The Lone Wolfs do it so damned good. Come watch
Eden Saul of The Dead Kooks!
Derek and I give it the college try with
BeachGrit TV. We really do. And someday it’ll be good. Our
DIY thing will shine etc. And we promise no Cori Shumcacher ever again
etc. Ever. Again. And. But. Ummm.
We both know how difficult “television” is to make. Neither of
us are comfortable in front of a camera. Each of us run to the
corners (off screen in “television” speak) as quickly as we can.
Etc. But we promise no Cori Schoolmaker ever again
etc. Ever. Never.
But the fact that we did once have Cori Spinnaker on a
podcast and we do accidentally not make it to the
corners quick enough shows how easy it is to go wrong.
And enter The Lone Wolfs. They do it all right from guest to
timing to filming to host to…. everything. Come watch what surf TV
should look like. This episode features Eden Saul of The Dead
Kooks.
Oh you’ll enjoy every minute because it is actually good. I
legitimately laughed at the end.
And how he was once rewarded, post-fight, with a
lifetime supply of cocaine!
Have you ever read Matt Warshaw’s History of Surfing? Oowee,
it’s thorough. A quarter-of-million words spread over 500
pages and, according to Amazon, a “true category killer.”
But who reads books anymore, am I right?
Yesterday, Warshaw released a first instalment of the book’s
contents online. Click here and you’ll be gifted the first two
sections, the birth of surfing all the way to the
early days of the North Shore. The other chapters will be dropped
piece by piece over the course of the year.
Anyway, what was a conversation about history turned into a
back and forth about surf brawlers, Warshaw’s favourites, how he
was once cuckolded by a relative of Robert Kennedy and, in a
separate instance, rewarded with a lifetime supply of cocaine after
being mistakenly punched.
Read below.
BeachGrit: You a brawler?
Warshaw: No. A non-brawler from a long line of non-brawlers. My
Jewish forebears ran off the Steppe years ahead of the invading
hoards just to avoid any physical business.
I know you’re a man of distinction, owner of horn-rimmed
glasses, live in a fog of perpetual white guilt there in Seattle,
but no man is immune from our caveman past. Reveal, for me, those
times when you’ve had to tamper down a burning desire to kill
someone…
I was cuckolded by a Kennedy, RFK’s youngest if memory serves.
Never met him, but he picked the phone up one morning when I called
my girlfriend, and it stove in my world, and for a year or so after
I spun out some pretty elaborate torture fantasies.
Kevin and I face off, and I’m sort of talking to him, not
particularly worried, thinking it ain’t gonna happen, and next
thing I’m my hands and knees, glasses sliding across the sidewalk,
bottom lip burst open. One punch done. My pals who were supposed to
jump in I guess were as surprised as I was, and faded into the
crowd.
Ever put your fists up?
No. Almost. A guy I knew thought I was hitting on his girl at a
party, and he called me out. Couple of friends were in my ear right
away saying, “Hey man, don’t worry, if Kevin swings we’ll jump
him.” So out we all go to the driveway. Kevin and I face off,
and I’m sort of talking to him, not particularly worried, thinking
it ain’t gonna happen, and next thing I’m my hands and knees,
glasses sliding across the sidewalk, bottom lip burst open. One
punch done. My pals who were supposed to jump in I guess were as
surprised as I was, and faded into the crowd. Kevin and I had
always been friendly, we’d surfed together a hundred times, and a
couple days later he figured out that I wasn’t in fact hitting on
his girl, it was somebody else. This was Manhattan Beach, 1982, and
Kevin was an aspiring coke dealer. So next time he sees me, he
fall over himself apologizing, and sets me up with a huge bump. For
two years after that, ever time we ran into each other at a party,
it was off to the bathroom. He overcompensated, if anything.
Historically, who are surfing’s most lively
brawlers? Johnny-Boy Gomes would be the
most famous. Some of the Narrabeen guys in the ’70s, but we’d have
to ask Nick Carroll about that. California surfer Gene “Tarzan”
Smith, back in the ‘30s and ‘40s, was pretty dedicated to knocking
heads. I believe he went out expressly looking to fight, the way
other guys go out looking for pussy. Brock Little had a bit of that
in him too, although I never saw it. Brock was so good at
separating the different sides of his life.
Can you list Sunny Garcia’s most golden
moments?
There’s a clip online of Sunny slapping Neco Padaratz’s head at
Pipe, then chasing him up the beach into the bushes. I like that
one because, like the story I just told, Sunny and Neco ended up
friends. The fight at Burleigh (second clip below) hd something to
do with Sunny’s kid. I don’t recall exactly. But anything having to
do with your child puts violence in a different light. Somebody
fucks your kid, right or wrong, all bets are off.
Is there a particular culture that celebrates surf
fights? I know the Balinese do like a raucous gang bang, so to
speak. Whereas the French will throw their arms up in the air, but
rarely throw a punch.
I’m so afraid of fighting, or even being around it, that I won’t
surf places that have a reputation for violence. I’m a short drive
away from one of the greatest point breaks in the world, in Oregon,
but the locals make the Bay Boys look like angry toddlers, so I’ll
never surf there. Velzyland, back when I used to go to Hawaii, I
would paddle out at daybreak then paddle in as soon the first local
showed up. On the other hand, all my life I’ve cozied up to the
enforcers at my local break. Never had anybody actually fight on my
behalf, but I’d get mouthy now and then knowing that the gnarly guy
a few yards to my right would jump in if necessary. Unlike my
buddies at that party. Fuck, it is all pretty caveman out there in
the water, still, isn’t it? Pussy cavemen were no doubt looking for
protection from the local heavies just the way I did at Taraval
Street, in San Francisco. Whatever gets you more waves, I
guess.
All my life I’ve cozied up to the enforcers at my local break.
Never had anybody actually fight on my behalf, but I’d get mouthy
now and then knowing that the gnarly guy a few yards to my right
would jump in if necessary.
Does it ever surprise you how… few… fights there are in
the water? Why? Are we, essentially, cowards?
It does surprise me. We puff our chests a lot, and talk shit, but
I’ve been surfing coming up on 50 years and can count on one hand
the number of fights I’ve seen. Maybe two hands.
What would it take, right now, for you to punch someone
in the water?
Nothing could make me throw a punch in the water. A half-century of
personal surfing non-violence is what I’m shooting for.
The world's most handsome goofy foot admits to a
deeply hidden secret!
Some of my favorite days of the month are when
I bump into Rob Machado at the market. Both of us shopping. Him
growing more and more regal with age. Me with two bottles of vodka
in my cart and packages of nitrate-free salami.
I bumped into him last evening at the market. Rob’s smile, if
you have never seen it up close, is like the Buddha’s. Serene.
Peaceful. Content. I asked him, “Do you think it is better to be
dumb and know that you are dumb or to be dumb and not know it?”
The conversation turned, slightly, toward having enough general
sense to be able to survive. Rob said, “I don’t even know how to
swim but if you drop me at second reef Pipe I’m sure I’ll figure
out how to get to the beach.”
“Really?” I responded “You really don’t know how to swim?”
“I mean kind of…” he said, “…but not well at all.”
And how’s that. Rob Machado can’t swim well. He is a Pipeline
Master.
My take away? It is 2017 and we can be whatever we want to be.
Spread those wings and soar!
Find out why Jordy Smith needs to learn the true meaning
of jihad. Why Gabriel Medina’s backflip was evidence of
“tectonic stasis rather than progress”. Why the public is a bitch
and how it relates to Dane Reynolds. How Kelly Slater accidentally
represents the dark side of capitalism and why John John Florence
is the necessary catalyst for a renewed tour.
5. Jordy Smith
According to Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the chief architect
of salafi jihadism, America is the most decadent culture in human
history, obsessed by the pursuit of wealth and luxury, corrupted by
a depth of moral licentiousness never before seen. On pain of
beheading I respectfully disagree.
I’m sick to death of writing that Jordy has no ticker. You can
imagine a thousand pathways to a world title for Jordy but none of
them involve winning a showdown at real Pipe.
I find Americans just about the stoutest and staunchest citizens
on Earth. My only beef is when Americans use the word cunt. From
puritan mouths it sounds queer and mean. It’s a convict term of
endearment and it should remain so. That digression because I’m
sick to death of writing that Jordy has no ticker. You can imagine
a thousand pathways to a world title for Jordy but none of them
involve winning a showdown at real Pipe.
Al-Zawahiri’s other intellectual achievement was the
sanctification of what he terms “matrydom operations”, a concept
our beloved South African/American could borrow when it comes to
hucking the ledge at Pipe. Am I saying Jordy needs a bit of
jihad in his soul to stiffen his resolve? I guess I am.
4. Gabs Medina
I know people are going to call me a glass half-empty miserable
son of a bitch, even though I’m not. In real life I’m cheerful as a
sky full of swallows. But I saw the Medina Rio backflip (what,
forgotten already?) as a sign of tectonic stasis rather than
progress. Flynn Novak pulled it off around the end of the last Ice
Age, way back in 2010. That was the era of Kai Neville and the
Kustom Airstrike, if you recall. Boat-load of the best progressive
surfers on the planet in Indo with Kai cutting edits from it. Hard
to believe they haven’t live streamed one like it yet.
Competitively, it was the last opening for a true progressive
vision of the sport to emerge. Dane had effectively welded an
avant-garde amalgamation of tail-high aerial surfing to brutal
power hacks, Kelly had risen to the challenge, bringing new lines
and fresh approaches to old venues. Natural heirs like Julian
Wilson, Owen Wright and Jordy Smith were ready to punch through the
hole into a radical future.
My heart pains to say that judges faced with radical choice
cowardly turned back to the conservatism of traditional Aussie
power surfing. Dane quit. The historical opening closed. We got
Parkinson, Fanning and De Souza. Parker’s Dead Ball Era. In that
context Medina could be the last best hope for a radical
recurrence.
3. Dane Reynolds
Seen from the perspective of an omniscient, omnipresent narrator
Dane’s career shimmers as the ultimate rock-n-roll swindle. Quit
the tour on a high and slit the throat of the Quiksilver fatted
calf with the biggest payday in history. One that forced the hand
of CEO Andrew Mooney to turn away from “athletes”, make Kelly an
offer he couldn’t accept and left a bloodless corpse to be picked
apart by the vultures of predatory capitalism.
How to kill a company, by Dane Reynolds. Chapter 11: Redemption.
Did you thrill,while watching Ch 11, to realise the wilderness
hadn’t been empty save cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon but was in fact a
dark night of the soul and Dane was now happy and on the other
side?
Did you think, like I, that those good ole Ventucky boys Dane
grew up with were reading from the book of Right-On when they
proclaimed pro surfing as an aberration, a weeping syphilitic
chancre on the flaccid cock of modern surfing?
The public are bitches. They turn on you in a heartbeat. In each
of us lives a person who wants to be loved for himself or herself
and not for his or her abilities, or even qualities. Value per se,
intrinsic. A dangerously anti-instrumental, anti-capital
orientation. Therein lies the motivation for Ch 11.
I understand panic attacks at pro surfing contests, having
suffered a similar malaise for years. It’s a mark of exquisite
taste that a man should feel spiritual and physical death descend
at these events. Is it now too much to ask that Dane lets C-Kat
bring the weird with the falcons and gives us what we want, what we
desire from the WSL but rarely receive: raw, elegant brutality, no
insipid 75% compromise, innovation? In short, the best surfing in
the world. You’re no huckster Dane, so the question is: Is you is
or is you ain’t going to bring the fucking gas money for the rest
of the trip?
Capitalism is an insatiable bitch, is it not comrades? Despite
being a digital entrepreneur and a sub-human redneck wastrel I hate
it intensely*, more than Noam Chomsky, more than Naomi Klein, more
than Yanis Varoufakis, more than Bernie, more even than all the
nude hippies in Morning of the Earth smoking chillums in the cave
at Ulus.
In the future, the one percent are going to own everything and
milk us dry, charging fees on everything. They’re going to shred us
all into tiny atomized monsters fighting each other in a
bottom-feeding frenzy for scraps of paper trickling down through
the gig economy.
The future is five minutes ago in the USA, five minutes away in
Oz. Granted, hating capitalism is a fashionable shape to throw in
public, one Kelly Slater loves to strike. He loves to swing for the
fences with Monsanto who, after all, did nothing more than
democratise GM seeds (true). They took jah’s seed and privatised it
for profit, he took jah’s wave and did the same thing, in a process
he described as “spiritual”.
Funny what folks find anti-depressive. Dark visions thrill me.
When I’m down I love to imagine the smoking ruins of capitalism are
nigh and the four horsemen wielding burning Merricks are galloping
over the hill ready to storm the hated symbol of corporate
oppression: the Slater Wave Tub. The blade falls and the surfing
prole hoists the white flag of freedom.
Suited greedheads have been eyeing off surfing since the
eighties, the seventies even, but we never imagined the person
delivering the Judas kiss would be the greatest surfer of all time.
Slater has finally achieved what business has yearned for but never
been able to achieve: he’s turned the essence of the surfing
experience, riding a wave, into a pure transaction. A wave as good
to be sold in the free market for profit.
For that, for feeding what was left alive of surfing to the
bitch of capitalism, and on behalf of the surfing prole I say: fuck
you very much Kelly. Kelly’s legacy is now set in stone, hitched to
the wavepool wagon for good or ill.
In the interim, while history arms itself against the rise of
the wave-machines and their “unforeseen consequences”, there is a
more pressing issue for Kelly to deal with: one last swing at a
Title in 2017. Chances? Depends on Snapper. He can’t afford to be
dead in the water after the Aussie Leg.
*Still available for freelance gigs. Special South Pacific
and wave-tub rates available now! Call me Kelly!
1. JJF
I love it when a writer handles his subject with a cool, light
touch, wields the scalpel so deftly the subject doesn’t even feel
the hot sting of the blade. But I love it more when passion for the
subject overwhelms them, when they lose restraint and start
bludgeoning everything in sight like a viking on an orgiastic
rampage. That is character. True Character. Like Dell on Israel,
Chas on Yemen and Rory on Costco workers.
As for writers, same for musicians and surfers. When they let
loose, when are they completely overcome in the moment is when the
real shit happens. That’s why watching JJF in Rio and in the
Portugal Final was so viscerally satisfying. There was no holding
back. No “mind.”
How’d you like your world champ’s year? This’ll be as popular as
a turd in the sangria bowl but I found it a tad… under-cooked. The
biggest tour cheerleaders would find it hard to spin a narrative
claiming the tour brings out the best in JJF. Low-energy lineups
orphan his surfing in a haze of opioid indifference.
He sits there, and he waits, and he sits. As for Fiji, apart
from round three did he not underwhelm, slightly but ever so
surely? Well-beaten twice in succession in perfect
six-to-eight-foot surf by Matt Wilko.
More than Pipe, more than Teahupoo, more than any other
reefbreak in the world, CB demands a cerebral approach, a constant
thinking and rethinking that just seemed to be beyond JJF. Easily
surrendered to Fanning in the J-Bay Final, Slater at Chopes.
What he has is the inverse of what Damien Jurado sang about in Return to
Maraqopa: Out there is nowhere but inside is
endless-taking up room till you run out of space. He has endless
space out there but inside is limited.
An algorithm can’t create now, or ever, the kind of surf which
elevates him from the amazing to the sublime. What he did in the
chaos of Rio, in Portugal, at Pipeline is a supra-intelligent
transcending of chaos.
The tour must be restructured, in format and location, to do
justice to the talent or suffer the slow burn of potential
greatness dying on the vine. The Slater Era is dead. The JJF Era
must proceed in a different biosphere. He is the greatest argument
for renewal.
Does the dream of a man surfing a 100 ft wave
thrill you to pieces or leave you cold and confused?
It leaves me cold and confused!
Oh I don’t mean to take anything away from brave souls combing
nautical charts, calculating wind, fetch, ummmm Fletch, in order to
find and conquer the biggest waves on earth but the number 100 just
seems so arbitrary.
Like, do you remember when Garrett McNamara claimed that he had
done it, done the 100 ft, at Nazaré in 2013 but it maybe turned out
that it was 60 something? A little embarrassing.
It is impossible to really measure a wave. Isn’t it?
CNN just did a nice story on the fabulous surfer Andrew Cotton
that pushes the 100 ft narrative but it seems that Mr. Cotton might
not care so much about the number. Let’s read!
Andrew Cotton is on a perpetual quest, the thirst for which
he admits will probably never be truly quenched.
Two years ago, the English plumber was fixing dripping taps
— now, as a professional surfer, he is tackling the world’s biggest
waves.
His obsession is twofold: To beat the unofficial record size
of 100 feet high; and to track down treacherous waves in waters
that have never been surfed before. Combining the two is the
ideal. “I think what drives me is the biggest wave,” Cotton says.
“That’s the dream isn’t it, in a place where you’re not going to
have 50 surfers? That’s exciting.”
If he breaks the record, and in uncharted waters … what
next?
“The thing about big-wave surfing is that it’s not like you
climb Everest and say, ‘That’s me done’,” he says. “There’s lots
more Everests to climb; with surfing you have no idea when the
bigger wave will come. I’m searching for the biggest wave, and that
search is never ending.”
That sounds like the right attitude. It doesn’t really sound
like he cares about “100 ft.” That’s CNN’s trip.
