surf ranch
The wave itself looks as perfect as ever. A succession of them feels like too much of a good thing, as though perhaps imperfection in surfing is as important as that one amazing wave you caught back in 1985 and remember forever. If all of them are perfect, what will you remember? | Photo: @ramamccabe

Live from Surf Ranch: “Perhaps imperfection is important”

The waves blurred one into the next. Only a few stood out.

I got barreled at Surf Ranch. Or at least, I got the closest thing to getting barreled that I could find. You see, if you stand near the middle of the pool, and wait patiently, eventually the water slops over the wall. And if you stand right up next to the wall, you can get totally barreled. 

So that’s exactly what I did. I stood right up against the wall. The spray covered me entirely. Bystanders looked on in awe. It was beautiful. 

I began the day by standing in line. The sun was hot, the line long. My feet already hurt, which is the kind of harbinger that you try to ignore, but it’s hard. It was entirely my own fault for wearing inappropriate shoes, which is a habit I’ve tried and failed to shake. I once ended up surrounded by spiders while taking photos in flip flops. I squealed and ran. It was extremely dignified. 

When I got to the front of the line, they turned me away. I was totally scared! Again, I was going to have to turn around and not see the Surf Ranch with my own eyes. And this time, I had come so close. They tried to take my food and I wouldn’t let them and then they told me to go to the other entrance. 

I didn’t know there was more than one entrance, but I found it! And when I did, at last, I entered Surf Ranch! Nirvana! Also, I still had my food, because never surrender.

The wave. You want to know about the wave. You don’t care about my sore feet. It’s my job to have sore feet, you’re saying. It’s my job to have sore feet and tell you about the wave pool. I am going to disappoint you. It looks exactly like the videos. Because of it’s totally improbable location, in fact, Surf Ranch might look less real when it’s right there in front of you than it does on the internet. 

I thought the train would be louder and hearing the wave pool compared to a fish bowl, I expected everything to be closer. I expected to see spray flying off the waves right there. It was oddly far away. I felt like it needed bridges maybe. Bridges so I could walk across and look down on Surf Ranch. Bridges so that I could walk over, rather than around. 

You want to know about the heat. The heat was everything I imagined and more. It was fabulous! Like a living thing. In the morning, there was a brief period of delusion. I sipped an iced coffee and ate something baked. Maybe it won’t be that hot today! 

Maybe we will not die out here, shriveled into dried up piles of cells on the cracked earth. We were wrong. By mid-afternoon, the wind died, the sun blazed. I almost cried, but I knew I couldn’t come back and face you all, if I cried at Surf Ranch. Somehow I’d wandered into a Steinbeck novel, all dust and heat. 

The waves blurred one into the next. Only a few stood out. Medina, Florence’s final air, Carissa Moore’s deep front-side barrels, Moore’s turns – pretty much all of them, really. The airs looked weirdly slow and I can’t for the life of me figure out why. Somehow they just seemed to lack the punch I expect to see.

But Steinbeck is dead and we’re still alive and we’d gathered around the wave pool in some kind of strange fellowship. All hail! The train is coming! We fell into step with its hypnotic rhythm. 

The wave itself looks as perfect as ever. A succession of them feels like too much of a good thing, as though perhaps imperfection in surfing is as important as that one amazing wave you caught back in 1985 and remember forever. If all of them are perfect, what will you remember? 

The level of surfing was uneven, as some competitors had learned the pool’s quirks better than others. Fanning’s board worked beautifully. Florence’s, much less so. There were still no true bottom turns to be seen and the more waves I watched, the more it nagged. 

The waves blurred one into the next. Only a few stood out. Medina, Florence’s final air, Carissa Moore’s deep front-side barrels, Moore’s turns – pretty much all of them, really. The airs looked weirdly slow and I can’t for the life of me figure out why. Somehow they just seemed to lack the punch I expect to see.

The crowd was enthusiastic, though not in the stadium roar kind of way. People were into the surfing, especially the barrels and wipe-outs, which are maybe the easiest things to understand out of it all. 

The general admission crowd gathered around the pool’s edges and seemed happy to take it all in. They appeared amused by the novelty of the setup. The VIP’s were more picky, more likely to pick and choose their favorites, but on the whole, it was a very Slater-friendly crowd. He drew the loudest applause each time he appeared.

I was there! At Surf Ranch! But somehow it all seemed to happen at a distance. The athletes appeared magically when it was time for their team’s round. Then they quickly disappeared. I’m not sure where they went. Tomorrow, I will try to find them. Depending on where I was around the pool, I could sometimes hear the commentary and sometimes, nothing at all. I ran into Shaun Tomson and had time to say hey, before he signed a couple autographs for the groms and disappeared. Maybe there was a really cool party going underground or behind a secret door. 

I confess I have no idea what broke during the afternoon rounds. But the whole thing – the wave, the surfing, all of it – stopped for around an hour. At the time, I was hanging around the middle section, trying to finish off my photo set. I had a spot in the shade and a place to sit. These factors won out over my curiosity to ask questions.

While the wave was broken, there was a short musical selection, I believe. I vaguely understood that Carissa Moore sang with a band of some kind, but I might have been wrong.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BibFvR9gH9W/?hl=en&taken-by=rissmoore10

By then, we’d reached the point where understanding had begun to fade. I never did figure out what Strider was doing with his blue surfboard.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BibHEJrnBgc/?hl=en&taken-by=stridersworld

Maybe it was the heat. Maybe my sore feet. Maybe it was the part where we switched to tequila sometime after three pm. By then I desperately wanted to cool my feet in the shallows, the way you do at the beach on a hot summer day. 

Maybe they could add that part.  A place to cool my feet. Or maybe on Monday I’ll just head to the beach and float in the cool water and stare up at the boundless, blue sky. 

At least I got barreled. At least I got barreled at Surf Ranch! A girl could live a long time on that alone. 


jordy-smith
When is a tube not a tube? When a surfer can crouch under the lip, fully visible, with a shot clock that I want to borrow in the bedroom for my next sexual performance. To put it delicately, it was flattering. I thought it not possible to score the tube. How could they? When you know it is coming you are basically scoring people for crouching down. They scored the tube. Rest of the World skipper, Jordy Smith. | Photo: WSL

Founders’ Cup: “Mind-numbing safety surfing!”

And a judging scale that seemed artificially tweaked to reward mediocrity…

Kelly Slater, when asked by Kaipo Guerrero about his thoughts on the impact of Day one of the Founders’ Cup held in a wave system in central California, admitted “I’m in the woods, I’m biased”.

I  also offer a similar caveat. I tried so hard to come with an open mind but it’s impossible, three years into the life of the Kelly Slater Wave Ranch, to not have a fully formed opinion locked down. 

The reality was a majority mind numbing predictable safety surfing and a judging scale that seemed artificially tweaked to reward mediocrity.

A structural problem is the novelty paradox. After three years of (admittedly brilliant) drip feed marketing from wavepool owners WSL there wasn’t much left to reveal. The promise was futuristic progression on tap, in a stadium atmosphere.

The reality was a majority mind-numbing predictable safety surfing and a judging scale that seemed artificially tweaked to reward mediocrity. When is a tube not a tube? When a surfer can crouch under the lip, fully visible, with a shot clock that I want to borrow in the bedroom for my next sexual performance. To put it delicately, it was flattering. I thought it not possible to score the tube. How could they? When you know it is coming you are basically scoring people for crouching down. They scored the tube.

The tub is killing Raimana, he looks pre-diabetic. Hope he’s going to be OK.

The steady beat of the action, was nice. The leaderboard, when they displayed it, was welcome. There is the germ of a very good idea there. But it didn’t quite work as designed. By mid-way through the second round I’d completely lost touch with the scoring and the leaderboard. It seemed arbitrary and disconnected from reality. When Kaipo said “historic day” I twitched, by the close of the first round I had developed a visceral loathing of Chris Cote, and he seems like a very nice gentleman who has never done a thing wrong by me. The tub is killing Raimana, he looks pre-diabetic. Hope he’s going to be OK.

The left is a porcine joke, suitable for foam climbs and not much else and punctuated by a toy tube section at the end. The most cringeworthy moment of the day came when Pete Mel started yelping like a drowning puppy when Slater did three foam climbs in a row on his penultimate wave of the day. Progression? We see things with different eyes Peter Mel, but if you can tell me that a foam climb on a head high wave was avante-garde any time after 1997 I speak for the surf world in calling your judgement into question.

The right is a decent simulacrum of a high-performance wave except the majority of it can only be surfed with rail free fins only snaps. Anyone trying to engage the rail properly left or right, except as a very finishing manouevre was summarily executed and left to stand in knee high water in front of five thousand fans. Were they baying fans? The broadcast gave no sense of fan engagement except when Kelly did a victory lap with golf claps or took the long walk back down the side of the pool, separated from California’s finest by only a moat of grey-green freshwater and a concrete wall. 

The most cringeworthy moment of the day came when Pete Mel started yelping like a drowning puppy when Slater did three foam climbs. Progression? We see things with different eyes Peter Mel, but if you can tell me that a foam climb on a head high wave was avante-garde any time after 1997 I speak for the surf world in calling your judgement into question.

I felt for the camera-men. A staple wide-shot before the train left the station was grim, industrial, like something scripted by Solzhenitsyn. There were no easy options for attractive cutaways, no gals, no beach; just shimmering heatwaves and beer in plastic cups. Round one ended and it was still black on the East Coast of Australia. I tried to catch some sleep but I felt so cold. So bone chilled cold that my blood felt frozen. When I woke, the future was there waiting for me.

No gender disparity existed, as far as I could see. Lakey Peterson and Tyler Wright turned as hard, or harder than men. Carissa Moore and Steph Gilmore rode deeper and more reliably in the tube.

The gals were a revelation. No gender disparity existed, as far as I could see. Lakey Peterson and Tyler Wright turned as hard, or harder than men. Carissa Moore and Steph Gilmore rode deeper and more reliably in the tube. Frankie Harrer from Team Europe: her beat was nice.The inclusion of mainstream CBS sports reporter, the sharp and savvy Jamie Erdahl lifted the mood in the pressers. Fresh blood is desperately needed in the booth.

Drama was hard to come by. The inter-country concept is well tried and well tested in international sport but they need to rejig the format to have any sense of real competition between nations. Tomorrow maybe different. I still cannot understand the format but it looks like there will be a sense of surfers from different nations surfing against each other. 

Was the CBS broadcast live when Parko was marooned for an hour by mechanical failure? That must have kept Sophie up at night. Sharks, onshore winds and flat spells are a hazard but the breakdown of the train is a stalking horse that trumps all as a boner kill. Still, it gave us one of the days many delicious ironies: 1978 World Champion Wayne Bartholomew filling dead air detailing the reasoning for the Dream Tour – World’s Best surfers in the World’s Best waves – with the pan cake flat lake as a back drop behind the Michelob encrusted glass.

When play resumed Parko made a wave, his first for the day. He wasn’t the only one to struggle. John Florence fell on both his opening waves… runs? What’s the terminology for these things now, and looked truly and wretchedly discombobulated standing in the shallows. He fell again on his left before loosing the one truly progressive, albeit utterly predictable, air of the day: a tail-high inverted reverse with an incredible landing. 

Based on what I saw today I would have Team Brazil first place. Judges have them languishing second last, below the cut. Filipe was the best surfer in the house, daylight second, even if his ten-point ride had a whiff of (historical) desperation about it. Still, he was the only surfer during the whole day to punt mid way through the ride. Another irony, bitter this time: the predictability of man-made perfection was designed and sold on the premise of loosing creativity and risk.

Based on the evidence from today, it has done exactly the opposite.

More to come etc etc. 

Founders’ Cup of Surfing Qualifying Runs:

L1 = First Lefthand Wave
R1 = First Righthand Wave

United States:
Lakey Peterson – L1: 6.6, R1: 7.83, L2: 2.77, R2: 7.93
Kolohe Andino – L1: 8.5, R1: 6.00, L2: 8.8, R2: 7.43
Carissa Moore – L1: 7.43, R1: 9.27, L2: 8.37, R2: 9.43
John John Florence – L1: 3.43, R1: 6.63, L2: 5.3, R2: 9.8
Kelly Slater – L1: 8.80, R1: 8.47, L2: 8.6, R2: 7.87
USA Team Total: 80.83

Australia:
Tyler Wright – L1: 4.83, R1: 9.1, L2: 6.4, R2: 9.33
Joel Parkinson – L1: 3.5, R1: 6, L2: 3.53, R2: 7.4
Mick Fanning – L1: 7.43, R1: 8, L2: 9.07, R2: 8.43
Stephanie Gilmore – L1: 8.63, R1: 8.23, L2: 5.53, R2: 2.17
Matt Wilkinson – L1: 8.37, R1: 3.83, L2: 4.5, R2:6.43
Australia Team Total: 75.82

World:
Bianca Buitendag – L1: 7.6, R1: 2.5, L2: 6.77, R2: 4.93
Kanoa Igarashi – L1: 2.17, R1: 8.83, L2: 3.87, R2: 4.5
Michel Bourez – L1: 8.8, R1: 7.5, L2: 5.5, R2: 4.5
Jordy Smith – L1: 7.27, R1: 9.07, L2: 8.87, R2: 4.53
Paige Hareb – L1: 7.53, R1: 7.93, L2: 7.43, R2: 8.33
World Team Total: 75.33

Brazil:
Taina Hinckel – L1: 2.17, R1: 4.17, L2: 5.5, R2: 4.1
Filipe Toledo – L1: 7.83, R1: 6.93, L2: 4.2, R2: 10
Gabriel Medina – L1: 6.67, R1: 7.83, L2: 6.87, R2: 9.17
Adriano de Souza – L1: 6.83, R1: 7.93, L2: 3.93 R2: 4.93
Silvana Lima – L1: 5.5, R1: 7.73, L2: 5.67, R2: 8.33
Brazil Team Total: 72.3

Europe:
Frankie Harrer – L1: 5.73, R1: 1.93, L2:5.87, R2: 3.83
Leonardo Fioravanti – L1: 8, R1: 8.17, L2: 3.73, R2: 9.57
Johanne Defay – L1: 6.67, R1: 0.77, L2: 5.33 R2: 7
Frederico Morais – L1: 7.17, R1: 3.07, L2: 7.17, R2: 6.77
Jeremy Flores – L1: 8, R1: 8.47, L2: 8.77, R2: 7.77
Europe Team Total: 72.12


Breaking: Jon Pyzel eats a hotdog!

With only mustard! No ketchup nor grilled onions nor sauerkraut!

The heart of surf is beating strong but not up in Lemoore, California where wide-stance’d European girls check-turn monotonous green waves. Where Adriano de Souza is not coming out of a tiny barrel to confused applause. No. It is beating strong underneath the fluorescent lights of an out-building at the Del Mar Fairgrounds.

It is beating strong at The Boardroom surfboard expo.

For it is here that the fucking surfers, the goddamn nerds, are mingling, caressing glassed rails, watching Peter Schroff stalk, listening to Devon Howard redefine the egg as a “big boy trike,” talking about surf and surfboards and surfboard rails and the weird minutia that turns us all on and by “all us” I mean the fucking surfers. The goddamn nerds.

Surf Ranch Founders’ Cup is playing on a few televisions but nobody is crowding to witness. It looks slow. It looks uninspired and the few stragglers stopping by seem genuinely confused by it. I ask a handsome boy, “What do you think?” He shrugs. I ask an older man, “What do you think?” He says, “About?”

I go outside and watch Jon Pyzel buy a hotdog. A hotdog with just a bun and the hotdog and mustard. No ketchup nor grilled onions nor sauerkraut. No flair just high performance, straight to the point, get ‘er done.

Hotdog.

And here is the damned thing. I’d rather watch Jon Pyzel, extraordinary shaper, John John’s secret weapon, 2x Stab in the Dark winner, eat a hotdog than a competition at Surf Ranch and that is God’s honest truth.


“Kissed by God a liberation from sickly lying!”

Andy's death released a tsunami of bullshit.

There are no innocents and there are no winners in a war on drugs.

Where were you when Andy died? Is it significant enough to stand out?

I remember the day clear as a cut diamond. Glorious day. An early season east swell had provided beautiful surf. I was back on the screen, lit up, anonymously commenting on BlasphemyRottmouth.com, the premier black ops surf site of the time.

2.58 pm Pacific Standard time, just before 10 am Australian Eastern Daylight Time, a poster named Mark dropped the bomb that Andy was found alone and dead in a Dallas hotel room. Exactly 44 mins passed, 3.42 PST to demolish the Dengue Fever cause of death being propagated by Billabong and the surf media.

It was a biological impossibility given the timeline.

In the febrile hours that followed, amidst the shock and the grief, a protection racket that the surf media had perfected in over 30 years of turning a deliberate blind eye to maintain a return on investment by the largest surf companies on Earth collided with the reality of the most famous addict in surf dying alone at the age of 32.

Andy’s death released a long developing tsunami of bullshit to swamp the World. Kissed by God goes someway to wandering among the wreckage left behind by that tsunami and finally exposing it to the light of day.

There is no real revelation in watching Andy’s story unfold on screen. That belonged natively to the two long form pieces Brad Melekian wrote in the weeks and months following the death for Outside magazine: Last Drop and Crashing Down.

They were strange days. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser had reported methadone found in the hotel room and the mainstream media was awash with the news that the death was being investigated as an overdose. I emailed the editor and he confirmed the paper was standing by the reporting.

Yet Nick Carroll* in the Sydney Morning Herald described rumours of drug overdose as “unavoidable but probably untrue.” In the same article Mark Occhilupo was quoted as saying he did not believe rumours that drug use was behind AI’s death and doubled down on the Dengue fever fiction.

In edition 308 of Surfing World magazine, devoted to Kelly Slater’s Tenth World Title and Andy’s legacy, veteran surf writer Sean Doherty* in a piece entitled Rainbows End which details the last days of AI and the days that followed (Doherty was on Puerto Rico at the time of Andy’s withdrawal from the Search event) fails completely to mention drug use or mental illness as contributing factors in Andy’s downfall.

Could both men, surf journalists for decades with deep friendships amongst the pro surfer ranks, really have plausible deniability about Andy’s rampant drug addiction and mood disorders?

The effect was eery, dissonant. Everyone, including the wider world, could see the Godzilla in the room, the drug use, the crazy mood swings, but in the surf world our most trusted journalists were still making soothing noises and telling us there was nothing to see here. That black was white: just a wayward mosquito bite.

What could cause this deliberate blindness? Of course a desire to protect a friend, a family member, relationships makes perfect sense. But maybe it goes deeper.

Writer JFK Miller spent years as a journalist in Communist China. He describes a process whereby the real victory of the Chinese censors is that the writer eventually self censors. The habituation to avoid offence and fall foul of the authorities makes the writer install their own “killer inside me”.

The more one gets used to turning a blind eye to protect surfers, sponsors, advertisers the more the blind spot grows until, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, it becomes completely second nature to deny reality, to self-censor the truth.

Melekian’s first article, Last Drop, fell like a bombshell onto this eerie post-truth landscape. It laid out some of the episodes shown in vivid detail in Kissed by God. The near-fatal booze and drug binge in Indo, the stints in rehab, the desire he had to come clean with the public. I figured that article had crossed the rubicon, that there would be a reckoning in surf media at least, maybe the industry: mea culpas from those who had seen and said nothing, and even denied what had become increasingly obvious. The protection racket was doomed. But I was wrong.

Nothing happened. No-one was called to account, in the industry or the media. About the best we got was a lukewarm mea culpa from Sean Doherty in Stab magazine three years ago: “One story that was covered and probably wasn’t covered that deeply at all was Andy Irons’ death,” Sean tells us. “Everything that was written around that time posed more questions than were answered. And: “I don’t think there’s any real journalism actually done in surf magazines, really. It’s just guys trying to avoid meaningful employment and increase their surf time.”

Nick Carroll in his biography of Tom Carroll published three years after Andy’s death offered an even more equivocal accounting of the role of surf journalism musing “Someone’s going to write about this [drug use] one day. I wonder if I should. I’m supposed to be a journalist after all.”

Kissed by God makes both of those positions look blackly comic in hindsight. Billabong was a billion dollar company, Andy Irons was a world-renowned athlete earning millions, triple world champ and a human torch burning up in full view of the public. There was no bigger story, no stronger calling for journalism, despite the ethical minefield involved.

Despite that a viewing of Kissed By God has softened my views. Bruce Irons states in the movie that finger pointing is easy but he and his brother were monsters when it came to drugs. They had agency. According to fellow Kauian Kai Garcia, “What are you going to tell the guy, he’s a grown man”. Taking the failures of surf journalism to the mat is one thing but taking the high ground on drug use is moral hubris of an entirely different order.

If Andy had one thing, it was what Sartre called “radical freedom”. From the age of 16 he was cut loose on the world, cashed up and dealing with screaming highs and crushing lows. According to Soren Kierkegaard the inescapable upshot of this “dizziness of freedom” is anxiety. The greater the anxiety the greater the man in his view. Kissed by God shows with full force how Andy was both attracted by the power of his surfing talent and repelled by the demands and confusions it imposed on him. The pressure to be great, the anxiety, was unrelenting. Surfing is an anxiolytic. And so are drugs and alcohol. Andy was liberal, unencumbered by any restraints, in his embrace of both.

It killed me when Bruce Irons led us barefoot down the path to it to tell the story of their childhood and brutal brotherly rivalry. It killed me late in the film when a desperately drug sick Andy was trying to get home to his pregnant wife. He had it. He was so close. So fucking close…

The film begins, and ends, in the Garden of Eden of Hanalei Bay. In a small green shack with a faded corrugated iron roof. For whatever reason, that little green shack killed me. It killed me when Bruce Irons led us barefoot down the path to it to tell the story of their childhood and brutal brotherly rivalry. It killed me late in the film when a desperately drug sick Andy was trying to get home to his pregnant wife. He had it. He was so close. So fucking close to pulling the return that Genghis Khan spoke of when he came back to the village: “ I return once more to simplicity, I return to purity”. The sweet, kind babe, the little green shack, the unborn son all there waiting for him. But he never made it and that broke my heart. We all know how the story ends.

Bruce carries the weight of the narrative load through the film and he is brilliant. Candid, thoughtful, articulate and brutally honest. The mania and the depression, the drug use, the booze, the pride in the greatness of his brother, the complicity in the downfall, the parasitic out-stretched hands who fed off the man, the sadness. It’s all there.

In his prime, and the film does a terrific job of documenting it, Andy was a magnificent beast. Prime specimen, even if some of his genius can be attributed to “pre-psychotic brilliance”. His battles with Kelly feature but this isn’t the definitive document of the intensity of that rivalry. That honour belongs to Jack McCoy’s Blue Horizon.

If the film is notable for it’s candour, it’s equally notable for it’s absences. There is Graham Stapleburg, former Billabong exec, but no Paul Naude. There are childhood friends and fellow Kauaians but no Blair Marlin, Andy’s interventionist manager. No Blake Petitt, the Billabong team handler who was on Puerto Rico at the time. Questions of professional judgement and duty of care remain unanswered. His people knew. Where were his people?

Andy had that docile blissed out opioid look about him. Was he high? We’ll never know but it’s safe to speculate now that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it’s probably off it’s tits on oxycontin. Andy spent most of the session sitting there blissed out. Occasionally an impossibly perfect wave would rear out of the glassy ocean and he would casually spear it riding deep in the tube to the channel.

Andy came back from his sabbatical in 2009 into the 2010 Pro Tour humbled and fragile. I saw him walk up the hill behind Snapper Rocks after an early round loss. Shoulders slumped, leaning into the rain, Lyndie dutifully following behind at a respectful distance. A broken man. He had no place in that circus.
But he wanted one more win. That’s all he wanted. And he got it. In Tahiti.

I shared the lineup with him on the evening before the win. It was a holy afternoon at Teahupoo. Soft golden light, glassed out. Fragrant smoke from cooking fires drifting out across the lagoon into the lineup. Andy had that docile blissed out opioid look about him. Was he high? We’ll never know but it’s safe to speculate now that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it’s probably off it’s tits on oxycontin. Andy spent most of the session sitting there blissed out. Occasionally an impossibly perfect wave would rear out of the glassy ocean and he would casually spear it riding deep in the tube to the channel.

Towards sunset I found myself sitting next to him as a set wave reared up. It was his wave. He just turned and looked at me and said “You go brah”. He had no reason to give an anonymous donkey – the Bribie analogue of what Henry Miller termed “just a Brooklyn boy” – a prime set wave at the location he was due to surf professionally the next day.

There’s nothing more beautiful in this life than the view from the interior of a Teahupoo set wave at sunset, nothing except the first sight of your newborn child. It was so weird I paddled in ecstatic and faintly troubled.

In Tahiti, even in that moment of his Final triumph the shadow of death seemed to be upon him.

Like Bruce says in the movie, when Lindy was screaming at his door, he knew. He knew straight away Andy was dead. It didn’t surprise. Him or me. In Tahiti, even in that moment of his Final triumph the shadow of death seemed to be upon him.

Kissed by God will ventilate many issues. Framed by the current opioid epidemic and crises in Mental Health, the life and death of Andy Irons will serve to make it possible to “come out”….to say , ‘Yeah I’m fucked up, I got a problem” and not be seen as a pariah or a liability. If you have seen someone close by struggle with bi-polar or deal with unruly thoughts and unrelenting moods yourself that is a liberation. A liberation from the sickly and subterranean lying and hiding the truth. Redundant chumps who have no fucking idea what it is like to wish the ghosts in your head would go to sleep will continue to call for an endless war on drugs. A war against millions of years of evolution. A war against Humanity, a war against Life itself.

The other great question is legacy. BeachGrit principal Derek Rielly said in a 2015 interview that he wasn’t sure Andy had left a legacy, that “ Everything moves forward at such a rate that no one’s looking in the rear view mirror anymore”.

I hold a different view. Paradoxically, by pulling back the curtain on the fatal flaws that made Andy fly too close to the sun, Kissed by God will only strengthen the hold his tragic life and surfing greatness has on surfing’s collective consciousness. His mythical status will strengthen over time, especially as Pro Surfing tightens it’s embrace of the mainstream, making the chances of another Andy increasingly remote. For good and ill. I conclude: Go see the fucking movie, it’s epic.

*I only choose Nick Carroll and Shaun Doherty as representatives of the surf media response, not to grind an axe: au contraire, but because I believe they have easiest right of reply and I can be accountable to them, face to face. I detest cowards but I will run like a squealing pig from Dustin Barca, Kai Garcia, Chava Greenlee or any other member of the WolfPak, no shit.


Live from Surf Ranch: “This ain’t a boat trip!”

Part 1 of today's historic Founders' Cup!

(Ed. Note: Of all the various medias sending witnesses to Surf Ranch I can authoritatively say we have the best. Jen See will be our eyes and our ears today and we are blessed.)

It’s 4 a.m. We’re in a bus. I try to pretend it’s a boat trip, but it’s not really working. There’s no splishy splashy water sounds, no scent of salt in the air. We’re pointed away from the coast. Landlocked, and destined to be more so.

It’s dark. The lighted signs of Southern California strip malls slide by on repeat. McDonalds. Starbucks. Chevron. Another McDonalds. Maybe the bus is just taking us to the boat. But no, not this time. There’s no boats involved. Just a bus.

In prehistoric time, California’s Central Valley was a sea floor, but not lately. A bunch of geology happened and it became a flat expanse of grasslands. More recently, industrial agriculture, which is neither especially aesthetic nor easy on the nose, took it over. John Muir wrote ecstatically — I think the dude used more exclamation marks than Chas — about the valley’s wildflowers and boundless life. On the slopes of the hills above Gorman, where poppies tint the terrain orange, you can still see a hint of what got Muir so excited.

A week ago I was doing 80 on the 99. I’d been on my way to do an interview at Surf Ranch when the whole thing got monkey wrenched. The Monkey Wrench is such a constant presence in media work that I’m always amazed when anything goes the way it’s planned. The 99 is one of two straight highway ribbons that unwind the length of the valley, which is tilted just slightly. The northern end is a few inches higher than the south. Drive up the map, drive up the terrain.

I’d pulled off the freeway in Tipton, a small town somewhere south of Visalia. An old man sat in the gas station, waiting. If you have a banjo handy, you might give it a little strum about now. Meat sizzled on an expanse of barbecue grills out front. There was another gas station across the street and a Denny’s after that. A loudspeaker called a school girl to the office somewhere nearby. The persistent wind riffled the trees’ leaves. Except for the highway, Tipton’s small grid of streets sat silent.

My phone lit up to tell me to turn around. I wasn’t going to the Surf Ranch this week. I didn’t need to be told twice. I pinned it south. Somewhere past Bakersfield I stopped at a gas station. I bought a bag of peanut M&M’s and poured it into my mouth. I chased it with the remains of a coffee of unspecified vintage. It wasn’t good.

By then, I was delirious from the truck fumes. I began to think this was all some kind of cruel joke that Kelly has decided to play on us all. Wha’d I ever do to you, man? You came to my town, you surfed our waves, I never dropped in on you. I didn’t snake you at the grocery store check-out line or eat out of your salad bowl. Maybe it was something I said. But really, I’m sure I never did anything to deserve this turn. I’m stuck in the Central Valley, miles from any ocean. Something has gone terribly wrong.

Back over the Grapevine where the dumbasses swerve in and out of the truck lane. I curse them vigorously. Then, the hard right turn across the Santa Clara river valley to Ventura. Back to the coast, I breathe more deeply. I made it home in time to surf with dolphins. No regrets.

Now I’m trying again with the whole Surf Ranch thing. That’s the point of this whole 4 a.m. bus trip. It’s Founders Cup weekend. I still don’t quite understand how this thing is supposed to work, but I figure I’ve got three hours in a bus to figure it out. There’s something with teams and rounds. Points, maybe. Someone will win, that seems certain.

And there’s a train that pulls a sled through the water to make a wave every four minutes. The Promethean analogy feels so obvious that it’s all but impossible to ignore. It’s like that footstool in the middle of the room that you keep tripping over, but can’t be bothered to move. It’s just right there.

The sun rises over Gorman. We drink truck stop coffee. I forgot to bring a banjo.