Matt Warshaw: “The internet has numbed me to a point where I’d have to smash my iPhone and cut my chest to feel anything about a tube ride.”

Ten-second tubes don't mean a dang thing anymore says bespectacled, begrimed, bow-legged surf historian…

Yesterday, I had an instructive conversation with the surf historian Matt Warshaw. It is a topic he feels very strongly about – that the tube ride, thanks to POV cameras and Kelly’s pool, now has as much value as the Venezuelan Bolivar. 

“I can do my little historian’s dance about how the tube—getting inside, grabbing the view with a camera—was once the Holy Grail,” said Warshaw. “Now a 10-second tube is a throwaway score.”

BeachGrit: It’s true, the tube ride really is a fading star. The Surf Ranch Pro banged the final nail into its coffin. Here was the tube ride as test-pattern. What did you see? What did you feel? 

Warshaw: The Surf Ranch Pro came down to airs. We saw that coming way before the contest started. So it ended up like long-program figure skating, where you know that all the gliding stuff in-between moves kind of counts, but really we’re just waiting to see if she nails the quad toe-loop. Except at Surf Ranch the in-between stuff was the tube. That hurt. I think in one of our earlier chats I said something about how a 10-second tube would be a throwaway at Kelly’s wave and that’s what happened. Maybe you have to be older to feel sad about that.

Skeleton Bay delivers a man (where are the gals?) a twenty-second tube and no one gives a shit. Tell me why that has devalued the tube ride as compared to Kirra, which was once a mirror version? You blaming the dang internet?

The internet has numbed me to a point where I’d have to smash my iPhone and cut my chest to feel anything. But with Skeleton Bay I think it’s more about the POV camera. Tube media—I want to sip it, like bourbon. POV cams turned the tube into a keg-stand.

Here’s where we’re going to differ about something. POV cameras. I’m going to suggest that they’ve kept the tube perspective alive, as well as, finally, giving not-so-great surfers, and non-surfers, a show they’d never otherwise see. And in that respect, they’re given tubes a prestige that would’ve faded long ago. Remember that Anthony Walsh shot of Laird Hamilton at Teahupoo (click here)? Tell me that don’t make your (considerable) neck hair stand up on end. 

No, my neck hairs stayed flaccid. Those stuntman surf photos, taken from a place on a wave I’d never myself get to — those images don’t get up inside me. Anything wide-angle, stuntman or not, I can take or leave. Or just leave. But this Sean Davey shot of Laird, for me, never gets old.

POV was the Grail for the longest time, Greenough and his cameras inside the tube were the stuff of legend. That these devices are now affordable and can now be affixed to helmet, mouth, pole etc, is something to celebrate, I’d suggest. Tell me the name of the Greenough movie (Innermost Limits?) and how surfers at the time reacted to seeing a tube from the inside out? 

The first Greenough inside-looking-out piece was “Coming of the Dawn” and it was the closing segment for Innermost Limits of Pure Fun. “Echoes” came next. That was for a movie called Crystal Voyager. “Echoes” was much better, cleaner, more mesmerizing, than “Dawn.” Greenough was just way WAY ahead of his time, wrangling that view and dragging it out for the world to see. George and Pink Floyd at some point got stoned together and the band gave George a track to use for “Echoes,” and George in turn let Floyd screen the movie during their concerts. The first surfer-rock band collab!

What excites me most, still, even though I’m not much in the game anymore, are tubes that I myself want to ride. Which means wedgy little rights. Which is why the Waco tank got my neck hairs all hard and sprung up!

Let’s be frank. There’s tubes and then there’s barrels. What excites you? Ten-foot Cloudbreak? Big Pipe? Or have you lost any joy from seeing a folding lip? 

What excites me most, still, even though I’m not much in the game anymore, are tubes that I myself want to ride. Which means wedgy little rights. Which is why the Waco tank got my neck hairs all hard and sprung up!

And while we’re being frank, was there too much cosmic bullshit surrounding tubes anyway? Debate about whether you could hear anything inside, manoeuvres in the tube, time slowing down etc, it was all smoke and mirrors, yes? 

One hundred percent bullshit, all of it. But that doesn’t take anything away from how full-on addicted we all were, maybe still are, to riding inside the tube. I can’t explain it. And I’ve never heard anybody else explain it to a degree that sounds reasonable. But the final 20 or so years of my surfing life I didn’t really want to do much else except ride inside the tube. Everything else was fun, but kind of just killing time until the sandbars got good again and the wind switched offshore and swell went to four at 12.

I liked Mark Richards quote somewhere where he said he’d rather hit the lip than stall and get tubed. You remember? 

Mark Richards never lived down the Shaun Tomson episode at OTW. Of course he’d say that.

When was the last time you got tubed? Did you feel… anything? 

A year ago, at the Surf Ranch! What if I die and that’s the last one I ever get? All the shit I’ve talked about Kelly’s wave, how funny would that be?