WSL: The Best (Worst) Game on Earth?

Wilko wins Quiksilver Pro, Stu Kennedy highballed, Filipe withdraws from Bells, Margs…

The heavens opened in Lennox last night. Like the rest of the town I was awake, wandering the rainy streets looking for signs and portents, greeting my fellow night-walkers, heads hunched low in raincoats, with the sign of the cross.

Babies are slapped on the arse at birth and have their necks broken so they can’t look left. For baptism they are rolled on the barnacles until a bloody mess and are lovingly taught their first words: “fuck off cunt”.

You’ve never been to Lennox? Don’t come. We hate tourists. I’ll paint you a sketch so you can taste it’s sweet fruits vicariously. Basically, it’s Paradise on Earth for the working man and woman. Big volcanic headland, sand-bottom point that breaks from two foot to as big as it gets. Warm water all year round.

Babies are slapped on the arse at birth and have their necks broken so they can’t look left. For baptism they are rolled on the barnacles until a bloody mess and are lovingly taught their first words: “fuck off cunt”.

We like fights, sharks, lawnmowers and mixing drink and drugs. Contrary to popular opinion we are an entrepeneurial race: Lennox Heads has the second highest number of successful lawn-mowing franchisees in the southern hemisphere. Luckily this was able to supplant the towns earlier industry of pot growing which was destroyed by the war on drugs. Funnily enough we are also, in the pro surfing space at least, at the vanguard of neuro-science. More on that later.

One of the (many) beefs I’ve had with Nick Carroll over the years concerns his deference to the superiority of WSL top 34 and the inferiority of the local “king of the Point”. Whenever I argued for the unknown surfer, I had Stu Kennedy in mind. This guy is 26.

Are we now expected to believe that this guy who has just beaten the best of the best has materialised out of the Lennox ether as a barely sponsored family man and fully formed top three surfer?

Or is there something rotten in the QS system and the whole industry paradigm of casting ripe on the vine surfers into the compost heap because they have red hair (Bede) or can’t shift product or like to speak their mind (Stu Kennedy) effectively cruelling careers before they begin?

It was quite a shock to see commenters, even moderators, calling the event and the surfing lame. It didn’t seem like it at the beach. It made me reflect on emotion and perspective. Beachside, as the QF between JJF and Stu came down to the final minute the collective mood in the crowd was hyper-intense.

In fact, judges seemed in thrall to the emotional force of the crowd and highballed Stu Kennedy. Looking back at the ride on the heat analyser minus the psychic impact and it looks thin and implausible. Such is life. I thought JJF had neutralised Kennedy’s aggression with passivity. There was a sense that Stu might have exhausted his reservoir of aggressive energy against a passive opponent.

I was embedded in the Stu Crew, with brother, mother, wife, manager and entourage. People were shaking, levitating as Stu rode the final wave.

“Did he get it?” I asked the manager.

He looked over his shoulder at me as he ran down the beach”…nah”.

But he did.

In fact, judges seemed in thrall to the emotional force of the crowd and highballed him. Looking back at the ride on the heat analyser minus the psychic impact and it looks thin and implausible. Such is life. I thought JJF had neutralised Kennedy’s aggression with passivity. There was a sense that Stu might have exhausted his reservoir of aggressive energy against a passive opponent.

But in the end, passivity was trumped by emotion. It was weird feeling the crowd go silent during a JJF ride, as if to downplay it to the judges. As a collective crowd strategy it worked.

Florence’s human, all too human strategy to defeat Toledo had the weight of prophecy, except it was Wilko who would reap the reward of Toledo’s mistake and injury. Just like that the seemingly undefeatable Toledo was being carried up the beach and then bundled into a black SUV with Dickie Toledo behind the wheel looking as solemn as Marlon Brando in the Godfather.

Half of Lennox head stood in the rain to push their boy through. But the Stu K engine was spluttering. The falls became more crucial and a not very pretty Kolohe squeezed him out. The margin closer than it looked from the beach. A pro surfing speciality: the two best surfers knocked out before the final.

I couldn’t deal with the anti-climax. Like Deathstar said to me yesterday, “Why do we even watch this shit? It has nothing to do with us and what we do as surfers”. Fascination had turned to contempt.

I was still fizzing from the WSL playing hardball with the Grit over the content and blackballing their Facebook page. Remember when the surf companies started treating their core with contempt? We know how that movie ended. Dave Prodan had emailed me when I said I would kick him in the nuts and said he had nothing to do with the social media or partnership terms of the WSL. I asked him why the WSL was pursuing such a counterproductive strategy of playing hardball with content? Why kick those in the teeth who are covering “your” sport. At time of writing, there was no response.

I hit the road before the final started. Maybe I’ll get the last five minutes with Deathstar I thought. It was finished as I pulled back in front of his surf shop. Scrappy, uninspiring was his summation. Don’t get me wrong, I love Wilko, but that stance has got a bit extreme, he could at least have the decency to tuck the back leg in a little. It’s scaring the kiddies.

Oh yeah. The neuro-science. I couldn’t get much sense out of Stu in the moments after the loss. He was with his family and his people, everyone was coming back down to Earth after a pretty wild ride. But I did get a few moments with the manager, a man at the forefront of sports performance in a new field called neuro-performance.

It involves rigging the athlete up to their own EEG monitor and measuring and then changing via neuro-plasticity the thoughts and action pathways in the brain, leading to improved peak performance. You wondered why Stu was able to bring the noise at such a high level, well, it had a little more to do than the environment of Lennox Head.

Roll on Bells. Will Slater show up or will this be the start of the biggest slow motion train wreck of a late career in sporting history? I can see him two or three years down the track arguing with the jetski security in the line-up.

“I’m Kelly fucking Slater dude. I’m here to surf”

“Move along mate, before you end up in the pen for the night. It’s over Kelly.”

I can never figure out whether this is the greatest or the worst sport on Earth.

Editor’s note: Filipe Toledo just withdrew from the Bells and Margaret River events. “I’ve pulled a groin muscle doing an air… so I’ll go back home and do some physio and get ready for Rio.”

Watch how he did it here.