Surfing's honored historian goes on a wild rant!
It’s been 48 hours-ish now since Dirk Ziff brought both of his surfing mutants (the World Surf League and Kelly Slater Wave Co.) under one roof and how do you feel about it? How has it settled in your heart?
If you are Matt Warshaw you feel the same sort of bald rage usually reserved for barely prepubescent teens! Here is surfing’s revered historian now!
Waves are the whole show. Waves are the only interesting thing about surfing. You’re a poetry-hating anti-New Age atheist with a penchant for hardcore rationalism? Same here. But at some level we know, we feel, that we are riding ocean-transported sunbeams, and it is magical. It is what makes surfing the very best of all sports. It is what separates us from parkour.
Surfers, furthermore, are only interesting because of waves. The things we do over the course of a life in pursuit of, and on behalf of, waves—the 10,000 bad decisions, the fiery burn rate of time and cash, the rivers of espoused bullshit, the volumes of arcane and otherwise totally worthless knowledge painstakingly gathered, catalogued, and deployed—are what makes us different, and, giving ourselves the benefit of the doubt, cool.
For 40-something years now, I have experienced variations on the same anxiety dream in which the surf is excellent, but I can’t get to it. The board is is locked in the car. Contact lenses are missing. Endless duckdives in the shorebreak while the sun drops into the horizon (thank you Ocean Beach, you wounding bitch). The number of times I’ve truly and completely had my fill of waves can be counted on one hand, and in each instance the craving was never further away than a meal and a nap. In terms of a life partner, that type of perpetual desire—a taste here and there, but never enough—is a greased playground slide to insanity. But in terms of a pastime being able to hold your attention, desire is the gift that lasts forever. Big-wave legend and humanist Fred Van Dyke, even when he was no longer able to surf, would pull off to the side of the road during a big swell, look out to a raging ocean, paddle out in his mind, choose a spot in the lineup, and wait for the right wave. In the end, surfing, for Fred, wasn’t even about standing on a board. It was just waves.
I have not seen more white passion since Howard Dean took the state in DeMoines in 2004!
And it is totally worth your day to go read the rest of his screed. God bless Matt Warshaw! God bless him every one!
This is like buying a car before internal combustion was invented, sure steam powered worked, but if you bought a steam car and watched the new gas model whiz by, I’d imagine that’s what it’s going to be like. Bad example WWE and RAW both wresting both the same thing but both fake, blatantly homo, but my point being there will be a splinter tour, and if it’s funded by redbull, it could be the model T where slates wave is demoted to the novelty it is. A lipless variable free boring falsity.
War, should’a Shaw it coming
Repent! The end is near! The Apocalipse is an artificial wave, god helps us all…
“For 40-something years now, I have experienced variations on the same anxiety dream in which the surf is excellent, but I can’t get to it. The board is is locked in the car. Contact lenses are missing. Endless duckdives in the shorebreak while the sun drops into the horizon…”
I honestly thought this was just me.
How I wish it was only a dream.
Golf tourno! What they need to do to make the WSL more like a PGA, is to have 18 wavepools, all next to one another and with different wave formats. Each surfer gets one wave in each pool, and the guy with the highest score at the end gets to pay micro a fortune.
I’m with Warshaw, I cant believe the big-wave world tour is going to be held in wave pools next year?! crazy hey? …wait what?
nobody needs pro surfing less than surfers
Hillary gets that crazy tone when she fires up too. its so creepy, like a crazed high school principal at a pep rally.
they might finally get a decent money shot.
He is wiping K-Y jelly all up on his junk. Jelly jelly jelly
Will waves pool’s existence make the slightest bit of difference to any of us the next time we go surfing? Nope.
I fear Mr. Warshaw is correct, at least about the existential
crisis part. Perhaps it will break open a bitter, feuding divide, which
will become interesting in its own right. Ocean-going purists versus
country club-ified poolies. A surf world torn asunder by dueling
elitisms.
I know which side I will be on but what about my 3 and 6
y.o. sons? I may encourage them to take up parkour which, despite Warshaw’s
protestation, he no doubt realizes is pretty cool. At least they will
be ready to flee the zombie hordes.
no pro skaters film parts in skateparks. this battle has been fought and lost by the machines.
In a nutshell! Apparently Mark Matthews’ next movie – extreme wavepooling – is battling to get sponsorship backing.
While I like Matt most of the time, he is a nostalgia junk-dealer. I literally fucking hate surf history before the Kelly Slater/Andy Irons rivalry years. Before that, it’s just utter garbage that no one but old-ass Australians want to watch. So it’s less than shocking that someone who has made a career out of living in the past would be abjectly terrified about the future.
I mean what pretentious, unnecessary, soul-searching gibberish would Matt be able to extract from an event at a wave pool? That’s the key, there’s no pseudo-philosophical dick-gazing there for writers of his ilk to extract just yet…
um. ok.
While I do enjoy Mr. Warshaw, I tend to agree with you. Nostalgia is for conservatives and hipsters. Burn it all down.
i went to the worst flea market at the Rose Bowl a couple weeks ago, people think garbage is valuable, as long as its old. wavepools still suck though.
Burnsy, that first sentence should be entered in some sort of Beachgrit Comments Section Passive Aggressive Sentence Of The Year!
oh not passive aggressive!!
Oh Yes! Burns’s gonna give Tom a run for the Title!
that should be comment of the month.
but I still love Matt W’s rant more.
pre ks/andy – you really arent missing much but there was some serious fuckin characters i’d pay to hear more stories about.
warshaw makes the case for how wavepools could actually create less crowded surf:
“If I were nine years old again, stepping across the threshold to my surfing life, with a choice between north side Santa Monica Pier (actual setting for my first summer on a board), and whatever beginners wave Kelly’s got in his back pocket, I’d take the wavepool. Fifteen-year-old me, obsessed with torquing out my off-the-lip and as desperate for tube time as I was for pussy, would drive straight away from Manhattan Pier to surf Kelly’s pool.”
Matt is off the mark when he says “We’re about to become gymnasts” We’re not all going to become gymnasts, but the best surfers will.
gymnasts are jocks
You guys realize that they’re not getting rid of the ocean, right? You can still use it for surfing!
…I make the same point in an interview with Mr Warshaw, coming soon!
I don’t trust someone who claims to be in control of the history of the sport! Can you ask him why there is no other historians on the history of surfing that are competing against him?
You’d think Warshaw would be pumped that all of the millennials with ADD will be bailing on the ocean for a scheduled guarantee.
Nope! They’re going to turn all the oceans into wave pools. Didn’t ya see that part? It’s totally gona happen. There will be no more oceans dude.
Aw fuck
Very true. And, I don’t think you HAVE to use a KSWC pool if you’re a surfer. Why if you really wanted I bet you could even avoid them all together!