Raise your glass to the full rubber clad, longer surfboard riding, backward fin utilizing, leash getting pulled, cop calling, World Surf League loving adult learner nearest you right now!
And here we are, New Year’s Eve in Australia almost New Year’s Eve in America, the most exciting nights of the entire year besides Surfer magazine’s Surfer Poll and the World Surf League’s Opening Night Ball (or whatever it’s called).
BeachGrit’s Man* of the Year.
Who could it be besides the adult learner? Men* who picked up surfboards in their late twenties or late thirties and decided then and there, “Surfing is life, the rest is just details!” and/or “Old Men* Rule!”
Surfing is being remade in his* image or at least professional surfing. The World Surf League is run by adult learners dead-set on creating a new, vibrant community of other adult learners. It’s the growth market with millions and billions of promised eyeballs/participants from adult pre-learner and ex-WSL Dear General Secretary Paul Speaker.
A fabulous re-imagining?
A once-in-a-lifetime rebirth?
The adult learner’s go to twin sources for content (Stab x The Inertia) certainly think so and a hot rumor on their union coming soon!
In the meantime, surfing has been a cloistered, impossible to navigate little world. I have spent my entire life trying to negotiate it as an Oregonian youth and am now trying to negotiate it as an adult re-learner.
Oh sure the grumpy local is our mission. To shrink surfing to the smallest possible market until it is literally just me, Derek Rielly and you in the lineup but that is a future-less model.
So raise your glass to the full rubber clad, longer surfboard riding, backward fin utilizing, leash getting pulled, cop calling, World Surf League loving adult learner nearest you right now.
You, adult learner, are BeachGrit’s Man* of the Year!
*All masculine nouns and pronouns are gender neutral.