The second ep in the Lone Wolfs' awesomely quirky series Everything's Not Working!
Derek’s trying to make me go to Oahu for two weeks to cover Pipe. I’m not super opposed to the idea, though I’m also not exactly chomping at the bit about it. I’ve spent enough time on Oahu.
I only mention it because he cc’ed me at the end of an email exchange with Dave Prodan that featured this lovely little nugget from Derek to Dave about me.
…it’s important to get him into the real world rather than be hyper-critical/paranoid from the safety of his house.
1) I’m not paranoid. It’s my enemies who plot against me.
2) I love tons of stuff. I may be critical, but that’s only because most shit straight sucks. That’s the thing about being good, it’s special. Rare. Difficult to achieve. What’s the point of being Mr Super Positive Rah-Rah Cheerleader? There’s enough of that shit floating around. Especially within the surf industry.
Like, I adore Gary Rogers and his weekly installments of Skateline.
I also can’t get enough Eric Andre. Dude’s managed to meld all the faux-talk show tropes into pure genius.
Not so sure how much I love Everythings Not Working. It’s kind of funny, almost gets there. I’ll call it silly-but-safe. Which doesn’t mean bad. Only two episodes in, plenty of room to grow. And they’re trying something kind of different, which I love and support.
The high point is Paddy Wilkins, the guy who plays “Aggro Surfer Bro.” He’s very funny. I did some internet stalking and found out he’s an actual actor. Knows how to deliver a line, sell a set of power tools.
Everythings Not Working is financed by Lone Wolf Objet’s d’ Surf. It’s a high-end boutique surf joint in Venice. Not exactly my scene. But I don’t want to be hyper-critical or anything. The fact that I don’t understand it doesn’t automatically make it bad.
I assume that, if you can open up a spendy surf shop in Venice, you’ve got some money backing you. Which is good news, possibly, for me. Their title is sort of similar to my podcast’s, Everything is Always Terrible. Grounds for a lawsuit? I sure hope so!
I called my lawyer to see if I shake ’em down for some cash I don’t deserve. She gave me the standard, gonna-bill-you-for-it, legal response.
“I’d need to research the issue.”
Not much help. Maybe I can strangle-fuck a proper answer out of her later on today.
Pssssssssst. Hey…. You looking for a good time? You wanna party?
Well don’t call the World Surf League! Oh our pastime’s governing body is many things but rarely/never does it surprise. Am I right?
Am I right?
And the just released schedule for the upcoming tour only shocks with boredom!
Let us recall that this upcoming season will be Kelly Slater’s farewell tour. Slater is waving goodbye after so many years of professional surfing. He is truly an icon, head and shoulder, above any other personality, and do you think the WSL could have mixed up his final year? Maybe showcasing different waves? Maybe injecting a spike of anticipation?
The answer is no! In the just released schedule we are dished lukewarm same.
Start on the Gold Coast
Travel to West Australia
Then back to Bells
Before going to “Rio”
And then Fiji
Ahead of J-Bay
Ahead of Teahupo’o
Trestles
France
Portugal
Pipe
And COME ON Mr. CEO Paul Speaker! This was your chance to toss a wildcard. A fabulous twist. A parting gift for your beautiful boy.
Where should the World Surf League have gone? What treat should they have rolled out to Kelly Slater for his years of service?
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Here we see little Mr Sunset Mason Ho loosening his six-seven channel bottom Trouble Shooter. | Photo: @riordanpringle
A visual instructional on how to command a channel bottom surfboard!
A couple of days back, I had a little jam with Matt Biolos on the aesthetically beautiful, if hydrodynamically complex, channel bottom surfboard.
Read that here if water flow mixed with surfboard design history gives you a thrill.
That story was meant to be bookended with a cut of Mason Ho riding his channel bottoms, a visual representation of the design. Mason, of course, won the recent Sunset contest on a six-seven channel bottom Trouble Shooterand has been riding ’em all over the North Shore.
Thing was, Mason’s filmer Rory Pringle wanted… fresh. And when I came knocking for the short for the story, Rory was, “Sheeeeit, Mase hasn’t paddled out yet!”
Next day: “Sorry to keep ya hangin’. We’ve been filming all morning trying to max out this Pipe swell. Fuckin cooked. Made is gonna wrap tonight.”
The resulting film shows Mason on his six-seven at Sunset (watch those jams in the pocket! It’s a channel-bottom speciality), V-Land roll-ins and figure-eight cutbacks on a six-four (gotta love a channel bottom) and a few at Temples, Uluwatu on a six-nine.
And, let’s be real, any taste of Mason Ho is a good thing, right?
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The day after the anointment of Donald Trump, the Hawaiian Clay Marzo (and his half brother Cheyne Magnusson, same mammy, diff dad) hit a dazzling Baja left. Offshore all day, real hot on the sand, real cold in the water. Clay ain't one for suits, hates 'em, so after one full-suit mesh, trunked it in the 59 degree (15 c) ice. | Photo: Russell Spencer aka @rustynutzzz
Clay Marzo and half-bro Cheyne Magnusson hit dazzling Mex left…
Another Clay Marzo clip, another series of unreal tube rides. Hyper-talent freakshow, this time in freezing cold offshore groomed Baja, California. Pretty bonkers going bareback that far south. The water always gets colder when you cross the border. I don’t know why. Maybe there’s a science reason, maybe it’s just my imagination.
I know I had more than a few numb foot sessions when I still lived in LA and could make the milk run south. Leave behind low-seventies, rock up on mid-fifties. Fuck that noise, I’m staying in Hawaii where it’s warm and fun and I don’t need to put on neoprene boots to surf.
I do miss the food. Tasty little tacos. So cheap, so good, I can eat so many. Seemed like there was always at least one idiot spinning the “they use cat meat” lie. Do you know how cheap you can get low-end beef, poultry or pork? Do you know how hard it is to catch and kill and skin a cat? I don’t, really, but I assume it’s difficult. And there’s hardly any meat on a cat anyway.
Let the wife get wasted on high end hop-laden garbage, then strangle fuck her in a hotel room. Which is her thing, not mine. But, again, I’ll play along. Am I a little worried I’ll leave hard to explain finger bruises around her throat one day? Absolutely. Am I dead certain she’ll tell people I abuse her when it happens? Totally. She thinks that shit is hilarious. Which it is, in theory. Not so much when people are looking at you like some an abusive monster.
This new clip comes with a great little story attached. It’s on the vimeo page. I could copy/paste it here, but I feel like we’ve been doing that too often lately. But you should read it, it’s entertaining. I had no idea that Cheyne Magnusson is Clay’s brother. Maybe you did.
Instead I’ll write about the cold weather trip I’m in the process of planning. Been looking at Portland, Oregon. Seems like the perfect spot for some good old fashioned gluttony/vice tourism. Amazing restaurants, legal weed, micro-breweries and vineyards galore.
I’m not really into the last two, but I can play along. Let the wife get wasted on high end hop-laden garbage, then strangle fuck her in a hotel room. Which is her thing, not mine. But, again, I’ll play along. Am I a little worried I’ll leave hard to explain finger bruises around her throat one day? Absolutely. Am I dead certain she’ll tell people I abuse her when it happens? Totally. She thinks that shit is hilarious. Which it is, in theory. Not so much when people are looking at you like some an abusive monster.
One time she fell down the stairs while wasted and ended up with a huge bruise on her side. It was perfectly fist shaped and she got endless joy telling people I did it. So uncomfortable.
“I didn’t hit her, she fell down the stairs.”
Who’s gonna buy that line? May as well say she walked into a door. Warning bells, red flag, whatever. I will admit, I often wish she were my size, so we could have a good clean bare knuckle fist fight. Really clear the air.
But she isn’t, so we can’t. Instead we fall into our old pattern of fighting like cats and dogs about accommodation. She wants to stay in an overpriced rock ‘n’ roll themed boutique hotel. Don’t even get our own bathroom, gotta share one in the hall with every other sucker more interested in decor than comfort. I just want a cheap roof over my head. Somewhere to pass out when I’m stuffed full of food and legal weed.
There’s never a middle ground. Closest we can come to a compromise is some half-cockedI Love Lucy style line down the middle.Half where she wants to go, half where I do.
But I know this trick. I’ll pick somewhere cheap, she applies any savings to her end. Hello penthouse suite. Goodbye financial solvency.
This time I’ve sworn to choose the worst hotel in Portland. Gonna cut off my own nose to spite my face. She wants cutesy-pootsy decor and heart stopping nightly rates, I’m finding a shooting gallery shithole where we have to barricade the door and sleep on a pile of rats. She knows I’m not kidding, has begun looking for clever end-runs around my resolve.
Like, just now, she called up with a “great idea.” You should write about it, let your readers choose where we stay.”
Fuck no.
1. I don’t trust anonymous internet commenters one fucking bit.
2. She’ll only follow through if she gets the answer she wants. I know this trick.
3. I’ll probably lose in the end anyway. No reason to make it easy on her.
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"My track record is horrible on trying to guess what Kelly is up to or what his motivation is," says the historian Matt Warshaw. "But I think he wants to win a CT event in his 50s. I really think that’s his goal, and there’s a decent chance he’ll pull it off." | Photo: @thesurfinghobo
Our fascination with Kelly Slater is gonna ride into the 2020s!
Yesterday, prez Trump was forgotten for a moment and we shifted noisy in our couches at the sight of Kelly Slater back at Haleiwa. For the first time in four years, the 11-timer was entered in all three Hawaiian Triple Crown events.
Was Kelly back in the Triple Crown game?Was running fifth in the all-time winner’s list suddenly insufferable?And, yeah, he looked like a whale that had received a harpoon. Darting back and forth. An easy heat win.
BeachGrit: Does it strike you as odd that Kelly doesn’t have more than two Triple Crowns, the last one almost twenty years ago?
Warshaw: Tom Carroll only has one. That’s much odder.
BeachGrit: You think it gives Tom some pain?
Warshaw: On good nights, Tom falls asleep thinking of his three Pipe Masters trophies, and on bad nights he revisits the horror of the ’88 Billabong Pro, and his stillborn third world title. But the Triple Crown, no, he’s fine with one is my guess.
BeachGrit: But, Kelly. There’s this…thing… that he can’t ride Sunset real well, hence the lack of TCs. I don’t believe that’s true. How do you see it? Is it a lack of interest in the Triple Crown on Kelly’s part?
Warshaw: Kelly fell hard for Pipe, right when he turned pro, or just before. Pipe was glamour. Pipe was new ground waiting to be broken. Sunset—not only is it a stupid amount of work, and the world’s most frustrating wave, but there wasn’t much left to do there by the time Kelly arrived. Long, deep turns, with 50 yards of travel time in-between.
Tom Carroll and Kong had already maxed out the performance level, more or less.
BeachGrit: And those skinny flip-nosed boards Kelly was riding back then . . .
Warshaw: The only place those boards really made sense was Pipe. I don’t know if Merrick shaped them specifically so Kelly could ride deeper at Backdoor, or if they just happened to work best there. Either way, Sunset wasn’t high on Kelly’s to-do list. That said, he easily could have won five events there. It’s just a lumbering heartbreaking bitch of a wave. You never put a big pile of money on anybody at Sunset. Tom Curren never won out there, and he rode the place like a god.
BeachGrit: How important is winning a Hawaiian Triple Crown? It gets talked up as the next best thing to a world title but, let’s be honest, that’s bullshit. Anyone remember Bede or Mike Rommelse or Myles Padaca or Kaipo Jaquias’ Triple Crowns? Although, I suppose, you could say that about Adriano or CJ’s world titles…
Warshaw: A Triple Crown trophy is worth more than a CT win in Rio or Portugal or Huntington, but less than a Pipe win, or an Eddie win. These days, anyway. The QS kicked the Triple Crown in the nuts, and it never really got back up. Before 1992, all three Triple Crown events had world title points. In ’92, when the QS started, it was just Pipe. Back when the Triple Crown mattered, the Ho brothers owned it. Kong got a couple. Tom got one. There was a year where Dane Kealoha won two of the three Triple Crown events, but didn’t get the title—how weird is that? Dane not having a Triple Crown seems impossible. But yeah, it really was a big deal up until the QS. And even after that, for a few years, I think all the top CT guys felt honor-bound to do all three events—but the focus shifted to Pipe. Sunny won whatever it was, 52 Triple Crowns in a row. Which he probably would have done even if all the CT contenders were involved. All the surfers you mentioned, Bede and Rommelse and Kaipo, none of them were undeserving. Apart from the fact that a lot of big boys weren’t playing, Kelly being the most obvious, there aren’t any real outliers on the Triple Crown winners list. They were all great North Shore surfers.
BeachGrit: Kelly’s hitting all three events this year, the first time in four years. What do you suppose his motivation is?
Warshaw: He’s been going to the North Shore every winter now for I think 30 years. If he hasn’t done all three Triple Crown comps for that past 20 or so, I guess he’d do it this year just to put a new twist on something that has to be getting . . . I don’t know, not boring maybe, but repetitive.
BeachGrit: If 2017 is Kelly’s last year, and he’s said enough publicly to presume it to be true, what will it mean for the tour and for pro surfing? Has he wrung the last drop of milk from the teat anyway and so little will change or matter? Or is he, in your opinion, still the hub around which the tour spins?
Warshaw: He’ll get wildcards for as long as he wants, and our fascination with Kelly’s wavepool ain’t going anywhere. So the tour will indeed spin out without him, but no doubt whatsoever that he’s gonna keep flagging our attention. My track record is horrible on trying to guess what Kelly is up to or what his motivation is. But I think he wants to win a CT event in his 50s. I really think that’s his goal, and there’s a decent chance he’ll pull it off.
BeachGrit: Over the last year, what has been your favourite moment involving Kelly’s social media? His pool announcement less than a day after Adriano gets the title? The Instagram post shortly after JJ won the title telling the world Jordy Smith made the best video parts and was the best technical surfer on tour?
Warshaw: I have a list of things to erase for memory once The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind technology is up to speed, and somewhere in the middle of that list is Slater’s face pasted onto Gene Wilder’s head.And fuck you for reminding me.
