Y'telling me being paid to shred and fend off A-ish class pussy around the world can be bad? Well, yes!
If you’re a man who lives within any proximity of the beach, you’ve always wanted to be a pro surfer. Like, aha, yeah, sure you want to be an accountant or a representative for a pharmaceutical goods company.
Girls wanna be models of course (hence the pout-y selflies with peace signs and bent legs, hands on hips etc) but beach rats wanna be a pro surfer. It’s validation of your manhood and your superiority over your dopey pals.
But, face it, it didn’t happen or it ain’t gonna happen.
Maybe you’ll scoop a minor sponsor, here, there, maybe you’ll even get a few free boards, but when the World Surf League steals only 34 surfers from the planet’s great pool of surfers (millions!), you don’t have to be Stevie Hawkings to see those miserable odds.
Yet…and yet… the tour isn’t the dick-swinging time you might think it is.
1. The pussy thing gets old
By the time the surf prodigy is 16 he’s engaged MILFs in relatively straight congress, had a handful of threesomes (though mostly guy-guy-girl), has faced maybe a dozen winking anuses (female) and has seen every variety of tit, pussy and haunch god ever created. The average man banks a dozen fucks, twenty if he’s a smooth-talker, on average, in his lifetime. A surf prodigy will roll those numbers during one good long weekend at a junior series event. You want to know why those pro’s get married so young? Cause they realise that sex without love ain’t much more than an agreeable friction. (Although that epiphany will eventually dull.)
2. Want to kill the thing you love? Do it for a living.
When you and I go for a surf we schralp around for an hour or so, talk to our pals, fall off on every air attempt, drop-in, get dropped-in on, do fins-first take-offs and have a general blast. Now, imagine, your entire career, your life, your finances, your emotional health and, in some cases, the welfare of your family, depends upon you nailing two sets in a heat and banging off 10 perfect turns. And when you get home the internet is full of couch-cowboys telling the world what a kook you are. Stressful!
3. It’s so serious!
One-time tour surfer Mitch Crews thought the qualifying series had set him up for the most sublime experience of his life. And yet, “I felt very awkward in the competition area because I’m really social and felt like I had to go through the charade of putting my headphones on and then staring at the camera all strong.” No one’s there to make pals. They’ve seen Kelly nail 11-titles, and Mick three, from serious.
4. Mostly, it ain’t flying biz
Travel once a year and what a thrill it is to paw at the airline magazines, rip things out of sealed plastic bags and drink wine from plastic cups while the world soars beneath you. Do it every week and it loses all of its sheen, and then some. If you’re top three, you can afford biz. But who’s top three!
5. Bores at bars
I see it around every contest. Some fan eating the ears of a pro, friendly at first, then increasingly belligerent as the pro politely (and they’re always polite) declines his offer of drinks, drugs (If the Gold Coast, meth, if Spain, coke, if Portugal, MDMA) or to kiss his girlfriend. Every pro needs a Johnny Gannon or a Kaiborg. But who can afford it!
6. The surf media
Can you imagine being called up or cornered every day by writers whom, by even the kindest measure, are borderline retarded?
7. There ain’t a lot of money in it
For Kelly, Joel, Mick, Taj, Gabriel… yes. For the back end, a hundred grand goes into the bank, a hundred-ten gets spent on travel. After five years you end up back in your country town trying to kick-start a surf school or schlepping oversized tees on the road.
8. There’s a chance you’ll be killed
Ever since big-wave surfing went psycho a few years back, the chances of being snuffed out in a heat has increased to it now being… likely. Ten foot Teahupoo; eight-foot Pipe. Not a lot separates you from rock.
9. The weird dynamic with friends
Once you get famous people treat you differently. Friends treat you differently. They walk a little to the side or behind with a sudden deference. And why wouldn’t they? Fans will come up and step right into your conversations with your pal. Girls will elbow the non-famous friend out of the way. And they don’t say a thing! Weird! But not as weird or awkward as…
10. You pay for everything
Let’s say you make it. Big time. A contender but not really. A million Americano shekels a year. You’ve got a couple of houses, a pretty car. But go out for dinner and the little leather wallet will be placed in front of you every single fucking time, either by staff or discreetly by head friend, to, like “fix up”. He’s rich! We’re not! is the unspoken transaction.
Good article, Rielly! The swell of surf-thought is pretty meager these day but you found a nice little shoulder there…
people say that Kelly Slater is the biggest penny pincher ever. He didn’t pay a dinner for a friend, as such, #10 is wrong
Yep, possums are doing it tough.
This, my friend, is why I love reading BeachGrit.
I love it when Wilko chews off fans ears.
Boo fucking hoo.
Well God Damn Reilly, this may be your finest work.
I want rich, I want pussy, I want to be able to land full roters. But I concede the difficulty of such a life.
fark it’s a STAB list… come on man, your better than this.
You don’t listicles? I write for you! Give me a feature idea and I’ll… do…
ok ok I do love a list…
Tell me what kinda list you’d like… I’ll punch it out by Monday-ish…
righto then.. how about 35 things Glenn Micro Hall will offer the WLT in 2015
I’ve always been interested in where pro surfers end up once they retire. It would make a nice addendum to this piece.
with a lot of talent it would amazing, but only if you can handle the challenges, that’s another skill you need.
…it’s serious, A-Rock! And a treatise on the relativity of happiness!
I worked as a surfing instructor for a summer/autumn straight after my Masters. At first it was great; being at the beach every day, surfing three times a day and just enjoying not having to untangle the complex notions of identity and its role in political conflict in the Pacific. But it wore thin pretty quick: I got sick of dealing with self-proclaimed ‘enlightened’ tourists, I was sick of being stereotyped as the cliche dumb surfer (I hadn’t had a hair cut for five years, but that’s my fault really), I missed my fiancee and I surfed that much that I started feeling obliged to paddle out every day; even when my shoulders felt like they were grinding against rough concrete and my elbows were so sore that driving was painful.
I was miserable, so I left the swell blessed coast I lived on, cut my hair and got a job as a policy advisor on a less swell blessed coast. Made me much happier and I enjoyed surfing again.
In short, I agree that happiness is relative and I really believe without a ounce of sarcasm that being a pro surfer would really be the pits. If not mostly for the fact that you would have to deal with the public. But that could just be because I am a misanthrope.
A misanthrope? How can a man, so lucid, and with such lovely punctuation, detest mankind so?
Really it is because I care too much. I secretly love humanity for all its beauty, brilliance, compassion, hope, quirks and very existence. Yet, the inherent ineptitude, wretchedness, viciousness, futility of the human being, and accompanying pain and suffering that make humans human (Ironic given my disdain for piousness and perfection) sends me into a state of despair where it is easier to hate than care. Humanity broke my heart.
…but isn’t the realisation that life is, ultimately, futile, a wonderful release?
There is a release. Though you can push too far with that. I went once with nihilistic abandon and stared back at the image in the mirror, peering intently, deconstructing what I saw until my pupils ceased to be anything remotely human. They were nothing more than apertures that light entered to relay messages to the brain of an irrational mass of organic matter. It led to a rather hefty existential crisis that nothing could soothe.
And even with release, there is still a hint of sadness at the tragedy of watching all those smiling people laughing with each other and knowing that ultimately they are doomed. Or that people can afflict upon others the most horrid of suffering because they (wrongly or rightly) believe it necessary or right. Kind of like watching professional surfing, you don’t have a stake in it, but you still get pissed when you watch someone blow it completely.
They (we) are all doomed, but to paraphrase Mr. Garcia I might be going to hell in a bucket, but at least I’m enjoying the ride. One day when I was death by drowning (side note: never trust the leash rope on a rental board) I watched a group of people playing on the beach, and though ‘they are having so much fun and I am struggling for my next breath.” I kept on breathing, and got the old bag of bones to the beach.
To your first post, I could imagine some situations whereby a person could be considered a ‘professional surfer’ and still live a happy life: free surfers, a guy in a regional circuit, or a youngster who does it until its played out. But generally speaking humans are not good at figuring out what will make them happy.
“It seems that we are gay because we are monstrously sad. We are serious, we know the abyss. This is why we defend ourselves against all that is serious.” – Nietzsche, Posthumous Fragments
Mmmm, Andy B?
Don’t know him. Matt McC?
Haha! Yes that is I… My we live in a small country. I recognise your humour and words… Another Ex surf.coer branching out into the interweb? Real name Initials or ex profile name will suffice.
Nah, you were right in the first instance. I just wanted to see if I could throw you off for a bit longer.
ahh yes! the suspense was killing me. Love the handle by the way.
You know each other? How does such a small and economically decrepit country create such fine word jockeys?
It’s pretty easy to know one another when there’s only 15 people living in the South Island. I just guess that it is proof that our education system works, because as you so rightly point out, not much else does.
Hes my twin…
So you moved from West to East? But policy advisor could be Wellington, I’ve had a couple of surfs at Titahi Bay, was actually not bad. I grew up at (lake) Mt Maunganui.
West to East, then North to Wellington. Titahi is pretty fun, I like it. It is one of those waves that is better on an onshore than off. Wellington has good waves ii is just plagued by flat spells of a length I’m yet to adjust to.
There is a Sacha Baron Cohen skit when he was launching the “Bruno” concept where he tries to convince people that being a supermodel is “the hardest job in the world”. This article is kinda like that, but not funny in any way, shape or form. If it is attempted satire, it is poorly executed. If it is intended to make Pro Surfers out to be the biggest bunch of entitled crybabies on the planet, then mission accomplished!