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 Shooter and 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-cocked I
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.
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Jon Pyzel and Matt Biolos by
@theneedforshutterspeed/Step Bros
