Warshaw: “You’ve thrown away the part that makes surfing the most compelling!”

The Washington Post weighs in on the Surf Ranch Pro!

You know The Washington Post as the publication that felled Richard M. Nixon and is trying to do the same to Donald H. Trump or whatever his middle name is. It is historic, proud, incredibly important with more awards than any other publication on earth.

So of course the editorial staff would want Matt Warshaw to weigh in on the meaning of the Surf Ranch Pro.

Of course.

Who would you call?

I called Matt the very second the plow whirred to life because who would I call?

Matt Warshaw is the answer in case you can’t tell that I’m vodka drunk at 1:24 pm and not even at Surf Ranch yet (tomorrow) where I won’t be drunk at all thanks to Michelob Ultra GOLD brewed with Organic Grains because I don’t think it has alcohol but if it does not a lot.

So anyhow, politicians and etc. the United States over will read Warshaw’s account of the Surf Ranch Pro and that will be gospel for them. What was his account?

LEMOORE, Calif. — The wave shouldn’t be here, surrounded by boundless fields of nuts, vegetables and cotton. It’s an exotic crest of water six feet high, one that would be at home in Bali or the east coast of Australia. But not here, well over 100 miles from the Pacific Ocean.

The idea of belonging, of context, has always been central to those who ride the best waves. Surfing was born centuries ago in the South Pacific and Hawaiian islands, where it is called he’e nalu, then rebranded starting in the early 1900s in California. From the Golden State it spread to the rest of the world, surfers always beholden to the finicky variables of their passion — tide and wind, swell and direction — and enamored of its offbeat culture. For some, it remains less a sport than a lifestyle.

So to find a wave like the one that surfaces in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley, which is to say a nearly perfect curl, is bizarre. And very tantalizing.

This is what has drawn 54 of the planet’s best surfers, who are competing in a vast concrete pool that is intended to introduce the sport to a new audience ahead of its Olympic debut in 2020. Only once before has an international event been held nowhere near open water — the first contest, several decades ago, was a disaster — and the $30 million artificial-wave complex constructed in the small farming town of Lemoore has elicited awe within the surfing community.

“It’s a beautiful wave to surf, it’s surreal,” said a beaming Courtney Conlogue, who last year was ranked fourth in the world. “I love what it’s going to bring to the sport.”

Yet Surf Ranch has also divided the community. Surfing historian Matt Warshaw sees wave pools as direct assaults on the very nature of the sport, from the unpredictability of its ocean setting and the nuanced forces that must be understood to the experience and skills accumulated over a lifetime.

“Now it’s more like a skatepark. You’ve thrown away the part that makes surfing the most compelling,” said Warshaw, whose “Encyclopedia of Surfing” and “History of Surfing” are considered definitive texts. “Something really fundamental is changing.”

It goes on and on and on so you can read the rest here. Democracy dies in darkness, bitches.