Analysis: Seabass wins Margaret River!

But didn't the Ausralian leg have a weird, slightly sad vibe about it?

Perspective is everything. Standing amongst sweating crowds watching Stu Kennedy run a wrecking ball through a complacent top order at Snapper seemed like green shoots and Rory Parker’s Dead Ball Era call was a vicious oversight, just an anomalous year or two in between Dane leaving and JJF ascending.

Now that the Australian leg has (mercifully) wrapped it seems more prophetic than ever.

A question for pro surfing: Did we really need to sit through weeks of heats featuring a pair of sevens or less to get to man-on-man finals in overhead surf?

Did we really see the best of the best surfing at their best?

When the format and the locations are baking in majority mediocrity with rare moments of brilliance you might think higher minds would take a fresh look at reshaping what is essentially still a toddler of a sport.

But they won’t because the Faustian truth is that the taxpayer underwrites the Australian leg and for that money they want bums on seats, big top surfing that runs for days and weeks and keep the petit-bourgoisie: the butcher, baker, candlestick maker – the local Mayor who gets rock star status from visiting pros – supplied with tourist dollar.

There’s no business case for making pro surfing what it could be and should be: a showcase of the best of the best for work-a-daddy surfers to drool over without trampling on the rights of local recreational surfers. So we lumber on, merrily kicking a comatose horse that shows an occassional sign of life.

Truthfully, pro surfing really only started in the early 2000’s with the webcast, lets say 1998 when Rabbit took over. Prior to that it was nothing more than a cheap carnival sideshow, run by carpetbaggers and populated by alcoholic trained seals whose careers lived and died on hometown decisions and outright chicanery.

Slater’s early era scarcely existed by any modern sporting standards. We found out about it months later from scribes of dubious veracity and conflicted interests. Derek Hynd called it as he saw it before OP engineered his sacking but as for the rest… Sarge? Sam George?

Lets start from the final and work backwards.

I bingewatched the Australian leg and thought SeaBass had the best turn game in town. Turpel called it “dirty” and that was right on. It was like seeing a fully fledged Kyuss for the first time in their prime. Judges fell hard for it and started overcooking scores, based on emotional memory, more than reality.

He scored 17.4 in the Final for essentially two turns, the first of which was dirty as hell but flawed. The motivation was understandable. Subjected to weeks of low risk surfing, nice, easy rhythm in the code language of Turpel, anything off axis and near the edge of the envelope would have offered tremendous relief. The temptation to throw big numbers at it, just as a means of encouragement, was overwhelming.

Julian? Another underwhelming final. Judges overcooked the first score, then undercooked the second, which had the sharpest, most viscious turn of the final as the opening strike. Seems a lifetime ago when Kelly Slater threw down one of the biggest, most progressive airs in pro surfing history against Mick Fanning in the Final at…Bells Beach. A ten-point ride that had the potential to smash into oblivion thirty years of pro surfing conservatism.

Four, maybe five years ago by my hazy recollection. Four years and we’re back to two carves and a safety bonk on the whitewater.

Tempting to think evolution always runs in the forwards direction. But it doesn’t. It has its backwaters and cul de sacs, its blind alleys and failed experiments. Homo Erectus in the cradle of life in the Tanzanian rift valley had a larger brain than Homo Sapiens yet they were swiftly exterminated by tool using brutes.

We read BeachGrit for its anti-depressive properties but didn’t the Ausralian leg have a weird, slightly sad vibe about it? Trying to think of an appropriate sad movie and I keep coming up with Born Free, where the lion dies.

Who knows what creativity was kindled by that large brain? What humanity could have become. Just like Kelly’s Bells air it’s become an evolutionary foot note, not a sign of new direction.

Barack Obama, in defending his foreign policy, said the arc of history bends towards justice. But does it? That might be mere wishful thinking, like the WSL’s constant exhortation of  pro surfing excellence. The arc of pro surfing is bending towards stasis, conservatism and turning talent into robots who value consistency over creativity. Tool using brutes.

Whoa, too pretentious Berkowitz. Settle down.

I love the anti-pretension movement happening at the Grit, but you can’t actually help what comes out when you sit at the keys, right Chas? It just comes from god knows where. I bet any commenter on here, pushed for a thousand words, sounds more like a Downs Syndrome Ludwig Wittgenstein than the Chas Bukowski they imagine themselves to be.

We read BeachGrit for its anti-depressive properties but didn’t the Ausralian leg have a weird, slightly sad vibe about it? Trying to think of an appropriate sad movie and I keep coming up with Born Free, where the lion dies.

Kelly getting whipped into last place by wildcards, kids and lawnmower men. Mick taking a personal year, Owen with his brain injury, Bede hobbling on crutches, Taj kicking out, a forlorn and philosphical Adriano appraising another early loss by raising the spectre of failing to qualify. Old tender lions, injured lions, champion lions ruefully wondering if they could ever pull down a full grown wildebeest on the savannah.

Do you have a defining image of the Australian leg? I can’t get the image out of mind of Wilko’s alpha- primate-at-the -waterhole mid-wave claim at Bells. It was past, present and future. A jackboot on the face of surfing as dance, if it ever was, but at the least it had too look good.

Where to from here? There’s renewal of personnel, obviously, but the sport is mired in a format that blunts potential. First principle of my revamped format which rewards progression and risk: man on man is a reward for getting to the pointy end of the contest. An Eddie style leaderboard with rotating four-man heats for day one. The best surfers, with the highest aggregate go through to day two. No one is going to get past day one with sevens.

Day two held in the best surf gets man on man. Two day event.

The bigger problem is not conceiving of a better format than the one we’ve got, it’s how to disentangle the current arrangements, in short how to rip professional surfing off the tit of the Australian taxpayer (and others) and stop whoring itself out to the tourist industry beloved of state governments.

I’m not much of a money man. If I keep my car on the road, slide a new sled under the house and keep the electricity on I put a gold star next to the year but there’s plenty of smart people out there with access to dough.

There might even be a Floridian billionaire with some loose change to throw at a vanity project. What? Already been tapped. Okay, looks like we’re back to defibrillating the comatose horse.

The ratings are a mess after three comps, hard to see a contender amongst them.

Wake me for Fiji, Rio’s timezone is despicable. I leave you with the quote of the century from Tom Carroll spruiking Margaret River.

“Lets take the excellence a little bit further”.