Oh sure some are funnier than others but the ones that shine
really shine! Kolohe Andino has a classic deadpan’s timing and
delivery. Dave Prodan (as pie eating ASP official) should
leave his post immediately and take the bus to Hollywood. Pete Mel
gives each of his performances the appropriate zing and the judges
complaining about their sandwiches…only the hardest of hearts could
not find joy in that thick Portuguese accent complaining about
pickles.
AdWeek reports:
Unlike past WSL efforts that focused on the inherent drama
and chaos of surfing, the new work casts the league’s athletes,
announcers and executives in skits designed to appeal to both
long-time fans and those just discovering the sport.
“The WSL felt like they were succeeding in showing the best
competitive surfing in the world, but were missing out on some of
the offbeat characters and unique fun that is at surfing’s core,”
Zambezi senior art director Chris Rutkowski tells AdFreak.
In seven 30-second clips running on WSL broadcasts and the
league’s social platforms, the league “stayed true to the laid-back
image of surfers with honest, sometimes self-deprecating humor to
make the surfing world as inviting as possible,” Rutkowski
says.
But enough of that mumbo jumbo. You watch and share your
opinion! Two thumbs up? Or no?
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Event winner John John Florence, inside, and
afro-Hawaiian stud Mason on outside of gorgeous Waimea bomb. |
Photo: WSL
Rumour: Red Bull to steal The Eddie!
By Derek Rielly
Red Bull meets with Hawaii's first family, the
Aikaus, in bid for broadcast rights!
I know we’ve all got abbreviated memories, but
you do remember The Quiksilver: In Memory Of Eddie
Aikau. You’ll remember because it was seared into your
brain.
Those broiling waves, the wipeouts that made you hold your
breath as you watched on the rectangle of your laptop, the mob of
jetskis all roaring towards the beach to escape a thirty-five-foot
closeout set. John John Florence surprising nobody by winning.
Biggest Waimea for a contest ever? Yeah, it was.
I put it to the guy who invented the pro circuit, the Triple
Crown, the Pipe Masters, and who famously said he’d go surf Waimea
alone to prove it was surfable in 1974, Mr Fred Hemmings.
Fred is seventy now, a little stooped, but says, yeah, bigger,
better. Calls it “an epic.” And says Clyde Aikau was the “real
hero” of the event. “Sixty-six years old and he paddled out in the
surf with twenty-year-old young men and he took off on a wave and…
got his ass kicked. And he paddled back out.”
Beautiful, yeah?
Anyway let’s relive a little of the contest here. WSL did a
helluva job of broadcasting the event, I thought. What kind of
value could you put on an event like that? Millions?
Now, there’s a rumour floating around, a solid rumour, that Red
Bull has been flying back and forth to Hawaii to meet
with the Aikau family in an attempt to secure media rights to next
year’s Eddie.
Red Bull doesn’t want naming rights, necessarily, although
cans of the company’s popular stimulant soda would, naturally, be
suddenly apparent in broadcasts, but want to turn The Eddie into “a
proper show.” Like this year’s Cape Fear
event.
Of course, if you listen to someone like Fred Hemmings, events
like this year’s Eddie only come along, what, once every forty
years.
Would broadcast rights, therefore, become a poisoned
chalice?
Too much money for too little zing?
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"We're all just in shock," says Kelly Slater. "I loved
this man. Can't believe we won't be seeing you as expected at every
event. I can hardly remember an event without you. Always in
everyone's corner on tour...it's really difficult to believe you're
gone. Rest in peace, my friend and our thoughts go out to your
children." | Photo: Steve Sherman/@tsherms/Surfing Photo Union
Worker
Head of WSL security dead of suicide
By Chas Smith
Can we speak of the unspeakable?
Anyone who has been around more than one
professional surf event (either ASP or WSL) would have seen Woody.
He was the head of security and looked it with shorn head and
severe goatee. Unlike most security guards, though, he was quick to
laugh. He seemed to know he was in on the joke. That surfing was
“professional” and needed “security.”
This morning he was found dead in his San Clemente hotel
room.
Stab has already posted a thoughtful and sensitive
piece but bury a key element in the URL and Kelly’s Instagram
post without really touching it themselves.
The likely cause of death was suicide.
And why is it so impossibly hard for us to get our heads around
suicide? To even say or write the word?
Suicide.
We brush it away, into the URL or onto someone else’s shoulders
as quickly as we can. It is a poison. A horrible, unspeakable
blank.
Jamie Tworkowski, a surfer and best-selling author from Florida
has spent his life dirtying his hands in these freezing cold,
uncomfortable waters.
I met him a lifetime ago in his hometown. He started and runs
the foundation To Write Love on Her Arms which deals directly and
head on with suicide. With its stigma and with letting the light
in, the air in, so maybe, just maybe, other suicides won’t happen.
Read all about him and
TWLOHA here. He is a champion.
And so I call him for more. Because how do we talk about it? How
do we look it in the eye? How do we not brush suicide away
anymore?
His voice is warm.
Look, these folks who knew him, who loved him are hurting.
It hurts beyond anything. But how do we talk about it? How do we
talk about suicide? Well, the leading cause of suicide is untreated
depression. Can we talk about that? Can we talk about our problems?
Problems that we all have and carry with us every day? We are not
really allowed to go there but that’s where we need to go. We have
to go to the headwaters and really deal with the issues.
Woody’s death is super hard news, it’s super painful but
there’s still a way to honor him. He lived, he had a family, he
impacted so many people. The way he died doesn’t take away from any
of that and I’m not interested in speculating on the causes of his
death. None of that goes away because of how he died.
But what do we need for the living? For the people
struggling under depression or the burden of problems they think
are too great to escape?
You are not alone. There are great resources and I talk with
people every single day who are alive even through the
struggle.
And God bless you Woody. Thanks for letting me get right in the
middle of Damien Hobgood vs. Dingo Morrison leash pull incident
freak out at Pipeline’s showers without shoving me aside. It was a
thing of beauty.
William Finnegan’s
much-lauded Barbarian Days has, of course, taken
the literary world by storm. President Barack Obama put it at the
very top of his summer reading list, it won the Pulitzer Prize,
every bestseller list many times over, etc. etc.
One of the greatest side benefits of all its success, though and
in my opinion, is an increase in quality writing about surf. Bill
made it ok to take it seriously! And there is a story in today’s
New York Times that fascinates!
Richard M. Nixon, noted dickhead and asshole and paranoid creep,
actually spied on Surfer magazine founder John
Severson! Let’s read about it!
Southern California surf culture is rich with such tales
from this period. Growing up in San Diego in the ’80s, I heard
stories of Marines confiscating (and even destroying) the boards of
surfers sneaking onto the beaches of Camp Pendleton, the Marine
Corps base just south of the Nixon house. A famous Ron Stoner
photograph from the ’60s shows a Marine M.P. wearing a sidearm,
storming off the beach with a single-fin shortboard.
Severson soon found himself in hot water over a series of
photographs he took of Nixon in La Casa Pacifica that he sold to
Life magazine in 1969. The Wall Street Journal reported that the
Life photos prompted Nixon to build a six-foot wall around his
property. It wasn’t long before the Secret Service took a hard look
at the Severson abode. Severson and his friends were convinced it
had been bugged. “They knew everything that was going on at that
house,” Steve Pezman, who ran Surfer magazine for two decades after
Severson, recalls. ”Nixon knew what he had for dinner, how it came
out and what he said to his wife in bed.”
At the Nixon library in Yorba Linda, Calif., I recently
found a 1969 letter from Severson to Nixon, apologizing for the
photos. “I’d like very much to speak with you for a few minutes,”
Severson went on, “regarding the surfing, public beach and access
problem that faces us in Southern California. Unfortunately, your
summer home has intensified the problem, but I believe a solution
can be reached without jeopardizing your security.”
In his memoir, Severson recalls that he was invited over to
La Casa Pacifica to negotiate a truce with the White House counsel
John Ehrlichman. “He was one tough cookie,” Severson said. “I
tough-cookied him right back.”
The story is delicious, detailing Nixon’s hatred of the damned
long-haired surfers surfing in front of his San Clemente home,
rubbing his nose in their loose morals and looser morals. Read
the rest here!
It makes me sad that surfing is no longer counter-culture in a
way. That our industry’s own thin-skinned paranoia has rendered any
external eye-twitching unnecessary.
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The New York Times called his final work, Boner from
the Stars, a 1400 page tome featuring experimental formatting and
totally lacking punctuation, “A stunningly self indulgent screed
that confuses at every turn. Lacking both form and substance,
[Reynolds’s] latest work could have been written by a proverbial
two monkeys in a mere twenty minutes.” Contrarily, The Paris Review
praised the novel, saying, “Intentionally befuddling delivery
aside, [Boner from the Stars] is Heinlein with half the fascism,
but twice the misogyny.”
Happy Birthday Dane Reynolds!
By Rory Parker
But do you know the world's favorite-ish surfer's
backstory?
Here’s a big Happy 31st Birthday to everyone’s
favorite surfer, Dane Reynolds!
Conceived while his father, a demolitions expert and amateur
tattooist, was on furlough from the Vietnam War, Danethon Leroy
Reynolds is the oldest of fourteen illegitimate children.
Reynolds first rose to national prominence as a brash MFA
student lauded for his series of groundbreaking science fiction
erotica. Dane was, somewhat controversially, thrice nominated for
both Hugo and Nebula awards, leading Isaac Aasimov and Arthur C
Clarke to publish open letters denouncing both institutions.
The New York Times called his final work, Boner
from the Stars, a 1400 page tome featuring experimental
formatting and totally lacking punctuation, “A stunningly self
indulgent screed that confuses at every turn. Lacking both form and
substance, [Reynolds’s] latest work could have been written by a
proverbial two monkeys in a mere twenty minutes.”
Contrarily, The Paris Review praised the novel, saying,
“Intentionally befuddling delivery aside, [Boner from the
Stars] is Heinlein with half the fascism, but twice the
misogyny.”
What came next was a decades long struggle with food addiction
and compulsive public nudity. Reynolds largely disappeared from the
public eye until he became embroiled in a series of Hollywood
A-list wife swapping scandals which ended in a highly publicized
trial and six month period of involuntary commitment.
The period was documented by Gay Talese in a series of columns
for The New Yorker titled, Man in the Box: A Boner
Falls to Earth. Talese was widely criticized for his work,
which was called by various sources, “Sensationalized,” “Nearly
totally lacking literary merit,” and “Unnecessarily racist.”
Following the successful completion of his therapeutic stay
Reynolds spent the next few years supporting himself with a series
of odd jobs. Rarely able to retain employment for longer than a few
weeks Dane worked, at various times, as a little league baseball
umpire, longshoreman, unlicensed contractor, short order cook,
unpasteurized dairy advocate, and motivational speaker.
In 1972 Reynolds suffered a relapse and was arrested on Sunset
Blvd when he was found wandering the street nude demanding change
from passers-by.
Due to his high blood alcohol content Reynolds was sentenced to
three days in county jail. During his incarceration he suffered
from a number of terrifying re-occurring nightmares he has often
publicly mentioned, but refuses to fully discuss.
For unknown reasons Reynolds believed the dreams were a sign he
should pursue a career as a professional surfer. After a mere two
seasons of competition he was signed to a lucrative contract by
Quiksilver, making him, for a time, the
highest paid professional surfer in the world.
In 2011 Reynolds retired from competitive professional surfing,
announcing he would be devoting his fortune to supporting the
emerging French Bulldog social media market.
Dane briefly made headlines again in 2013 when paparazzi
captured footage of him urinating in a public drinking fountain.
Following a plea deal, which saw him sentenced to house arrest,
Reynolds retreated to his Ventura County compound.
Reynolds house arrest eventually turned to voluntary hermitage.
In 2015 Buzzfeed reported he would soon be releasing the
first of a series of hip hop albums loosely based on the Kama
Sutra, but the album failed to materialize.
Other than a series of bizarre profanity-laced Twitter rants in
January of 2016, in which he blamed “dinosaur jew monsters” for the
majority of society’s ills, little has been seen or heard of
Reynolds in recent months.
