Boy is my face red. I reported, days ago, that
surfwear giant Billabong was dropping longtime team rider Joel
Parkinson. The rumor floated to me via my dry cleaner, a very
believable Korean man, but just today Stab has published
that Joel locked into a six-year extension and I am going to have
to better vet my dry cleaner’s information moving forward.
How could he have been so wrong? So confused?
I’ll get to the bottom of this but in the meantime, Julian
Wilson delivered a very fine post-win interview to a respectable
newspaper with quality sources (The
Guardian).
I’ve learned a lot about myself at this event and through
this injury and the birth of my baby girl Olivia. Honestly,
watching the birth of my first child gave me unbelievable strength
to just suck it up, come down here and do what I needed to
do.
I’ve got huge inspiration from my wife [Ashley] and the
whole experience. I’ve got to thank my wife for that.
My number one competitor this last week was myself – testing
myself, figuring out where I could go and where I
couldn’t.
I was lucky enough to get some good waves come my way and I
was able to surf pretty well. I can’t believe I’ve won it.
And are you riding the Julian train right now? Pulling for him
to win it all come December? His narrative is very compelling. New
father of a daughter, fresh off shoulder injury… in fact, I don’t
think there has been a front-runner with a more compelling
narrative in quite some time. Of course it is too early to think
about December already but if Julian does well at Margaret River,
very much in his purview, and does well at Bells then… Well, it is
too early.
Ok. I’m off to the dry cleaner’s with a stern face right now.
BRB.
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Hot Nife: The official sponsor of last
place!
By Chas Smith
420.
You may, or may not, have noticed the Hot
Nife advertisements that run on this website from time
to time. For the curious, Hot Nife is a marijuana company based in
California and specializing in ultra-premium CO2 extracted oil
cartridges/vape pens which are sold throughout the state’s premier dispensaries. It is a very
fine product, one that I back without caveat, and I am happy for
our partnership.
Marijuana consumption can still be a touchy subject for some,
even though it is now legal in California, Oregon, Nevada,
Washington, etc. but BeachGrit has never been pharisaical.
We preach anti-depression here and we preach it in all of its
gorgeous forms. Surf, booze, weed.
Thus, it is with great pleasure that I announce weed is
partnering with surf and booze at the highest level with Hot Nife
becoming the official sponsor of the World Surf League’s last
place.
Did you not see?
Amongst other changes for the 2018 season (no Hawaii, no Barton
Lynch) the League has changed point totals for wins/losses. First
place still gets 10000 but from there the numbers appear a bit
random. Second place gets 7800, third gets 6085 and so forth all
the way down to twenty-fifth, or last place, which gets… 420.
Now, you of course know that 420 is the numerical code that
references marijuana so it makes perfect sense that Hot Nife would
pounce upon these colorful losers and desire their company most.
Who needs the Jeep Leaderboard Yellow Jersey when you’ve got John
John and Kelly?
If one of the power bottoms just so happens to get 420 for
each and every event all 2018 long then Hot Nife will send that
best loser a care package featuring very much marijuana. Don’t you
wish you surfed on the Championship Tour now?
Well, don’t you?
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Pottz: “Hawaii is the Super Bowl of
surfing!”
By Chas Smith
Hawaii is a spectre that will haunt this 2018
season.
The first event is officially in the bag with
fine, deserving champions on each side. Julian Wilson and Lakey
Peterson both wear victory well and their respective homelands
should smile with pride.
The entire show was, well… it seemed… I don’t know. Something
was missing. Maybe it was Barton Lynch? Last year’s best
commentator was brushed aside this year in apparent cost saving
measures which left the standard cast in the booth. Ron Blakey,
Pete Mel, Joe Turpel and 1989 World Champion Martin Potter.
They’ve all been with us for years now and… I just don’t know. I
want more. I need more. Though, I must say, I did enjoy one moment
between Joe Turpel and Pottz.
It came near twenty minutes into the Ace Buchan vs. Owen Wright
heat when Turpel, as is his wont, asked Potter a benign question.
“What is your favorite event on tour?”
Potter responded, without missing a beat, “Hawaii. It’s the
Super Bowl of surfing.”
Now, do you think that Pottz has yet to be informed that
Pipeline, the WSL’s Championship Tour’s only stop in Hawaii, has
been axed? That professional surfers will no longer travel to the
Aloha State in order to do battle on the big stage?
Or do you think he knew and was furious about the decision,
deciding to protest in his own small way?
The broader issue, here, is that Pipeline will hover over the
2018 season like a spectre. It will haunt the proceedings and I
wonder if the League will have to, in the end, capitulate and keep
Pipe in December as the last stop for the next ten years. Or as
long as Pottz lives. It is one thing to thumb a nose at Honolulu’s
mayor. Quite another thing, though, to change the flow of
history.
Hmmmm.
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The male gender category champion Julian Wilson. |
Photo: WSL
Quik Pro Finals: “Satan made Kirra to spite
God!”
By Longtom
Julian Wilson and Lakey Peterson win respective
gender categories at semi-awesome Kirra…
Plenty of thinking time in the scotopic light 500 yards
or so out off Big Groyne Kirra this morning in the cyclone
swell. Swimming, blue foamy racing in the rip up to North
Kirra. Lots of water moving. Thick beasts unloading on the Big
Groyne part of the sandbar.
A day for Kirra Specialists, thought I, or dumb luck from rank
virgins.
It is a wave for specialists and with Kelly a no-show, Mick,
Joel and Steph out the closest thing to a specialist left in the
draw was Julian Wilson.
Obscene screams woke me in the dark. A fox in the henhouse? I
ran outside with a headlamp and found a python strangling a bat. By
the time I’d loaded the Camry the snake was gone and the dead bat
lay prone on the ground. I read as a bad portent.
Owen failed to load, Ace spiked a couple medium-sized waves for
an easy win in the first heat of the day. The last time the comp
ended with a Kirra final day was way back in 2013, the last great
Year of the Kelly Era, at the start of the Speaker reign and before
pro surfing was even a twinkle in Sophie Goldschmidt’s eye. Kelly’s
“honeypot” strategy netted him multiple ten-point rides and a
memorable final ride with priority against a bird flipping
Parko.
You recall, surely.
Heat two of the quarters featured no Kirra specialists and
exposed a gap in Filipe’s resume for World Champ. He couldn’t best
Tomas Hermes, who wouldn’t have made a heat of the Kirra Surfriders
club round. Kelly would have watched in horror.
From the front bar of the Kirra surf club the good old boys
enjoyed Wilson’s easy win over M-Rod and erupted for Griff’s triple
banger ten-pointer. It was a wave that rescued the morning from
unflattering comparisons with 2013. “Fucken Mick woulda been
getting’ them all fucken day long maate!” said a florid-faced bloke
beside me from between magnificently mottled jowls.
Wilson/Colapinto, Ace/Hermes Semi’s. Not a Finals roster anyone
in their right mind could have foreseen.
Do you have a favourite Kirra Specialist?
You might think of Michael Peterson or Wayne “Rabbit”
Bartholomew maybe Kelly “Willie” Slater.
Or, if you live locally, Sean “Reg” Riley, Neal Purchase Jnr,
Jason “China” O’Connor or Nick Vasicek might come to mind. My fav
is an unknown Kiwi guy named Gizza I shared a tenement in Surfers
Paradise with. A small-time eccy and weed dealer Gizza had an
unholy love of Kirra that he would sacrifice anything to
consummate. One golden afternoon with Kirra pumping we all piled
into a Valiant Safari and headed to Kirra, Gizza’s heavily pregnant
gal included. She had a doctor’s appointment and Gizza was expected
to attend. Outside the Doc’s on a seedy part of the Palm Beach
strip she piled out and eyeballed our Kiwi anti-hero, “Come on
Gizza, lets go”.
Gizza sat as still as a buddha and uttered the immortal words,
“Hey babe, all I know is Kirra’s pumping and I’m out there.”
We drove off with his gal screaming at the top of her lungs,
“Fuck you, fuck you Gizza!”
I don’t know if it was worth it for Giz. Six months later he was
dead in a bathtub.
It’s that kind of wave.
I couldn’t have picked Ace Buchan to final at the Quik Pro
despite insanely sharp, error-free, high-drifting hooks on his
backhand. It just always seemed like someone better would topple
him. But no-one did. And he kept air-dropping into kegs and making
waves, to meet Julian in the Final.
Australia’s second-best ever PM Paul Keating famously said “You
change the Prime Minister, you change the country.”
As for PM’s so for pro surfing CEO’s. Rabbit Bartholomew birthed
the Dream Tour and presided over the Kelly/Andy rivalry, what
historians in future will refer to as the Golden Age of Pro
Surfing. He was the last True Believer to head the organisation.
Brodie Carr fended off a Rebel Tour and rewrote contracts to
appease Kelly Slater.
In his zeal to create private stadiums out of public space, Paul
Speaker launched aggressive ambit claims over everything that
happened at a WSL event. The atmosphere created was authoritarian
and oppressive, a heavy hand on the shoulder always seemed nearby
for freelancers like me, maybe rendition to a secret black ops WSL
re-education centre.
And Sophie?
Clueless by her own admission she is what writer Tim Winton
calls a “citizen in a strange world.” But she has loosened the
program up. The ambit claims seem a little less obvious, maybe
because she realises they are unenforceable and reliant on the
goodwill of democratically elected institutions who hand out
taxpayer-funded permits. Permits that can be denied.
But, more likely, because Sophie’s reign has a technological
“Final” solution to the untameable ocean. With the tub comes the
stadium and the timetable, the broadcast, the tickets, all the
things that have eluded the sport so far. You can see why she would
loosen her grip on “ocean” surfing and embrace the wave system. The
fractured sport she creates will be her legacy and all the King’s
horses won’t be able to put the pieces together again.
The gamble to hold off the event for a couple hours paid off
massively after an epic final between J-Dub and Ace. Ace was
comboed once, then twice, after Julian ducked and weaved through
sandy caverns, the first of which was a ten all day long. Ace kept
fighting deserving the mantle of Kirra specialist but Julian was
too strong, too good.
Couldn’t have picked the men’s final but it would have been a
travesty if Lakey Peterson didn’t hoist the trophy. She dominated a
one-sided final.
If beauty is truth and truth is beauty then the great deceiver
Satan himself must have created Queensland to spite God because
no-one ages uglier and happier than a Queenslander.
No-one sacrifices more to ride the most gorgeous tubes on earth.
Their youth, their beauty, gone in a blur of blue-water tubes and
alcoholic excess.
Except Julian Wilson. He’ll be beautiful for ever.
Quiksilver Pro Gold Coast Final Results:
1 – Julian Wilson (AUS) 17.43
2 – Adrian Buchan (AUS) 15.10
Quiksilver Pro Gold Coast Semifinal
Results:
SF 1: Adrian Buchan (AUS) 10.00 def. Tomas Hermes (BRA) 9.17
SF 2: Julian Wilson (AUS) 13.77 def. Griffin Colapinto (USA)
11.66
Quiksilver Pro Gold Coast Quarterfinal
Results:
QF 1: Adrian Buchan (AUS) 13.50 def. Owen Wright (AUS) 2.50
QF 2: Tomas Hermes (BRA) 8.73 def. Filipe Toledo (BRA) 7.33
QF 3: Julian Wilson (AUS) 14.44 def. Michael Rodrigues (BRA)
10.00
QF 4: Griffin Colapinto (USA) 16.43 def. Michel Bourez (PYF)
12.44
Roxy Pro Gold Coast Final Results:
1 – Lakey Peterson (USA) 15.67
2 – Keely Andrew (AUS) 5.67
Roxy Pro Gold Coast Semifinal Results:
Heat 1: Lakey Peterson (USA) 11.00 def. Malia Manuel (HAW) 8.33
Heat 2: Keely Andrew (AUS) 7.50 def. Sally Fitzgibbons (AUS)
6.77
2018 WSL Men’s CT Jeep Leaderboard (After Quiksilver Pro
Gold Coast):
1 -Julian Wilson (AUS) 10,000 pts
2 – Adrian Buchan (AUS) 7,800 pts
3 – Griffin Colapinto (USA) 6,085 pts
3 – Tomas Hermes (BRA) 6,085 pts
The template for the WSL comes straight from the
ATP. Who knew? Bobby knew!
I thought it was common knowledge that the WSL is built
on the blueprint of the Association of Tennis Professionals
(ATP). The contest/tournament calendar, the ranking
system, the contest format and now the exhibition extras – all the
same as the ATP.
It makes sense, therefore, that professional surfing’s owner has
turned the reigns over to Sophie Goldschmidt with her four years
experience as a vice-president at the WTA (Women’s Tennis
Association).
It ain’t sexy but it ain’t crazy, if you dig.
Listen. If you were a minnow sport like surfing and looking to a
big brother for advice, tennis makes sense. Count the similarities:
an individual sport, competitors from a wide variety of nations,
tournaments scattered around the world. And tennis has provided
household names and reaped fortunes for over half a century.
But Tennis is a rich man’s game. The outfits, the tradition, the
silence. That ain’t surf or it at least it wasn’t.
And isn’t tennis really about the four grand slams? Does anyone
actually tune in for anything else?
Tennis certainly doesn’t have super-star names who don’t compete
but attract fabulous salaries and starry eyes for knocking the ball
around the practise court. There’s no Dane Reynolds, no Creed
McTaggart, no Craig Anderson. And judging from tennis’s moves
trying to shorten and re-jig the format over the past few years,
you know they’re having a golf-type issue in trying to appeal to
the new generation.
If we look purely from a governing body’s format, what has the
WSL borrowed?
1. Tournament Structure – Tennis has the
Challenger Tour and the World Tour. Surfing has the Qualification
Series and Championship Tour. Both formats allow competitors to
earn points through lower events and use these points to qualify
for higher-rated events.
2. Tournament Funding – The level of an ATP
event (points available), all depends on the prizemoney offered,
and as a result the more funded to the governing body. Want to
stage the ATP1000 in your crummy little neighbourhood, just cough
up the cash and it’s yours. Surfing is the same game. Fork out the
money and you can have a QS10,000 at your local break.
3. Hopman Cup / Founders Cup – Did anyone else
notice that Sophie’s first big splash, The Founders Cup, takes its
colours from the Hopman Cup? International all-team tournament with
mixed gender teams? Hopman.
4. Nitto ATP Finals / WSL Mentawaii Finals
– The WSL will introduce a finals series to finish of
the year in 2019. When this was announced everyone’s eyes went to a
NBA/NFL/MLB finals format thinking those jocks were the
inspiration. It was actually tennis that has had a finals format
for years now. With an Emirates-sponsored ATP Race to
London points ladder.
What does the future hold? Tennis has pushed towards indoor
single day/night exhibitions to lure millennials in with loud
music, flashy lights and a shorter time frame, the Laver Cup for
example.
What’s surfing got? Pools, pools, pools.
And another similarity, to quote Billie Jean King, “Tennis is a
perfect combination of violent action taking place in an atmosphere
of total tranquility.”
