Long way to a ham sandwich but maybe food for
thought!
Dear WSL Elite,
If I were surfing’s equivalent of a social justice warrior I
would certainly demand a recount on the dimpled/hanging chad of the
Italo/Kolohe final at Snapper. I would demand that your judges
reconvene and rewind the tape and recount every drop of water
displaced to right the injustice of scoring because my guy didn’t
win. I would call you racist against Californians and hold my
breath and start some half-ass hashtag that only covers one side of
this issue in an attempt to drum up a narrative. Something like
#OhBrother or #NotMySnapperChamp. Seeing how well that has gone for
the far right and the far left in politics, I am here to take a
kinder and more gentle approach to push for change.
What Snapper highlighted was something we already knew about
your judging, it is objective. Objectivity is a strange beast as it
cannot be distilled down into quantifiable inputs backed by
non-biased data. It can be distilled into a number based on rules
and criteria, but “that’s like your opinion, man” [said in my best
Tommy Chong voice]. I don’t often have a problem with this. It
works in the Olympics. It works in the X-Games. That being said,
the World Tour is a completely different beast.
Unlike the Olympics, the World Tour is a string of events and
the objectivity in judging has its obvious flaws when a judge is
asked to pretend that every wave they are seeing is a single
instance of performance. You are asking judges to continually
forget performance in previous events and ignore title
implications. You are asking judges to do what they can not- to
turn off being human, shut down their memory, avoid creating a
narrative, and avoid picking a team to root for.
Also, from what I am to understand, the Judges do not have any
term limits and there are no conditions on how long they can remain
in their role. You have essentially appointed an unelected
surfocracy whereby we, as fans, are expected to never question the
rulings of any of your panel and take their objectivity at face
value. As we have seen throughout the annals of time, any
non-elected body with an indefinite or permanent residency in a
position of power often undermines the trust of the people.
***Cough Big Banking*** Cough CEOS*** Cough SCOTUS*** Almost every
time someone tells you to trust them blindly, they are not worthy
of trust and you, WSL, are rapidly approaching that inflection
point. Your judging panel presents the same problem. Over time,
your judges may be emboldened with power and may feel as if any
questioning of their absolute power of determination of the World
Title victor as a usurping of their divine gift of wave
scoring.
I myself have found myself questioning calls over the years and
know others have as well. I have seen online demands for a
restructuring of the scoring, but will not push for change as
radical as I feel that would be the functional equivalent of
surfing’s Green New Deal- well-intentioned but ruinous to most of
the things we hold dear. Instead, I would like to propose six-year
“term limits” on CT judges (and Supreme Court Justices if anybody
in the Judicial Branch of the US Federal government is reading).
Moreover, I would like to propose that you create a bigger pool of
Judges (you too SCOTUS) that are assigned, at random, to CT and QS
events so each event is judged by a panel of divergent viewpoints
and opinions.
Another further recommendation we the surfers would like to make
is to remove the judges from the beach entirely and send them
videos of the scoring waves to a clandestine war-room where they
have to score in a vacuum, away from the energy and excitement of a
crowd that can sway a decision. To pretend that Judges aren’t human
and incapable of being swayed by an uproar of excitement from the
beach is not only misguided, but it is also unfair to the judges
who are being asked to make a fair and objective scoring evaluation
in an environment filled with cheers, jeers, cowbells, and
applause.
To your credit, this style of judging worked great for many
years. Those around my age will remember getting snippets of
contests from ABC World Wide of Sports or getting results weeks
later in a magazine. We weren’t with you there. We didn’t have a
live feed. We weren’t privy to live last-minute heroics or a
swinging insider that could upend a likely heat winners victory. We
had no reason to question you. But times have changed, and now,
what was once a news feed is now a jetstream of bullshit and
negativity that pushes to us a new negative headline every seven
minutes. We have fun depression inducers in our pocket with apps
where we can hide behind the anonymity of bravado and call each
other “cucks” and “morons” without ever having to face the
likelihood of getting socked in the mouth. That being said, you
gave us these contests to watch live, and now that we have the full
picture and can rewatch and dissect- you’re under the microscope
and we have opinions about your opinions. We share our opinions on
social media. The surfing community is not the shaggy hair stoners
in a parking lot at the beach anymore; it is global, it is
interconnected and online. As a result of all of the above, we talk
and we’re all talking about you.
Any effort you make to increase the subjectivity and decrease
the objectivity of your judging would be greatly appreciated, but I
know you probably won’t listen. Also, I really understand how
ironic it is that I am writing a letter to the WSL to ask them to
change something that literally has no bearing on my day-to-day
life and is frankly unimportant in the grand scheme of things but
hey, I am a surfer who essentially blows off obligations to play in
the ocean on a glorified pool toy, so from where I am sitting, this
is pretty much par for the course.
What do you have to lose though? If you do it, you get to
essentially tell a bunch of grumpy locals to go pound sand for
complaining. If you don’t, well, we’re just going to sit here and
whine, because as I eluded to before, surfers are pretty much
children- especially those of us who watch contests.
Long way to a ham sandwich but maybe food for thought.
Respectfully yours,
THE ANIMAL CHIN
