Why doesn't Kelly Slater use any of his own
products? Is it dumb or genius? Maybe genius!
What if you were set to launch a new product?
It was yours all yours and its success depended on you talking
about it, thinking about it but, most of all, using it. Of course
you would toe the line right? Of course! Because the new product’s
success would directly affect your own bottom line! And so you
would dutifully strap on and enjoy the ride. That is what good
pitch men do and their bank accounts swell because of it.
And yet look at the great mystery of Kelly Slater, the most
recognizable and marketable creature surf has ever dreamed up. At
40-whatever he is dynamic, bronzed and handsome. Jettisoning from
Quiksilver he is also launching so many new products!
Except.
Have you ever seen the man wear his own label OuterKnown? Maybe
on the website, sure, but in life Kelly is more likely to be found
in weird free Volcom things. Volcom’s parent company is also
OuterKnown’s but weird right? Why isn’t Kelly Slater living the OK
ideals? Why isn’t he pulling on an organic, sustainable, virgin
wool hoodie knitted by Peruvian monks after every single surf,
looking at the WSL camera and saying, “I don’t always like to get
warm after I surf, but when I do I prefer OuterKnown. It’s
sustainable.”
And in J-Bay. Kelly wins his first heat in grand fashion but is
it on one of his eponymous boards shaped by Tomo or Greg Webber?
No! It’s an old board shaped by and older Hawaiian. Great and a good story but in
no way does Kelly see any kick from it. In fact, it directly
cannibalizes his business.
Does Kelly drink Purps? Who knows? Not me because I don’t see
him doing it and I don’t even see Purps stickers on his fresh,
white non-KS Surfboards surfboard.
The whole business literally makes no sense. It’s like Kelly
wants all of his businesses to fail. But why? Is he not a real
belieber? Does he think marketing cheapens the
OK/surfboard/Purps?
Wait.
Is him not pushing his medicine on the masses actually brilliant
marketing? In our oversaturated landscape is his silence the
assured brushstroke of a genius?
The newest Wavegarden park opening has been delayed
in Austin, Texas. Because it sucks? Or because it is maybe set to
amaze?
Wavegarden technology, like Adriano de Souza,
had minutes to enjoy the spotlight before Kelly Slater swung
his mighty sledgehammer and crushed both hopes and dreams. Do you
remember Surf Snowdonia? Do you remember the slightly crumbly yet
still dreamy manmade waves that inflated our sense of the the
future? Do you remember the little Brazilian man lifting his arms
in triumph on Pipeline’s sands?
Don’t worry. Neither does anyone else.
Anyone not named Doug Coors.
The beer empire heir caught the Wavegarden pitch and 160 acres
in Austin, Texas. His surf park, NLand Surf Park, was set to bring
Texas-sized smiles to the southern United States starting in Spring
2016. It is now deep summer and the park is not open and the
parking lot is not finished. Let’s read from the Austin Business Journal:
Plans for the park were first revealed in 2015.
Developers originally hoped to open the park by spring 2016 but
that date has been pushed back. Coors said in a statement to
surfing news website Surfline that the park would not open until “early summer.” In a brief
statement July 7, NLand Surf Park spokesperson
Chris Jones said there was not much to report on the opening
date.
“We haven’t shared any specific
information about the park opening yet,” Jones wrote.
In aerial photos taken July 7 by
Austin Business Journal, the lagoon appears nearly finished.
However, other aspects of the park such as the parking lot are
still incomplete.
The rectangular lagoon is bisected
by a boardwalk that stretches its length. The wave generating
equipment is housed underneath this boardwalk. The park will use
Wavegarden Inc. equipment to generate its waves. The equipment
creates waves by drawing a hydrofoil through the water at speed.
While we were flying overhead Thursday, the park’s operators
appeared to be testing the wave generating equipment, with a line
of waves emanating outward from the boardwalk, its long crest
traveling down the lagoon.
And what do you imagine has stalled
construction? Could it be they are trying to figure out how to swap
out Wavegarden technology for Kelly Slater’s? Maybe?
But I also had another thought. What if
Wavegarden is actually better than Kelly’s pool? What if they are
dialing Austin up, working out the kinks, crafting a wave that is
actually bigger than a normal sized man? What if they are
attempting to VHS the Kelly Slater Wave Company?
The videotape format wars of the 1980s
were so great! Two technologies, VHS and Betamax, smashed into each
other. VHS eventually won even though it was worse than Beta. Or
was it? Who cares! The consumer was the victor. Maybe.
In any case, Doug Coors and his Austin
waterbaby will have five minutes to steal the spotlight back from
Kelly Slater when they open. If the pool churns out what we saw in
Wales it will be game over. But if the wave surprises us with its
size and power…if it actually has a trough…then game on!
“In the 1990 Quiksilver/Aikau event, still considered by
many to be the most exciting big-wave contest ever seen, (Keone)
Downing was regarded as a longshot contender. But he selected waves
perfectly, went through the one-day event without so much as a slip
or bobble, and led from start to finish. He rode a board shaped by
his father. Downing’s $55,000 winner’s check was the sport’s
biggest-ever cash prize at the time.In 2013, the 59-year-old
Downing was on the alternate list for the Quiksilver/Aikau event.
He also owned and operated Downing Hawaii, the surfboard shop his
father launched in 1968.”
It says a lot, to me, about Kelly’s appreciation of the craft of
surfboard making that he would approach Keone, in the first place.
As it transpires, Keone built Kelly two boards for last year’s
J-Bay contest, one a five-ten, one a five-eleven,
Keone didn’t hear anything for a year until, two nights ago, he
woke up to a text from Kelly telling him he’d ridden the
five-ten and that he might want to check the heat analyser to
examine its performance.
The board in question Keone calls the M2K, because of
the influence of two shapers, Maurice Cole and
Martial Crum, and his own first
initial.
Keone had traded boards with the 1988 world champ Barton Lynch,
whom he knows well and who was riding a Maurice Cole, and was
fascinated by the performance of the deep single concave.
Around the same time, his pal Martial Crum was working on a
“booster pocket” or deep concave in the tail section of the board.
Keone moved the single concave back between the legs (“This is
where the drive is going to come from,” says Keone), threw in a
little booster pocket, made it to Kelly’s dimensions (5’10” x 18
3/16″ x 2 1/4″) and glassed it with four-ounce both sides with a
four-ounce stomp pad 13 one third up the board. This ain’t no
hyper-light epoxy.
“You’ve got to give credit to who inspires you,” says Keone.
“We’re all artists, we’re all inspired by something.
There’s something that triggers our inspiration
that makes you want to go out and create. I always appreciate those
people.”
But come inside for a real mathematical look at WSL
judging!
(I lurv u beechgirt readers. I reely do an
its not jes the vodka typing. I meanitis butt i also do. Like, reed
this ledder her. Woh wood tak this mulch time? Only u! Becuz u
rooool and can do maths. I cant. At all. Bet jes lookit this! It
goooood. Suriously. From Parick Brewster who I enven luv mor then u
becuz…becuz… Well. just reed hiz maths!)
Add me to the club. I hate Chas Smith. I hate the man for two
reasons.
Reason 1: An electric version of his book is $14.99 (ridiculous)
(2 b honess that sux. U shudd hav bot the paperbak from
austrltia becuz my pichur is on the new one (COMING AUGUST
1!))
Reason 2: For what he has forced me to do with my spare time for
the past several weeks.
After reading the article “Revolution: Let’s dump the judges” I
(idiotically) took it upon myself to see if “a system of speed,
torque, amount of time in the air, number of spins in the air,
amount of time in the barrel” was possible, or, better yet, if it
already existed – if only in the ether.
I took on this moronic and thankless project because I am of the
firm belief that competitive surfing needs an element of
objectivity if it is to become respected. As it stands, the knower
of all things (Wikipedia) defines surfing as “a surface water
sport in which the wave rider, referred to as a surfer, rides
on the forward or deep face of a moving wave, which is usually
carrying the surfer towards the shore.”
This is a stark contrast to something like basketball which “is
a sport, generally played by two teams of five players on a
rectangular court. The objective is
to shoot a ball through a hoop 18 inches
(46 cm) in diameter and 10 feet (3.048 m) high mounted to
a backboard at each end.”
Such objectivity! Such order, justice, and beauty!
It irritates me to no end that there is no true definition of
surfing. The feeling I get when someone who floundered on a
soft-top claims to have ‘surfed’ is similar to one I had couple
years ago:
(Bare with me, I promise it will come full circle.)
I was in my final semester of college wrapping up an, all to
easy in retrospect, degree in economics at my overpriced private
alma mater. The school had recently been accused of ‘rigging’ the
college rankings in large part by accepting rich foreign students
who paid full-freight but whose grades and test scores, which were
often sub-par, did not factor into the ranking equation.
I was settling down in front of one of the library’s computers,
hoping that its stats program would be able to find some
correlation robust enough for me to write a 20-page paper and
graduate. Naturally, the stats program I was working on crashed and
failed to reopen.
I moved to the adjacent computer and began work there. After a
few minutes, a tall, skinny, Chinese guy who I recognized from my
final class sat down next to me. When I leaned over and told him
that the program was broken on that computer he looked back at me
blankly. “The math program is broken on that computer,” I
said again.
“English?” he replied, with a confounded expression.
I slowly reiterated, “The pro-gram for the MAAATH is bro-ken,”
before deciding to let him figure it out on his own.
As far as I know, him and me earned the same piece paper. Just
as a person on an 8’ soft-top hopelessly flapping while being
sucked out to sea is also ‘surfing’.
I never would have imagined that I would return to the same
library, to the same computer, two years later to answer
Chas’s call. (Fuk thatguy!)
The process began by going through each wave of finals day of
the Fiji pro and logging some objective aspects of the each wave (#
of turns, tube time, etc.) along with the score. In reality it took
maybe two hours tops, but between cursing Chas’s name (Its
dumb! Who call himself CHAD CHAS? Fukin retard!) and beer
breaks it felt eternal. Spreadsheet in proverbial hand, I plugged
the numbers into a stats program and voilà, a hideous, premature,
wave-scoring model is born.
Without further ado, I present to you with the equation for
finals day of the Fiji pro:
1.08516362*(# of top turns) + 1.057755641*(Seconds of tube
time)+ 2.259198138(if completed) – .63
In words: each top turn added 1.08 points to a wave score. Each
second (measured in the very scientific ‘one thousand’ system) of
tube time added 1.06 points. Add 2.26 for completing a wave. Then
subtract .63.
Using just 3 variables (#of top turns, tube time, and
completion) we can explain 70% of the score (69.6258% to be
precise) which is pretty damn good. With enough time and beer,
someone could log wave size, airtime, etc., and the model could get
much, much better. Maybe good enough for a robot judge. We could
name it Chas.
Cheers,
PB
(Parrtick Bruwstur)
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The funny thing about Jordy Smith. The waves always get
so small during his heat. It's overhead all day, then he paddles
out and it drops to shoulder high. Oops, wait. He's a normal-sized
human man competing against a bunch of Oompa Loompas. It's a
perspective thing. | Photo: WSL
I feel like I've seen it all before. Same guys,
same turns. Maybe I'm jaded? Am I crazy?
There were three minutes left in Parko v.
Banting when I realized I was bored. Is there
something wrong with me? It’s flawless rippable J-Bay and I
couldn’t care less.
I feel like I’ve seen it all before. Every year, over and over.
Same guys, same turns. Maybe I’m jaded? Am I crazy?
It’s like every guy wants to win the same way. No one trying to
draw a different line. Coach mentality. Win at any cost and the
fans pay the price.
J-Bay’s so fast, so much opportunity to wind up for something
huge. Throw some improv. Instead I’m watching high talent
choreography. Everything pre-planned, nothing off the cuff.
Didn’t Callinan used to be some aerial wunderkind? Wasn’t
Banting too? Did their injuries kill that part of their soul? Are
they worried for their joints, thinking like men ten years
older?
Maybe we can blame the Brazilians. When it came time for a new
crew to storm onto the scene they grabbed the spot. Motivated
contest machines from birth. Not something they grew into,
ingrained in their psyches from the moment they took their first
steps.
Maybe it’s because the old men held on so long this time.
Mid-thirties, early-forties, still top of the game. Leading by
example. But what they’re doing was new when they started. The
young ones are just following suit.
John John’s different. Medina is when he needs the score. Filipe
shows flashes. Coffin’s got potential.
Maybe I should blame the judges.
Ah, but it’s not that simple! They’re willing to give single
maneuver waves big scores. They just aren’t willing to punish a
semi-safe, tried and true, approach.
Dantas/Andre… real demonstration of skill, yes. Floater,
backside bash, float. Any one of those turns would have made my
year. But it’s so repetitive. There’s gotta be a way to encourage
some variation.
You know what it might be? No skis! It’s a damn long paddle from
halfway down. A mid wave fail has real consequences. Zip ’em back
out right quick and they can risk their shit.
Melling and Coffin was a close heat, the old man took the win.
And he deserved it. Mixed up his turns a tad. Coffin just kinda did
the same thing over and over. He did it well, but he can do better.
Maybe Gerr will give him a flogging. “Mix up your turns, worm!”
Flores beat himself. Let an underscore trigger a meltdown.
Elbowed his board, bash bash bash. Used that anger to go hard on
the end section. Great to watch. I love it. But you’ve gotta safety
bonk for that extra point.
I don’t know why Pupo won, even so. But he did.
Conner Coffin’s got quite the chest pelt for someone his age.
Maybe we should stop comparing him to Curren, start calling him
Baby Pottz. Judges told him he lost because of lack of risk? Did I
hear that right? That’s cool. I can understand his frustration, but
he did do the same turn a bajillion times.
Kerr’s stalefish rev warmed my heart. Love how he surfs, even
though Rusty’s marking guy pulled his upcoming ad campaign (and a testimonial in our
media kit) when I wrote about his IV use at Snapper. I
think I’d be justified to hold a grudge. They’re professional
fucking athletes, I’m allowed to write about them.
BJ Penn got pulled from UFC 199 and handed a suspension
for doing the exact same thing, whileout of competiton.Kerrzy did it right before
paddling out. It’s newsworthy, damnit.
This is how companies lean on surf media.
Dusty Payne ripped the shit out of one during his heat against
Stu Kennedy. Remembered to play it safe at the end. If he’d tried
to do something cool, then fell, he’d’ve got a six or something.
End section maneuver makes it a 9.77.
I think that’s how it works.
The funny thing about Jordy Smith. The waves always get so small
during his heat. It’s overhead all day, then he paddles out and it
drops to shoulder high.
Oops, wait. He’s a normal-sized human man competing against a
bunch of Oompa Loompas. It’s a perspective thing.
Smith handed Andino the younger his ass without too much
difficulty. Kolohe looked out of rhythm. But he was trying to be
different-ish, and I like that.
John John opened up his heat with some stylish groovitude that
left my panties moist. Payne answered back with a beauty, put all
that speed to good use at the end. Heaved a huge one toward the
heavens but couldn’t stick it.
Which really highlights a problem with the judging. A boring
turn at the end would’ve given him a bump. Might’ve been enough to
grab the win. We keep seeing it happen, they get handed a reward
for the “finishing maneuver.” But by trying hard he got punished,
ended up losing the heat by point-nine.
Kerr manhandled Ferrari in conditions which looked difficult to
surf on your backhand. Slightly lined up, crumbly lip. Makes for a
target on your forehand.
A target at which Kerr aimed and soared.
Final heat of the day, GOAT v Buchan, saw the conditions
continue to deteriorate. Ace was obviously struggling to deal with
the semi-gutlessness. Mid face chop catching his rail, slowing him
down.
Slater put his forehand advantage to good use. Didn’t really
wow, but definitely won.
And that’s the end for now. Swell bump forecast for Saturday and
Sunday. Hopefully it’ll add some zazz. Maybe it won’t. I don’t
know.
J-Bay Open Round 2 Results:
Heat 1: Matt Wilkinson (AUS) 8.47 def. Steven Sawyer (ZAF) 7.93
Heat 2: John John Florence (HAW) 17.27 def. Alex Ribeiro (BRA)
11.77
Heat 3: Filipe Toledo (BRA) 16.54 def. Kai Otton (AUS) 14.34
Heat 4: Adrian Buchan (AUS) 10.50 def. Keanu Asing (HAW) 3.87
Heat 5: Michel Bourez (PYF) 16.07 def. Ryan Callinan (AUS)
12.90
Heat 6: Alejo Muniz (BRA) 14.27 def. Nat Young (USA) 12.93
Heat 7: Joel Parkinson (AUS) 15.17 def. Matt Banting (AUS)
12.17
Heat 8: Wiggolly Dantas (BRA) 18.27 def. Jadson Andre (BRA)
17.13
Heat 9: Adam Melling (AUS) 14.86 def. Conner Coffin (USA) 14.67
Heat 10: Miguel Pupo (BRA) 15.67 def Jeremy Flores (FRA) 13.44
Heat 11: Josh Kerr (AUS) 18.06 def. Jack Freestone (AUS) 15.26
Heat 12: Dusty Payne (HAW) 17.47 def. Stuart Kennedy (AUS)
11.44
J-Bay Open Round 3 Results:
Heat 1: Jordy Smith (ZAF) 18.20 def. Kolohe Andino (USA) 10.10
Heat 2: John John Florence (HAW) 14.83 def. Dusty Payne (HAW)
13.93
Heat 3: Josh Kerr (AUS) 16.40 def. Italo Ferreira (BRA) 14.20
Heat 4: Kelly Slater (USA) 11.73 def. Adrian Buchan (AUS) 5.20
J-Bay Open Upcoming Round 3 Match-Ups:
Heat 5: Sebastian Zietz (HAW) vs. Michel Bourez (PYF)
Heat 6: Matt Wilkinson (AUS) vs. Alejo Muniz (BRA)
Heat 7: Gabriel Medina (BRA) vs. Adam Melling (AUS)
Heat 8: Julian Wilson (AUS) vs. Joel Parkinson (AUS)
Heat 9: Filipe Toledo (BRA) vs. Miguel Pupo (BRA)
Heat 10: Mick Fanning (AUS) vs. Kanoa Igarashi (USA)
Heat 11: Caio Ibelli (BRA) vs. Wiggolly Dantas (BRA)
Heat 12: Adriano De Souza (BRA) vs. Davey Cathels (AUS)
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Jon Pyzel and Matt Biolos by
@theneedforshutterspeed/Step Bros
