Gab Medina seen here in happier times.
Gab Medina seen here in happier times.

Parker: “How to kill pro surfing!”

What kind of missteps would it take to kill the WSL?

I’m having a hard time focusing on surfing at the moment. Been too wrapped up in our glorious election, in the implosion of the Republican party. Beyond fascinating to watch someone hit their own self destruct button. And that’s what this is.

Hateful hate-filled straight white dudes, and their mid-west Schlafly-esque counterparts, are loud as fuck. But they are a minority. Something of which they are well aware. Which explains the terror and acts against their own self interest. We all know how they feel about minorities.

I’ve been struggling to think of a similar meltdown within the surf industry. Lots of failures out there. Nature of business within an industry that relies heavily on being trendy. Like skateboarding, it’ll always be up and down. Feast and famine. Hold on tight and hope you can ride it out until the kids wanna look surfy again.

What kind of missteps would it take to kill the WSL?

Like, if Speaker made a public comment about the lack of black surfers on tour, claimed, “It’s because of their higher bone density. They don’t swim well. Ask a scientist, I know what I’m talking about.”

Would that do it? Maybe not. Hard to alienate an audience you don’t really have to begin with.

Maybe something anti-woman?

“We don’t have a women’s Pipe event because of the physical dangers they’d face. Their vaginas could fill up like balloons during a wipeout, damaging their wombs, rendering them infertile and therefore useless to society.”

That’d surely piss a few people off.

I think the problem with the two aforementioned examples, they’re obviously not true. So they wouldn’t be said, and if they were they’d be largely ignored. We all like to watch surfing, and the WSL is the only game in town.

You know what might do it?

Actually drive people away, rather than fail to attract new eyes, like they’re already doing.

Tell the truth. Call a press conference, get up on stage, and tell it like it is.

“We’re only in this for the money.”

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Radiation: “Passion bigger than risk!”

Would you risk radiation poisoning for a few empty waves? Why not!

We chat here so often about surfing and the increasing variety of obstacle one must hurdle in order to do. Sharks everywhere, SUPers riding guillotines, crowds, The Brazilian Storm, etc. etc. And we discuss because the only thing we have to fear is fear itself! If we look these various conflagrations, directly, then we’ll truly know their heat doesn’t even come close to matching the flames burning in our own hearts!

We love surfing! It’s anti-depressive and nothing but nothing will stand in our way!

Except maybe a massive nuclear meltdown spilling directly into the lineup!

Of course you remember 2011’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. The Japanese facility perched right the Pacific coast not three hours north of Tokyo melted straight down after the Tohoku earthquake.

A whole town decimated. Finished. Abandoned still and the scientists tell us poisoned for centuries to come.

Except surfers don’t care! The flames in our own hearts licks eats nuclear waste for breakfast before slapping its lip! NextShark, an online magazine focusing on Asian youth, has a fascinating piece of photojournalism on Japanese surfers who brave growing extra limbs.

The photographer, Eric Lafforgue, declares, “The surfers say their passion is bigger than the risks and the truth will not be known for 20 years.”

In 20 years who do you think will win, surfers or radiation?

I say surfers! It’s the anti-depressive answer!

Go here to view the gallery!

It is only bag upon bag of radioactive sand there in the background. Totally worth the lack of crowds!
It is only bag upon bag of radioactive sand there in the background. Totally worth the lack of crowds!
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#tournotes: “He must be proud of hisself!”

Keanu Asing! He soar! Still!

And is your spirit still soaring over Keanu Asing’s World Championship Tour victory? How could it not be! Next Gen Rudy! The best sporting story on earth!

Peter King? Are you there? With your Samsung Galaxy 7 (iPhone 5)? Can you give us the love and up close?

Of course! It is what the man is paid to do (I think)!

And my favorite moment is when Gabi Medina says, “He must be proud of hisself. I want it so bad but I’m pr… I’m happy for him.”

Don’t be a hater! That is the sweet honey of a broken-hearted but very good loser.

I’m a fan! Gabi for 2016 World Champ!

Gabi for President!

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Just in: Great White Breaks Into Dive Cage!

Y'ever wondered what'd happen if a Great White really wanted to get inside a dive cage?

Clickbait, yeah we do. And this is as wonderful as clickbaitery gets.

A Great White, maybe a dozen feet long, bangs into one of those shark dive cages in Mex, the sorta thing you pay a thousand bucks to ride in down in South Australia.

I’d always had it in the back of my mind as a fun thing to do, maybe later in life, hand over the shekels, and get real close to a Great White. But I always had the fear: what if a White really had the shits and got into the damn thing?

Like here.

Shark goes crazy. Gets stuck in cage.

There’s plenty of “oh my gods!” until someone asks:

“Is there anybody in there?” 

“Nobody’s in there.”

Pause.

“Somebody’s in the cage.”

What happens?

Watch!

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Yvon Chouinard
"He who dies with the least toys wins," says Yvon Chouinard. "Because the more you know, the less you need."

Long Read: The Divine Yvon Chouinard!

Dazzling, inspiring read of Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard in The New Yorker.

I’ll admit. Patagonia, the brand, doesn’t do a hell of a lot for me. The ritual use of dull browns, the lingering smell of piety, the full silhouettes suited to the fashionably retarded.

I live in the city where the climate is temperate. I don’t climb, don’t fish, use a little of the ocean close to shore and what little nature I get is from the television. Fornication, perhaps, is the closest I get to God.

And, yet, I’ve always found Yvon Chouinard, the climber and surfer who founded Patagonia, deeply interesting. One of those men whom you would’ve loved as a childhood mentor. Teach me to make tools, teach me to scale mountains, teach me to live in the wild.

Recently, writer  profiled Yvon for The New Yorker. If you didn’t know, or appreciate, Yvon before, read this and you’ll fall under his spell.

Here’s a taste.

He was first (and perhaps in his own mind remains foremost) a climber, a renowned pioneer of rock and ice routes around the world, and one of the luminaries of the great generation of American postwar outdoor adventurers. Then a blacksmith: he designed, and made by hand, a host of ingenious new climbing tools, and for a time was the leading manufacturer of climbing equipment in North America. Next, itinerant thrill-seeker: the relatively meagre proceeds from equipment sales allowed him to continue to pursue an intrepid life of risky recreation in the outdoors. (On a van trip from California to the tip of South America, in 1968, ostensibly to climb Mt. Fitz Roy, he and his mates carried a homemade flag that read “Viva Los Fun Hogs.” Chouinard told me, “People we met, hitchhikers we picked up, they asked us, ‘What does this mean, “Fun Hogs”?’ We said, ‘Puercos deportivos.’ Heh-heh. Sporting porks.”) Finally, eco-warrior: his travels and travails in supposedly wild places awakened him to their ongoing devastation, and he made it his mission, as a man selling consumer goods that he acknowledged people don’t need, to try to counteract humanity’s regrettable propensity to soil its own nest. In each of these guises, at least, he was authentically countercultural and anti-corporate, a credible advocate for a kind of lawless self-reliance and uncompromising common sense.

His childhood dream was to be a fur trapper, like his French-Canadian forebears. He was reared in Lisbon, Maine, the home town of his mother, Yvonne. School was all in French. His father, a third-grade dropout, was a journeyman laborer who at night repaired the looms at a wool mill there—a dur à cuire whom Chouinard remembers sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of whiskey, using a pair of pliers to pull his own teeth, because he objected to the expense of dentures. “I was brought up surrounded by women,” Chouinard writes. “I have ever since preferred that accommodation.”

In January, 1946, Yvon’s older brother Gerald, stationed in San Diego, in the Navy, sent his family a box of oranges. Fresh fruit in winter: “That’s it,” Yvonne said. Citing her husband’s asthma, she insisted that the family move, that spring, to California: Burbank. Yvon, a shrimp with a girl’s name and no English, fled public school after a week and wound up at parochial school under the tutelage of nuns. He was, as he recalls, a loner and a geek, a D student who spent all his free time biking to city parks and private golf-course ponds to bait-fish and to hunt for frogs, crawdads, and rabbits. Before long, he was diving for lobster and abalone off the Malibu coast.

And this, about the company’s ethos. Not exactly anti-profit, but close.

Eventually, they went so far as to openly discourage their customers from buying their products, as in the notorious 2011 advertising campaign that read “Don’t Buy This Jacket.” It went on, “The environmental cost of everything we make is astonishing.” Manufacturing and shipping just one of the jackets in question required a hundred and thirty-five litres of water and generated nearly twenty pounds of carbon dioxide. “Don’t buy what you don’t need.” (Some people at Patagonia had been considering declaring Black Friday a “no-buy day,” to make their point about consumption.)

Guilt and high principle mutate into marketing: this was the Patagonia feedback loop, on high screech. To some, the slogan sounded an awful lot like “Buy this jacket, not that other one, from the North Face.” One plausible response was “Don’t worry, I won’t. I can’t afford it.” Chouinard may walk the walk, as far as not buying things—his own Patagonia gear tends to date back to the last century—but his customers are often the kinds of people who can afford as many jackets as they want. The credo “One Percent for the Planet” can misread. There are class implications, problems of privilege and access, the lingering taint of monikers like Fratagonia and Patagucci.

One catalogue, in the nineties, had a little chart of what Patagonia was versus what it was not: Fly fishing, not bass fishing. Long-haul trucking, not delivery-men. Surfing, not waterskiing. Upland bird hunting, not deer hunting. Gardeners, not survivalists. Patagonia’s people were the West’s recolonizers, the next wave of pioneers, the self-appointed protectors asserting a blue-state ethos in red-state territory—tree huggers pitching their tents in a logging camp. By now, this war for the West is a tired one, but it is in some ways a microcosm of the greater global battle between those who want to preserve lands and conserve resources and those who would prefer to exploit them.

The Patagonia catalogue can induce awe and envy. Authentic as its photographic subjects are—“We were the first to use real people, and captions saying who and where they were,” Chouinard said—it is a classic kind of aspirational branding. The life style, to a large swath, is unaffordable, if not in pure monetary terms (outdoor adventure is not in itself expensive, necessarily, although the clothing for sale certainly is), then at least in terms of time, talent, energy, and gumption. It isn’t really a lack of funds that prevents most of us from spending half the year sleeping in vans and dodging the park rangers to free-solo the big walls at Yosemite.

In its presentation of hale young adventure athletes, living righteously in Edenic locales, all of them with just the right amount of dishevelment and duct tape, the catalogue can emanate the passive-aggressive piety of a food-co-op scolding. It unwittingly celebrates a kind of countercultural conformity. This neo-Rockwellian idyll of desert-dawn yoga sessions, usefully toned arms and abs, spectacularly perilous bivouacs and bouldering slabs, hardy kids and sporty hounds can feel like a rebuke if you are on a sofa in the city.

Read the full story here. 

And here, below, watch the wonderful full-length movie 180 South, as climber Jeff Johnson recreates Yvon and Doug Tompkins wild 1968 trip to Patagonia.

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