Love old men. Fall off waves. Worship at Andy
Irons' throne.
A couple of years back I threw a ten-pack of
advice on what to teach your kids about surf. The usual
stuff, why the death penalty shouldn’t be applied to longboarders
no matter how sensible it would be, and so on.
You got kids? Here’s another ten things to tell
‘em.
1. Lay off the fish: You’ll get lazy
at some point, kiddo, or there’ll be a run of bad waves for a month
and you’ll want a surfboard that picks up a ripple and eats
sections. Something wider. Flatter. Thicker. Don’t. You might never
come back. Oh, you’ll feel… fabulous… surfing has never
been this easy. But when has anything good come without the blood,
sweat and pus of trying until you want to puke?
2. Download that GoPro footage:
There’s gotta be a thousand years of unclaimed footage sitting
around on kids’ GoPros. Get into the habit of downloading it,
cutting the clips and sending ’em off somewhere like
the Hurley Surf Club. In an act of benevolence from an
industry owned, mostly, by French luxury brands and investment
bankers, Hurley’ll get your clips, rate ‘em, offer suggestions on
how to get better and do it all for free. (And no, that wasn’t
native advertising.)
3. You’ll never a man like Kelly Slater in
your lifetime: Oh, I know… I know… to
you he seems like a silly old man, the way he bites back to
nobodies on his Instagram. Throw a line out there,
say his clothing isn’t organic or suggest that the earth is a
pancake and you’ll haul him in. But, listen: that same
screen jockey…made… pro surfing. And for twenty years
there wasn’t a man who could touch him.
Oh, wait, there was. Andy Irons.
4. There’ll never be another Andy Irons
either. In the great Andy v Kelly rivalry at the turn of
the century picking who the good and bad guys were was impossible.
Superficially, Kelly was the modest hero. Statues were build of him
in his hometown. Magazines competed to see how often they could use
the word modest in their profiles. Andy was the trainwreck who’d
celebrate a contest win, and a loss if you want to know, by
throwing his beak onto the grindstone. A closer examination of
their motivations, however, would reveal Kelly as Machiavellian,
Andy as terrifyingly honest. The performance level of both surfers,
in the sort of waves that matter, is only now, almost twenty years
on, being scratched by John John.
5. Learn to skate. Nail ollies,
grinds, shuv-its and spins and apply to your surf. And then quit
before you break and distort your limbs. Forty-year-old skaters are
scarecrow horror shows.
6. Join a club. Local competition
sharpens your game and it does it in a way where you don’t feel
like you’re going to faint from the pressure. Maybe you’ll like
being told to perform in fifteen-minute bursts, maybe it’ll repel
you. Whatever happens, you’ll surf better.
7. It’s cool to try: I love watching
a kid try the same move over and over for weeks. Blows wave after
wave. The frustration kills him. And then one day he lands a
monster air-rev or whatever. And suddenly he’s better than most of
the guys in the lineup.
8. You can’t fight a
SUP: You’re not going to out-paddle one and you’re
not going to win a collision with a clown erect on his boat. So
move down the beach if you think you’ll lose your mind watching him
catch and blow every set.
9. Respect the better older surfers:
Hoot ‘em. Tell ‘em if you enjoyed the line they took into a
roundhouse. It never happens so you’ll be repaid in waves, in
advice, protection, whatever you want.
10. Be kind to kooks: Nothing
is more repellant than a pampered jock surf kid railing at
beginners as if he was born with a frontside wrap and backside
reverse.
