Tim Winton says, "It's amazing how cowardly those guys were."
Two days ago, the celebrated Australian writer Tim Winton appeared on a youth network talk show for a few reasons: to pimp a new book and talk about “toxic masculinity” with a brief detour into the film adaption of his surf novel Breath.
Winton, who is fifty seven years old and lives in a suburb of Perth, Western Australia, regards the modern man as something a little diminished.
“As someone who’s surfed all over the world and with the machismo and bravado of Brazilians in particular, I thought it was amazing how cowardly those guys were,” he said
“I wonder what kind of sooks men are… (if they) can’t hear any form of criticism without needing cotton wool or wearing a special helmet,” he said.
Winton grew up surfing around the south-west and says he wasn’t impressed when the Brazilians Gabriel Medina and Italo Ferreira applied a little pressure to the WSL to cancel the Margaret River Pro.
“As someone who’s surfed all over the world and with the machismo and bravado of Brazilians in particular, I thought it was amazing how cowardly those guys were,” he said. “Look, not everybody wants to be in the water the day after two guys have failed the taste test around the corner, but I thought it was a really low act on behalf of those two guys. Because, also, there’s a professional aspect to that. They’ve just given themselves a professional advantage in the competition. At one level it was weak of them. At another level it was conniving.”
Winton suggested a chlorinated future would better suit the pair.
“I just think if you want to go swimming in a dead ocean, go to a pool, go to a wave pool. If you want to be part of something that’s alive, and that’s what surfing is to most of us, then you’ve gotta be prepared, you’re doing that in a living ecosystem. If you want to kill all the sharks you’re just going to kill the oceans. It’s one of the few places in the world where there are actually real waves.”
(Here, the host jumped in. “And it was ripping!”)
“Yeah, so they can go back to surfing dirty onshore beach slop in water somewhere else and that’ll be surfing. Finally we get something to look at and they don’t want to go out.”