Watch: Jordy Smith’s New Movie!

Jordy's internal struggle between freesurfing greatness and competitive success wages on...

Progressive CT surfers are cursed. They retain the skills to tickle surfing’s realm of possibility, but are constantly reminded that they’d be better off sticking to the status quo. This becomes, I imagine, something of a gorilla on the backs of the Johns, Julians, and Jordies of the world.

Take someone less progressively-adept like, say, Ace Buchan. Ace is great surfer, but his skill set is designed to garner consistent scores within our current judging criteria. This means hard, critical turns in the steep section of the wave, along with some great forehand tube riding skills. Because he’s never been much of an “air guy”, Ace likely spends his freesurfs performing in exactly the same manner that he would in a heat.

So while Ace is doing that, Jordy goes into freesurfs with a major question in mind: To surf to win, or to surf to excel?

Even negating the injury factor, as I recognize that plays a major role in guys’ decision to go-big or not, progressive surfers are in a major bind. They could go out and freesurf the same way as Ace, which would likely lead to more heat wins (fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times), but they’d also be bored to tears and feel like they’re wasting away their talents.

Jordy has come out and said, on multiple occasions, that he’s going to forget about the freesurfing and put his focus solely onto winning a world title. That may be true in his mind, meaning that he’s not traveling the world between events to film with Kai Neville, but in reality he’s unable to tone his surfing down to CT-heat level. There must be thirty full-rotation airs in his new clip, Just Now, and I couldn’t tell you the last time Jordy did one of those in competition.

This is conflicting even for the viewers. We want to see our favorite surfers succeed competitively, but we also want them to push the boundaries of the sport. I guess John won a title last year while performing some of the greatest surfing ever  between heats, so it is possible, but damn hard I tell you.

As for this film, to me it’s a little… strange. The editing is choppy and the song choice is unique (mostly 80s rock bands), so probably not something I’d watch again, but there is plenty of quality surfing inside. It’s also Jordy’s first film since 2013, so stop contemplating and just give it a click.