Half-a-million fans excepted at world's biggest surf contest!
Today is the official opening day of the US Open of Surfing in Huntington Beach, CA, or it might have been yesterday. I don’t exactly know since I’m still in Copenhagen, up early with the summer sun, eating avocado on rye bread with rhubarb, tomato, mint, olive salad in the side, swimming everywhere.
Copenhagen is a dream and Søren Kierkegaard was smart to be born here and not Huntington Beach where the dirty feet of sex-crazed inland empirians kick up so much dust during the US Open of Surfing that lung cancer rates sky rocket.
I have very mixed feelings about the US Open of Surfing and I tried to work through them in the book Cocaine + Surfing.
I watch a dirty perverted teenaged boy with the words “Sexx Simbol” scrawled across his chest try and slap the ass of dirty perverted teenaged girl with the words “Slap dat” scrawled on her lower back. Giggling from both parties ensues as he swings and misses and almost runs into a three-hundred-pound man riding a motorized chair with off-road tires featuring many Vans and Volcom stickers.
Here is my ode:
And if Agenda, in Long Beach, is a tri-colored mural of the five-year surf apocalypse then the U.S. Open of Surfing is its taste. The decayed flavor of good times turned very bad. A Mad Max-esque dystopian mess where God has officially turned his back and allows for mankind to swallow spoonful after spoonful of putrid filth.
I watch a dirty perverted teenaged boy with the words “Sexx Simbol” scrawled across his chest try and slap the ass of dirty perverted teenaged girl with the words “Slap dat” scrawled on her lower back. Giggling from both parties ensues as he swings and misses and almost runs into a three-hundred-pound man riding a motorized chair with off-road tires featuring many Vans and Volcom stickers.
A Monster Girl holding a T-shirt cannon watches too with a blank expression. I wonder if she ever fantasizes about shooting people in the face. I wonder if she could please just shoot me in the face. It would be a fitting end and my grave stone could read: “He died how he lived—like an asshole.”
Maybe I would even get a paddle out. Have you seen one of those? Where surfers paddle out on their boards together when someone dies and sit in a circle and splash water in the air and sometimes wear floral leis?
Ugh.
The U.S. Open of Surfing is like an unfortunate paddle out on land for an elderly and very bad horrible performance longboarder who died of a coronary or something. Much to everyone in the surf industry’s chagrin it is the biggest event of the year, and by far. Thousands upon thousands upon hundreds of thousands of perverts drain into Huntington Beach for one week near the end of July to make a mockery of decency and of my career. There are art exhibits, some skateboarding (maybe), some BMX (I think), free industry garbage like Hurley Frisbees and Mayhem temporary belly tattoos, underage drinking and a World Surf League qualifying tour event in the worst waves imaginable.
There used to be live music, but it got cancelled after the 2013 U.S. Open of Surfing turned into a riot.
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What a pathetic “freak show” showcasing the devolution and immoral depravity common in todays contemporary society masked under the pretense of the popular anti-establishement anti-corporate post idealism.
And if that dont get me banned nothing will
Further to my point if it was not for these great events most if not all the surf journos would be out of a job no event no advertising no ads no cash no cash no journos , so the long bow is all you smart arse surf journos actually feed from the trough that is pro surfing , so stop trying to be so fucking cool and just admit it deep down you are pro surf bitches
OK fuck it.
Here is a bit of actual Truth for you Linda.
In 2001 I wrote a piece that was pretty critical of the tour for bailing on the European tour in the face of scary 9/11. My thought was that professional surfers were by rote representative of surfers everywhere, and being frightened off by a bunch of Muslim psychopaths was not a surfer stance.
I was immediately assaulted verbally in private by a handful of professional surfers. One in particular, not an American, who said words to me to the effect that You only get to do what you do because of us, so you know, shut up.
I will tell you now what I told those people then. Which is: I can do whatever the fuck I want. Can work anywhere I like. Indeed, I could make a fuckload more money writing about other stuff if I chose, because there is no shortage of enquiries, trust me. But I choose to write about surfing because I am as into surfing as any of you, maybe more than some given the evidence to hand. I am part of a lineage of writers who bothered to write about surfing out of their passion, not out of the farcical pretence of financial reward. YOU are the ones who are being paid to surf. But you are the ones who are not surfing. I however am still writing, and will continue to do so long as I am interested in it.
This is a short way of saying wake the fuck up to yourselves, all you dingbat fucking idiots who think people like me are slaves to some goddam surf industry. I could make way the hell more money writing about other stuff, but I love to surf. Thus I was writing about surfing before any of that shit existed, and I’ll keep writing about it after it’s dead and fucking buried. Unless I get bored.
Ps I am pretty sure the same is true of Derek and Chas. Which is why I love them.
Bit harsh mate , the US of A open is the peak the surfing experience as envisaged by Ian Cairns PT and all those pioneering folks that created what is the paid to go surfing career.i think its just marvelous.
You mean you have to pay to surf. The few top tools have there backers paying there way.
Try to park, live or travel to a break today…..$$$
Accepted I think. I’ll be in Copenhagen in two weeks so hopefully they’ll have restocked the Carlsberg by then.
I don’t know about anyone else but this article comments and all is well toxic!
Soceity has gone insane!
Will surfing survive? With the US Open, WSL and Oak Tree’s QuikBong.
🙄
Oh I left out Kelly’s swimming pool.
aherrmm
Chas – title byline
*expected
Including some not so temporary swastika and Aryan nation tattoos that seem to creep in from Spanish sounding mountains by the sea.
Every year I can tell when the US Open starts because I can honestly see the floating filth cloud in the air from my house 5 or 10 miles south.
The US Open sounds like being in a Walmart in Myrtle Beach after 10pm, my kind of happening!
Having spent plenty of time in both the aforementioned venues, I can assure you that the US Open is much, much worse.
Perhaps someone could start a ‘People of Huntington Beach’ blog.
Huntington Beach is best left to the tribal tat, fake boobs, bulldog owning crowd that descended on it in the nineties. Katin Pro-Am may you rest in peace.
Chas ,happy to see your enjoying life in a northern town but before sending one an all to Copenhagen please let them know that Northern Europe is suffering from drought and basking under the warmest summer since 76 . Living one hour south of the Danish Border, I can honestly say it is a miserable wet cold place to be from November to May with the sun setting at 3:30 pm if it ever sees the light of day through the blankets of cloud , mist , fog and snow .ps If Kierkegaard was born in Huntington ,he could have profited from USA surfing media and industry,won the US Open then surfed for Denmark in the Olympics ?Life is absurd ?
Having just returned from a similar latitude on the western side of DE, I really miss those long soft summer evenings. By mid March I was in a dark place, Karneval is over, and june just so far away.
Having spent more time that I care to in Sweden the last ten years I find it very difficult to sleep during the summer. While the winters depress the shit out of me at least I can sleep.
I used to joke that if spent a week in Gothenburg during the winter I’d see the sun once on Monday at 35,000 feet and then once on Friday at 35,000. The rest of the time it was cold, wet, dark and miserable.
I can’t wait to reveal my permanent Mayhem belly tattoo on the ski this year.
you could be a VIP if you have $1499 , or only $ 199 per day !
The US Open of Surfing! Where BF Goodrich meets BFE Filthyperv!
Cuntington Beach did you say?
Sorry. Couldn’t quite make out what you said.
Ah but the real positive about the US open is we the people have the envied position of having the choice not to go to there!