You’re the CEO of a new surf label. Unlimited
funds…
Think you could run a major surf brand? Easy,
no? Sprinkle a little perfume here and there, cut a few stale
names, strategically jam your ads hither and yon, tighten the
silhouettes of those boxy tees and pinched waist trunks and,
suddenly, you’re the freshest breath in the industry.
Oh, if it was that…easy.
You don’t think Billabong and Quiksilver have at least a few
good business brains in their vast timber and glass modernist
offices? You don’t think Depactus had money behind it? What about
Vissla and their angle of sponsoring the hottest sub-pro’s in every
town? Josh Kerr’s VNDA?
Today’s question, below, is as simple as it is complex.
You’re a Global Marketing Director for a major surf brand
with a blank check in front of you. The CEO has tasked you with
picking the face of the brand for the next five years. Every pro is
available.
Who do you pick and why?
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Parker: 6 Predictions for the Quik
Pro!
By Rory Parker
Adriano will win Snapper! Gabriel the world
title!
Snapper’s almost here! Hurrah! Makes my job
easier, pick apart every bad decision, none of this
sit-in-front-of-the-computer-and-wrack-my-brain-for-ideas-before-giving-up-and-just-writing-about-myself.
Or, you know, less of it. Little fascinates me as much as
myself.
For today, let’s make some predictions. I know I did one
of these a while back, but there’s no shame in recycling ideas. Or,
if there is, I don’t feel it.
If I’m wrong, oh well, I’ll just never mention it again. But if
I’m right… oh boy! I can say, “See, see seeeeee! I told
ya’ so.
ADS will win Snapper: The forecast looks like
it’s gonna be small, the WSL didn’t revamp scoring criteria, and
his #1 spot will feed him green ‘QS kids in the early rounds. He’ll
build momentum, sit on people once he gains the lead, and end up
shipping home a didgeridoo.
Oh, and Mick’ll go out on round tww.
Medina will win the title: With his sophomore
slump behind him he’ll shake out the butterflies and go back to
form. One of the best surfers on tour, a murderous grip on heat
tactics, and a solid, if not death defying, game in waves of
consequence. I’m tempted to give the nod to Filipe, but unless he’s
spent some time with a sports psychologist in the off season I
don’t think he’ll bring it at the scary stops.
Injuries, injuries, injuries: 2015 mangled
bodies. Banting, Bede, Owen, JJ, Jordy, Flores, Bourez, and Simpo
all missed events due to injury last year. No surprise, modern high
performance surfing tears your ass apart.
2016 ain’t getting easier, and the surfers aren’t getting any
younger. The only question is which guy’s gonna get drug screaming
from the water with an exploded knee and a dead career. (I’m
guessing Banting.)
Cali ain’t got a chance: Life’s just too
damn easy if you grow up within a stone’s throw of the SoCal surf
industry ghetto. You gotta be hungry to win it. Yeah, Conner and
Kanoa surf real good, but I just don’t see the magic. Winning ‘QS
events isn’t an indicator of success, every guy on tour won ’em.
Kolohe doesn’t have it, try as he might, and Nat Young is looking
at a journeyman career. Top ten finishes for life, but he’ll never
clutch the top spot.
Great stuff! (Thanks to James B for posting this on his site.
I’d’ve never known about I otherwise.)
If I wanted to be a real dick, and I do, I’m calling Igarashi a
one-and-done. Too small, needs to pack on some mass before he can
be a real contender. Which could happen, I guess. Young certainly
started surfing better once his body toned down the lankiness.
This will be the last year we see the WCT in its current
form: Grossly inflated viewership numbers aside, it’s
hard to see the WSL as anything but a sinking ship. Failure to find
an event sponsor for J-Bay is mind boggling. A surfer nearly got
eaten by a shark last year! How can you fail to sell that angle? If
there’s one thing non-surfers will tune in for it’s the chance for
a taste of blood. Fiji still languishes unloved as well. And Target
has kicked the women to the curb.
In it’s current form the WSL is trying too hard to be cool,
blasé. But we all know there’s nothing cool about trying to be so.
Hip cats don’t give a shit what anyone thinks, they just do their
thing and others marvel.
But you can’t focus group that shit, so I’m calling X Games
level zaniness. Explosions and brightly colored graphics, and an
ever increasing level of hyperbole.
You’ll hear the words “wrap,” “jam,” and “knife” so many
times it’ll make you want to smash your dick with a hammer
just so you can be momentarily distracted from the total lack of
vocabulary the commentary team employs. Seriously, guys, we’ve got
a rick fucking lexicon and tons of proper words to describe
maneuvers. I know you know ’em. Use them, please.
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Report: “Surfers are retarded!”
By Chas Smith
The Atlantic uncovers "chronic truancy" amongst
today's surfer stars!
The Atlantic is a very fine
magazine/website filled with interesting, well-researched stories.
Two days ago they turned their editorial gaze toward our fair
pastime with the piece “Ditching Class to Hit the Waves: How
talented teenage surfers struggle to balance homework with travel
and commitment required to become pros.”
It features interviews with Conner Coffin, Carissa Moore, Eithan
Osborne and others speaking to the rigors of pairing education with
fabulous surf careers. Let’s read some!
Osborne’s latest battle, though, isn’t in the ocean but in
the classroom. Recently, he was forced to leave the public high
school he has been attending in his hometown of Ventura,
California, a coastal suburb north of Los Angeles. His
often-grueling travel schedule requires him to miss class,
sometimes for two or three weeks at a time, to fulfill sponsor
obligations (like filming surf movies and participating in photo
shoots), attend training camps, and compete in contests. It’s a
romantic existence, traveling the world, living the
itinerant, Endless Summer-inspired lifestyle. But while
Osborne said he has been diligent with completing homework packets
and communicating with teachers from the far-flung locales he
travels to, over the course of the school year thus far, he has
accumulated enough absences to be in violation of California law. The law
mandates that students who are absent three times or more, for more
than 30 minutes, without a valid excuse are considered truant.
Students are considered “chronic truants” if they miss 10 percent
or more of school days in one school year.
Chronic truants! How good would that be as a surf brand? But
also maybe not very interesting and especially when those in the
profile are all successful-ish. I wanted to read about the
failures. The children whose parents yanked them from school but
then they failed as surfers and had no education etc. Who did those
children become? Are you one of them? If you were, say, good enough
to be pulled out of school but not good enough to make it as a pro
where would you turn? Crime? What sort of crime?
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Kinky: Meet Brothers Marshall!
By Jamie Brisick
Surf label studs from Malibu love to French kiss
and flabbergast!
It’s the 2006 Malibu Classic and the waves are
waist-high and lackluster, the couple hundred gathered around the
contest site looking slightly bored in the honeyed afternoon
light.
In a kind of send-in-the-clowns rescue effort, event organizers
decide to put on a same-sex tandem heat, which inspires wry grins
on the faces of Trace and Chad Marshall. Trace slips into his
purple short john, Chad borrows a pair of acid wash cut-offs and a
red bikini top from a girl called Soul Mama.
Trace grabs Chad by the hips and proceeds to dry hump him from
behind. He pumps, pumps, pumps and his brother writhes, writhes,
writhes. Chad turns around, drops to his knees and proceeds to
simulate oral sex on his big brother. Trace reciprocates. The beach
is flabbergasted.
They paddle out on a thick longboard and assume position at the
very top of First Point. When the wave of the day comes, they spin
around, stroke, and hop to their feet. And then in a move that’s
more the kind of thing you find atop a gay pride parade float,
Trace grabs Chad by the hips and proceeds to dry hump him from
behind. He pumps, pumps, pumps and his brother writhes, writhes,
writhes. Chad turns around, drops to his knees and proceeds to
simulate oral sex on his big brother. Trace reciprocates. The beach
is flabbergasted. The garrulous announcer has fallen silent and the
teams from Santa Cruz, San Clemente, San Diego and Japan are all in
shock. Not since Dora’s famous BA in ’67 has Malibu seen such
flagrant perversion across its ruler-edged righthanders.
And then when they hit that bend in inner First Point where the
wave seems to be crafted by machine and the image of surfer, pier
and Santa Monica Mountains appears as a kind of postcard of the
California Dream, Trace lifts Chad above his head and Chad arches
his back with a kind of cheerleaderish grace, his arms in swan, his
toes perfectly pointed. They hold the pose long enough to draw
applause from the entire beach, long enough for the judges to
scribble perfect 10s on their score sheets, long enough for their
mastery to trump their irreverence.
And that, ladies and gentleman, is but a single ride in the
whirlwind shuffle that is being Brothers Marshall.
The Marshall Bros, aka the Gay Brothers, have made a career out
of pulling outrageous stunts. Wherever they sniff out taboo in the
surfer psyche they attack, attack, attack. They’re
court jesters, agent provocateurs, hole-pokers in the
stereotype.
When a display of heated machismo broke out during a recent club
contest at San Miguel, it was a Marshall who planted a French kiss
on the perpetrator, diffusing the fight and bringing mirth to an
entire parking lot.
When surfing went all black wetsuit/clear board in the mid-‘90s
it was the Marshalls who sported hot pink and fluoro turquoise.
When their fellow competitors turned jockish and traveled with
extensive quivers, Trace and Chad showed up to events half-drunk
and boardless. When a display of heated machismo broke out during a
recent club contest at San Miguel, it was a Marshall who planted a
French kiss on the perpetrator, diffusing the fight and bringing
mirth to an entire parking lot.
When it seems that every beaver tail-wearing, acid splash
fish-riding alt-surfer is also a
shaper/painter/photographer/musician/filmmaker, Brothers Marshall
make a mockumentary taking the piss out of all the above, the
innate self-incrimination precisely the point. But then just when
their shenanigans seem to upstage their watery prowess, just when
the naysayer might accuse them of being all humor and no substance,
they’ll paddle out and serve up some of the craftiest, most
original longboarding the world’s ever seen.
1982. Jim Marshall is a high school senior surfer/skater
from the valley who doesn’t mind a good scrap. At a dive
bar in North Hollywood he finds himself shooting pool with Dionne,
a hot blonde whose three-dot Mi Vida Loca tattoo suggests
a taste for the wild. Beer is swilled, eight balls are banked into
corner pockets. And then just when the night’s hitting its stride,
Dionne’s C14 Westside boyfriend Psycho shows up with his homeys and
proceeds to call Jim out. It’s a dual straight out of Westside
Story. Fists fly, bottles break, and pool cues snap. In the end
Jim emerges the victor and so begins the courtship of the future
Mr. and Mrs. Marshall. A year later Trace is hatched, two years
later Chad, and six years later DJ.
Jim takes a job with the LAPD. By the time the boys are
seaworthy he’s working Hollywood Vice night shift. Amongst his
busts are pimps, prostitutes, raging crackheads and A-list
celebrities. He dodges bullets during the Rodney King riots. He
still has the scar from when a savage drag queen tried to bite his
ear off. To curtail the madness, he arrives home in the mornings,
loads the kids and 9’4” Kennedy in the station wagon, and heads to
Malibu. Between surfs he catnaps on the beach, during which time
twelve-year-old Trace and ten-year-old Chad take turns riding
whitewash at the bottom of First Point.
It’s not long before they’re totally hooked. Not only by the
glory of standing on a board and streaking across water, but by the
endless beach party that is the scene at First Point. They bop
their heads to Billy Bear’s guitar strumming; they overhear Angie
Reno’s detailed accounts of early Pipeline. They marvel at Josh
Farberow’s, Jimmy Gamboa’s and Dane Peterson’s ace nose riding. On
south swells, they’re treated to Joel Tudor’s and Herbie Fletcher’s
mastery. And then one day they put it together that these are the
very same guys they’ve been watching in videos like Power
Glide, Blazing Longboards, and Siestas and
Olas.
“We were just these kids from the valley, standing on the edge
of the best surfers in the world, totally in awe,” says Trace. “If
we were lucky we’d get a head nod. But what broke it was my little
brother. One day we get out of the water and DJ, who’s six at the
time, is giving tacos to some model chick. Then the next thing you
know he’s tossing a football back and forth with Josh Farberow. And
then the next thing you know me and Chad join in, and from that
point on we started hanging out under the palapa and raging with
this whole multi-generational crew.”
It was a tutelage that would resonate profoundly. Had Mr.
Marshall chosen a perch 200 yards further up the point the brothers
may have become God-fearing, thruster-riding NSSA kids, but as it
were they had an entirely different coming of age. Trace remembers
smoking joints with old salty dogs that’d listen to smooth jazz
through transistor radios; Chad recalls endless parties in
beachfront palaces where he’d wake up amongst a sea of bodies and
beer bottles and overflowing ashtrays—“I’m pretty sure that was the
summer I lost my virginity.” But as much as they were getting a
crash course in barefoot hedonism, so too was their surfing
progressing in leaps and bounds.
“Josh Farberow taught us how to read the wave at First Point,”
says Trace. “He was the one who told us we needed to go way outside
and surf all the way across the point. He also told us to surf for
yourself. This was when longboarding was exploding and there were
always cameras around and he was like, ‘Don’t pose. Just surf for
the feeling. It’s about going from Point A to Point B…’”
The next arc in our story comes in ’96 when Jim and Dionne
divorce and Jim moves to Manhattan Beach. Though unfortunate as far
as the family goes, it was a blessing in disguise with regards to
Trace and Chad’s surfing. All they’d ever known was the long,
tapered walls of Malibu, and suddenly they were bouncing around the
mercurial beachbreaks of the South Bay. Chad remembers: “We’d be
staying with my dad in Manhattan Beach and a big swell would come
in and we’d jump off the end of the pier. Everyone thought we were
crazy ‘cause we were riding longboards. We were like, Let’s
think outside the box and do weird stuff—fin first nose rides, fin
first tube rides, these weird nose ride floaters… We’d go back
to Malibu and do it on clean waves and it was a piece of cake.”
They surfed their first contest in ’97 and both won, Trace
taking the Juniors, Chad the Menehune. And then just a few weeks
later they found themselves pounding Bloody Marys on a plane bound
for Sydney in what’s a story straight out of the Dora
Handboook.
Amongst the melting pot of Malibu they’d befriended Henry
Holmes, a renowned entertainment lawyer whose beachfront pad they’d
hang out at between surfs. Holmes had a soft spot for the Brothers
Marshall and when they mentioned the upcoming Noosa Festival of
Surfing in Australia and the fact they had no money to get there,
Holmes set up a travel fund. Amongst the contributors: Pamela
Anderson, Hulk Hogan, George Foreman and an array of other dubious
celebrities.
It was a headfirst plunge into the higher echelons of
longboarding. They stayed at the Four Seasons, shared waves with
Nat Young, Greg Noll, Bob McTavish, and Joel Tudor, and got
hammered in the hotel bar with all their heroes. Chad placed second
and Trace got puked on by one of the top female noseriders of the
time. “It felt like we’d stepped into Blazing Longboards,”
recalls Chad. “Only in this version we were co-stars.”
They spent the next couple years chasing contests from Santa
Cruz to San Miguel. And though they made the finals of virtually
every event they entered, their run would be short lived. “We loved
the fun of hanging out with friends up and down the coast,” says
Trace. “But we also saw how disposable it was. Like, Why should
we be fake and kiss up to these companies to get $1000 a
month? I guess we just saw the bigger picture.”
There was also the megalopolis of Los Angeles. It seems only a
matter of time before the Malibu surfer’s interests expand beyond
the beach. By the time Trace was a high school senior he was
spending as much time tagging freeway underpasses as he was hanging
ten. And then there was the trip to Mexico with Thomas Campbell
where he became interested in photography, the fortuitous meeting
with Barry McGee at a gallery opening in San Francisco, the
epiphany on the 101 in which he realized it was time for change. “I
really wanted to get away from surfing,” he says. “So right after I
got out of high school I was like, Dad, I’m movin’ to San
Francisco—will you buy me a train ticket? I’ll never forget
the ride up, looking out the window seeing all my favorite
breaks—Ventura, Rincon, the Ranch—it felt like saying goodbye.”
Trace bounced from couch to couch, wrote a shitload of graffiti,
and shirked a paying job. For a time he was homeless in the Mission
district. “I’d just wander the streets all night and then sleep in
movie theatres in the day. See, you can’t really sleep anywhere at
night. You can’t sleep in the park ‘cause they think you’re a
gangster. You can’t sleep on the street ‘cause they think you’re a
crackhead. You can’t be on the sidewalk ‘cause the gutter punks
stick together and’ll kick your ass. I ended up having this guy
pull a knife on me for a pair of Reeboks and that was the end of
it.”
After a short stint selling churros at PacBell Park, Trace
landed a gig with Urban Outfitters, who were heavily impressed by
his freewheeling creativity. It wasn’t long before they had him
zapping all over the country doing installations and window
displays for their booming retail chain. And though another
nineteen-year-old might’ve reveled in his good fortune, Trace felt
like he was getting old before his time.
“I was up in Canada doing a window display and I was like a
full-on magazine junkie. So one night I’m doing my nightly sesh at
the newsstand when I grab Longboard and it’s the California
issue and there’s like Josh and Jimmy and all my buddies surfing in
trunks and I’m like, Holy fuck, what am I doing? I’m movin’
back… I called Chad and he was completely on the same
page.”
Chad, incidentally, had been on sabbatical as well. In his
words, he’d gotten “totally into chicks, punk rock and
skateboarding.” Chad drove to San Francisco, scooped up Trace, and
brought him back to the ‘Bu. It was a strange homecoming. They’d
been gone less than a year but so much had changed. The palapa was
gone, Angie Reno was gone, Josh Farberow had moved up to the Ranch,
and the longboarding boom had seemingly come to a close. For the
first time in their young lives, the brothers felt the weight of
maturity. “We were standing there looking out over First Point and
it was like it all flashed before us,” says Trace. “And we pretty
much just said, Alright, we’re back. But this time let’s make
it happen on our terms.”
They rented a small apartment in Santa Monica,
raged every night, and made it a point to get in the water
everyday. Some months later Trace and a friend packed up four
Holgas (skewed-focus cameras), 80 rolls of film, and two 9’6”s and
flew to Puerto Vallarta in a kind of On The Road search
for the soul of early millennium surfing. Instead they ended up at
a transvestite club in Zihuatanejo, which resulted in “Have You Met
My Girlfriend Holga?” a photo exhibition of transvestites in lewd
positions (the flyer shows a nude tranny holding a camera over
his/her crotch). For the next year the brothers ran wild on the
streets of Los Angeles. “We’d go from weird mansion parties to red
carpet events to sleazy dive bars to skid row,” recalls Trace.
“Things just clicked: LA history, fashion, music, design. It was
pretty much the beach meets the streets – Malibu by day,
Hollywood all night.”
Good things came their way. They co-founded clothing label
Gonz, launched the Marshall Model with longtime shaper
Scott Anderson, and designed a wetsuit range out of Japan entitled
Dirty Rubbers: Custom Seamen Suits. Above all
else, they tapped a creative vein that fuses surfing and urban
interests. The inner animal, in other words, has not been squashed.
As Trace puts it, “We’re just a couple of fucking kooks who ride
longboards at First Point Malibu. I mean at what point did people
start taking themselves so seriously? Surfing’s like the least
serious thing in the world.”
The parallels are uncanny. In Big Wednesday a drunken
Matt Johnson shows up to faux Malibu sans surfboard. He wears jeans
and red Pendleton and his sandy blonde hair flops in his face.
While his buddies Barlow and Leroy borrow him a board, he’s on
hands and knees nearly puking. In the background, the iconic Malibu
wall reads “Long Live King Matt.”
On a Saturday morning in the summer of 2007 a severely hungover
Trace Marshall shows up to Malibu without a board. He wears
turquoise skinny jeans, grey hoodie and a pair of bug-eyed red
sunglasses that look like something from Disneyland. His blonde
hair flops in his face. While the regulars make lewd comments about
last night’s festivities, Trace rubs his temples and ponders the
row of motley equipment. There’s a spankin’ new displacement hull,
an oval-shaped four fin, an ‘80s West German windsurf vehicle
converted to a longboard, and a late ‘70s Natural Progression
winged pintail single fin. In the background, the iconic wall reads
“Marshalls are fags.”
In Big Wednesday Johnson stumbles to the
water and paddles out like some kook from Ohio. And then a
wave comes. He strokes, hops to his feet, and proceeds to ride with
a grace and flow that’s more powerful than the alcohol in his
system. When he cross steps to the nose and assumes the position
the message is perfectly clear: water as healer, surfing as
salvation. Trace’s movements are equally as poetic. He paddles out
on the converted windsurfer, picks off a waist-high peeler, and
goes straight for the nose. His arms are seemingly glued to his
hips and his body English resembles a soldier in front of
Buckingham Palace. It’s effortlessness raised to the level of
statuesque. It’s vaguely tongue in cheek. It’s what 2007 kids do to
1963 when their heads are fuzzy.
Another Big Wednesday moment: Remember the party scene
where all hell’s breaking loose downstairs and mom patiently,
lovingly, has her nose buried in a book upstairs? Three drunken
girls bust through the door looking for the bathroom and rather
than get pissed off mom merely shakes her head as if to say, Oh
those crazy kids…
Golden Bull restaurant in Santa Monica Canyon.
A couple dozen of Malibu’s finest huddle in ruby red vinyl booths
while a fading beauty straight out of a Tom Waits song DJs the
karaoke booth. The Trouble Sisters with their Farrah Fawcett hair,
Bonne Bell eyes and checkered slip-ons are in the house. So’s Eric
Gross the elegant noserider and Jesse Faen the Aussie transplant
who tears the gullet out of First Point on his Pavel fish. So’s
Neil, Litz, Jordy, Piscitelli, Diamond Dave, Malibu Carl and Billy
Bear. During another ebb in LA surfing’s checkered history this
would be one of those rare moments where comments like “strange to
see you out of your wetsuit” abound, but here in the summer of ‘07
it’s become a typical gathering. In fact one could argue that
Malibu hasn’t felt such communal buzz since the days of Kahuna and
Moondoggie. And while it was once a haven of the unemployed, it’s
now something like a think tank of creatives who work their own
hours. Gross is an art director, Jesse’s an apparel VP, Jordy’s a
music label owner, Piscitelli’s a video director…
The Trouble Sisters’ mother sits in a rear booth and watches in
awe as her seventeen- and fourteen-year-old daughters cavort with
these fangless wolves who’ve taken them under their wing. Trouble
drinks a Shirley Temple, Trouble Jr. a Roy Rogers.
Trouble sidles up to her mom: “Chad says for you to get him a
Jack and Coke.”
Mom laughs. She doesn’t know whether to be offended or charmed.
“He’s kidding, right?”
“No.”
Mom shrugs, “Diet or regular Coke?”
Chad on stage, mic in one hand, Jack and Coke in the other. In
his burgundy wingtips, skin-tight jeans, and flamingo pink vest he
resembles a kind of suntanned leprechaun. His ice blue eyes burst
with life and his gleaming smile is contagious. He’s propped up on
his elbow as if telling a bedtime story. He sings: Girlfriend
in a coma/ I know I know/ It’s serious. But of course
it isn’t. It’s a campy take on Morrisey with a hint of Sinatra
thrown in to pay tribute to fact that this place has been here for
sixty-odd years and advertises prime rib on its signage – a
slice of endangered Americana. It’s the kind of post-modern night
that echoes the Golden Age of Hotdogging when one’s ability to lift
the Moment was intrinsically linked to one’s ability to find the
trim line.
And when the song finishes Chad hands the mic back to the vested
DJ, slinks to the bar and banters with the indie film starlet, then
steps out to the sidewalk and lights a cigarette with a fluidity
that’s both James Dean and Gerry Lopez. When a greasy homeless dude
stumbles up and asks for spare change, Chad opens up to him as if
he were part of the gang. And it’s this ability to bounce from one
end of the spectrum to the other that is the hallmark of the Malibu
surfer. It comes from an upbringing of constant improvisation,
dancing amongst the culture clash, finding moments of rapture on a
wave that’s often clusterfucked three surfer’s thick.
Which brings us back to the ‘Bu.
It would be easy to overlook their surfing
skills. Ask Chad about the details of the Marshall Model
and he shrugs, “I don’t even know what the fuck boards do.” Ask
Trace how surfing fits into his urban life and he says, “It’s an
extension of everything we do” and then mentions the amazing
fashion get-ups he sees on the bus each morning (he works in
downtown LA). They will tell you that Tom Curren, Joel Tudor and
skateboarders Mark Gonzales and Natas Kaupas have been huge
inspirations, and that above all else it’s about “setting up the
next section, making it to the beach, and doing it all over again.”
But ultimately they prefer to let their surfing do the talking.
Thus this slice of a late September session:
Trace and Chad frolic like a couple of giddy sea otters in the
First Point line-up. The light is halcyon orange, the water endless
summer blue. Trace takes off on a waist high peeler and cranks a
Carson-esque bottom turn. His hands mirror the lip in a kind of
Malibu hula. Behind him, Chad hops to his feet and swiftly
somersaults across the deck and lands in a hang ten. For a moment
there’s a synchronicity, the brothers on back-to-back waves, both
on the nose, both arching their backs and holding their arms just
so.
The session is an exercise in imagination. There are fin-first
take offs, hang heels, one-footed hang tens, high fives while one
paddles out and the other rides past. There are hoots and shouts
and whistles that resemble an elementary school yard at recess.
There’s an engagement beyond just what happens whilst standing, a
kind of seamless, holistic immersion that puts the dismount on the
shore and the trot up the sand and the knee paddle out to the crown
of First Point right up there with the left-go-right bottom turn or
fifty-yard soul arch. Most of all, there’s this obvious dialogue
between the two, a Heckle and Jeckle repartee on water that’s not
about one-upmanship but melding energies, taking what’s
traditionally known as an individual sport into duo territory. This
becomes most apparent when they perform their signature trick:
Trace paddles out, Chad streaks across. Just as Chad’s about to
pass, Trace dismounts and pushes his board into the wave. And then
in a move that contains a hint of abracadabra and a heap of
symbolism, Chad hops from his to Trace’s board and continues on
down the line, while Trace dutifully, lovingly, swims shoreward to
retrieve his brother’s board.
(Editor’s note: This story first appeared in The
Surfer’s Journal.)
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Blood Feud: The world vs. Silvana
Lima!
By Chas Smith
Silvana Lima has had a terrible, horrible, no good,
very bad day.
Sometimes things don’t go our way. Sometimes we
go to sleep with gum in our mouths and then there’s gum in our hair
when we get out of bed in the morning. Then we trip over the
skateboard and by mistake drop our sweaters in the sink while the
water is running and we can tell it will be a terrible, horrible,
no good, very bad day.
Or sometimes no one wants to sponsor us maybe because we are not
model good looking and our boobs are too small so we have to breed
French bulldogs and use their puppies to pay for plane tickets
around the world so we can compete in professional surf contests
but we get dropped into the Qualifying Series as opposed to the
Championship Tour but even then when a competitor on the
Championship Tour gets hurt and we should be given the injury
replacement we aren’t and we know that it is a terrible, horrible,
no good, very bad day.
Yes, according to the World Surf League:
Bronte Macauley will be surfing the Roxy Pro because
CT star Lakey
Peterson recently broke
her ankle and withdrew from the first event. Macaulay has
an elite level reputation to live up to: Her dad, Dave Macaulay,
was on the Championship Tour in the 1980s and ’90s. She just missed
the CT cutoff in 2015, so we expect her to make the most of this
opportunity.
Bronte Macauley NOT Silvana Lima and what a bum run of luck. At
least the fans are cheering for Silvana. They say:
Be fair wsl. Silvana should be there by ranking and hr
surfing
My last comment on that matter….WSL what you are doing with
Silvana is a crime. No way i will watch or care for the women
tour , and I run that tour back late 80 til middle 90 …Men tour of
course Shame on you people
Where is SILVANA LIMA?
As much as I would love to see Bronte surf, people below are
correct in asking why the Women have double standards with the call
up spot for the Womens World Tour? Why is it next WT qualifier for
men and whoever you feel like for the Womens? I spent nine years on
the World Tour and saw this happen to Chelsea Hedges also, who is a
previous World Champ and event winner at Snapper. Yes improve the
sport, but do it fairly!
Such a shame that it’s not Sylvana, she owns this
place!!!
Etc.
Why is Silvana Lima not surfing in the Roxy Pro just a few short
days away? I don’t know. Maybe just because some days
are terrible, horrible, no good, very bad.