Come to the end of the road!

It was Sunday morning in America, yesterday, and the last hours of summer with nothing to do but luxuriate. It was a gorgeous day in southern California, sun shining and hot, some small but fun waves on tap. No major sporting events on television as we’re still a week away from the start of college football, two weeks away from the National Football League, but there was day 2 of the Tahiti Pro Teahupoo presented by Hurley on the computer and I imagined it would do very well, airing in the wheelhouse of typical American sport consumption with no competition elsewhere.

I flipped it on and watched for a few moments, a smattering of minutes, but couldn’t really get engaged. The surf looked fine, interesting enough, and there were some fine enough storylines but… my mind wandered and then I received a revelation.

Is professional surf watching only tolerable when sitting under fluorescent lighting in a cubicle, on an interminably long road trip, when there are pressing chores to do but unpleasant chores like putting fitted sheets onto beds etc? Or must there be some other event happening, another televised game or some such, to have on concurrently with professional surfing running in the background?

The interactions on our patented “comment live” feed were slim and I had the distinct feeling that no one was really watching anywhere because, again, it was a glorious day in southern California and probably the rest of the United States from the looks of it.

Well, I don’t know that the contest will run today but I am out early and, as you know by now, would rather wear the shame of posting our Tahiti Pro Teahupoo presented by Hurley without it running rather than wear the shame of not posting it and it running.

Also, today is a work day. Enjoy the slightly better alternative to your job.

Why the late, great, wild, bad and mad Hawaiian surfer Marvin Foster is a Tarantino movie waiting to happen…

(Editor’s note: If you’re a subscriber to Matt Warshaw’s Encyclopedia of Surfing, which costs three dollars a month with a twenty percent discount if you take it over a year, your Sundays will be gifted with a long email from Warshaw himself. Today’s piece is about the Hawaiian surfer Marvin Foster, who dazzled at Pipe in the eighties and nineties, ran various criminal rackets, competed in the 1995 Eddie while on the run from the cops and who hanged himself in 2010, aged 49. A man of complexity and worth investigating.)

I posted this clip of Marvin Foster a few days back said something about how Foster is a “Quentin Tarantino movie waiting to happen.”

Marvin Foster from ENCYCLOPEDIA of SURFING on Vimeo.

Have you seen Tarantino’s latest, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood? If so, are you feeling maybe a little pulled in two directions?

I agree with Richard Brody that Once Upon a Time has its macho head stuffed way up its own ass. Yet I melted for the performances, the sets, the music, and especially the comedy. When I think of Marvin Foster by way of Tarantino, however, it’s more in the style of Django Unchained or Inglorious Basterds, and what I mean by that is the violence and assorted other bad behaviors committed by our anti-hero needs that Django-like connection to a broader — nay, overwhelming — injustice.

For the moment let’s just say that Marvin had a good side, a big heart, was friendly at times to people he didn’t know and talked openly and often about his love for family — but he also crossed a lot of lines, hurt a lot of people, and at the very least was a heavy and often threatening surf world presence.

Hold that thought.

It would be somewhere between hard and impossible to catalog all the bad choices Marvin Foster made in his relatively short life. You’ll find a few specifics near the end of this post, and Foster himself weighs in here. For the moment let’s just say that Marvin had a good side, a big heart, was friendly at times to people he didn’t know and talked openly and often about his love for family — but he also crossed a lot of lines, hurt a lot of people, and at the very least was a heavy and often threatening surf world presence.

(Again, I don’t have at hand or want to seek out the particulars of Foster’s bad actions, and will leave off by saying just that Kai “Borg” Garcia, possibly the heaviest of the surf-world heavies, called Foster “one of the toughest men to ever wander the North Shore.”)

So for Tarantino, or the person watching a Tarantino film, the question is: How far are you willing to go in terms of allowing history to mitigate a person’s crimes, flaws, and moral failings? Or more to the point: How damaging was it for Marvin to grow up poor and dark-skinned in Hawaii during the 1960s and ’70s?

Since we’re being cinematic and historical, picture this.

It is 1909 on the Waikiki beachfront. Before us is a hot young gun with seven vowels and two apostrophes in his last name, the Marvin Foster of the new century, eating lunch after a surf and minding his business when somebody walks up and drops this magazine article in his lap.

He reads to the bottom of the page. “The white man and boy are doing much in Hawaii to develop the art of surf-riding . . . and at the recent surfing carnivals in honor of the visits of the American battleship fleet, practically every prize offered for those most expert in Hawaiian water sports were won by white boys and girls, who have only recently mastered the art that was for so long believed to be possible of acquirement only by the native-born dark-skinned Hawaiian.”

Our boy shakes his head, hands the magazine back, tosses his board into the banyan tree for safekeeping, heads home to find out a Mainland newcomer just paid down his uncle’s delinquent property tax bill and legally snatched up the deed to his family’s one acre-plot.

Have we mitigated yet? Getting closer?

“Why do I feel like stomping the haole? Well, look at my side of things. Suppose I came over to your house and said you weren’t dressing right, you weren’t living right, and this and that. You’d get mad and sock me too. It’s a lot deeper, I guess, but that’s the way we feel.” Unnamed Hawaiian.

One more example, from a 1969 issue of SURFER, and this is one that really stuck with me as a kid, I think because the violence was delivered in such a calm voice. “Haole Go Home” was written by an unnamed Hawaiian.

Here’s the condensed version:

Why do I feel like stomping the haole? Well, look at my side of things. Suppose I came over to your house and said you weren’t dressing right, you weren’t living right, and this and that. You’d get mad and sock me too. It’s a lot deeper, I guess, but that’s the way we feel. Captain Cook and the missionaries that followed taught us that we were sinners. They brought the word of God, but I don’t think God had this in mind. This rape of Hawaii! It makes my blood boil when I see all the hotels and stores, all the ships in our harbors, servicemen on our streets and tourists jamming up everything. Till a few years ago, we could still get away from all of this by going surfing. Now that’s even taken over by the haole. So once in a while when I get a few good blasts of beer going, I get to thinking of all of these things, and some haole acts up; well, I just bust him one good one, and I feel a little better.

In terms of letting Marvin off the hook, no, I still don’t think we’re in Django territory. But let’s acknowledge that he was not acting in a void, and that to fully understand how and why Marvin got bent you’ll have to put on a 12-bolt bronze helmet and say goodbye to the sun cause the dive is going to be deep, long, and dark.

Meanwhile, through all that, possibly because of all that, Foster surfed like a big cat running down a gazelle while listening to Metallica.

Let's drink our teas and coffees together.

It’s Sunday morning in America and the perfect day for professional surfing. The NFL hasn’t quite begun yet but is just around the corner and, even if you are not a professional football fan, you couldn’t help but catch yesterday’s news that Indianapolis Colts quarterback Andrew Luck retired near his prime, leaving a potential half a billion dollars on the table.

Half a billion dollars.

Can you imagine that? I think it is a lot of money and if I had half a billion dollars the first thing I’d buy, as previously stated, is a 1974 Porsche 914. The second thing I’d buy is Teahupoo and while we’re talking about buying places, I think President Donald Trump should float a purchase of Tahiti to President Emmanuel Macron. I think President Macron would be in a listening mood. Then Tahiti and Hawaii could be formed into the same state with a “French” speaking part and an “English” speaking part.

It would be like warm Canada and who doesn’t like Canada?

A few questions, before we chat live.

What wouldn’t you do for half a billion dollars?

Do you think Kelly Slater internally mocks anyone who retires?

Is Gabriel Medina going to win this event?

Longtom is feeling Kelly + Italo and you should read his summary here, if you haven’t already.

People will get sent home from warm Canada today.

That’s fun, no?

Watch here!

Kelly Slater, Italo Ferreira dominate opening day at crummy three-foot Teahupoo…

It really does feel a lifetime ago since J-Bay wrapped but here we are six weeks later for day one of the Tahiti Pro, held in three-foot gurgle that would nonetheless make many rec surfers brown their undergarments.

A big day, very entertaining I thought, mostly for the calls in the booth and the exposition of the talking points as the WSL tries to retro-fit a post-modern greenwash onto one of the most carbon hungry pursuits on Earth.

First, did you notice Billabong had slipped out the backdoor and Hurley had shyly and slyly slipped in as “presenting” sponsor, presumably at a good discount on the naming rights?

Me, neither.

But it happened last year, must have been when the press release kid was on holidays. Smart pick up from Hurley. They get the kudos without carrying the can.

It was obvious from the get go we were going “all in” with the wozzle on the Glowing, glowing gone campaign. Obvs a part of Elo’s big push into the content and branding space.

Have you caught up with the Mic’ed Up and Transformed series of clips?

How should we judge the output?

Patchy? Glossy but a tad insipid? A little too much Oprah?

To be very honest, I have not been able to watch the latest Sounds Waves with Courtney Conlogue because I like watching her surf and don’t want my pleasure interrupted by intrusive thoughts.

Like I now have after watching Connor Coffin’s Sound Waves episode.

Soli Bailey got off to a flying start in heat one, threading a couple of very nice translucent blue tubes. The day-glo jerseys which, according to a refreshed Joe Turpel represented a “cry for help” from our coralline brethren and sistren, looked very snazzy tucked in behind the curtain.

Medina showed an appropriate level of desperation in hyena-ing his way around the line-up. Eventually, he found two scrappy rides and consigned a hapless Crisanto to the losers’ round.

It was very easy to get lost behind collapsing chandeliers, as happened to Jordan Smith. My feed kept dropping out which meant a constant confrontation with an unfortunate and kooky error that had Elo written all over it.

On the live page a shot of Gabe Medina grabbing rail at the Box had been flipped so he presented as a natural footer grabbing rail on a left.

Did you see? It took until heat eight before the high castle at Santa Monica was able to replace the image with an actual shot of Gabe at Teahupoo.

Heat four was the highlight of the day. Kieren Perrow was in the booth. By my calculations speaking almost non-stop for 19 minutes while waves refused to break.

At one point, the action seemed so slow he entertained the idea of calling it off. It’s also a known known that Kelly was pressuring him to swivel the sign to stop on the day. Kieren did not flinch and Italo found a flurry of good waves to take out the heat.

The only wave worth catching up on if you missed: an under-the-lip-drop-to-deep-tube and searing cutback for a high seven . The colours: bleached blond, pink, yellow, translucent blue. To die for. We are all confident enough in our masculinity to admit that, surely?

Joan Duru, thirty years of age and struggling outside the cut-off mark (again) won his heat and is my pick for the working class roughie to come through and win.

He can win in small and ugly and he will send it when it’s heavy, brah.

Andino in the next heat bested Yago Dora in a paddle battle that was an inverse of the humiliation he suffered at the hands of Medina in 2014, when Medina slowly led him up the reef like a docile cow, then left him stranded. Brothers’s different now.

Not only does he wear the yellow jersey, the first Californian since Arnold Schwarzenegger to attain world domination, he has also superseded Jordy Smith in terms of giving the best post-heat pressers. He called his current tenure as world Number One in the yellow, “a moment in time” before admitting to nerves when he put it on.

“This is proper,” he thought.

He then called himself “the underdog” in the world-title contenders. This put Ross Williams into a paroxysm of joy, declaring that Kolohe was “marching forwards as a warrior.”

Stirring stuff and very true and beautiful.

Kelly was beautiful too, with his brown, glowing bald head protruding out of the day-glo jersey. There was something vaguely pornographic about it, in the most tasteful sense.

Kelly looked jet-lagged and out of sorts, which he freely admitted later, after arriving in Tahiti overnight. He got his pants pulled down and his bottom spanked in a paddle battle with Fred Morais, inspiring a bit of revisionist history making from the champ later in the booth when he claimed he could “keep up with anyone”.

I was very glad to see justice restored. Having Kelly eliminated in scrappy baby food when proper Chopes beckons by competitors who aren’t fit to scrape the dog caca off his thongs would be a very sad outcome.

No matter.

It came down to two or three glorious minutes when he dominated the closing third of the heat with two sizzling rides and went from last to first. I was very glad to see justice restored. Having Kelly eliminated in scrappy baby food when proper Chopes beckons by competitors who aren’t fit to scrape the dog caca off his thongs would be a very sad outcome.

It was tough to hear the commentators in the booth blagging about coral reefs. As the holder of a (useless) degree in Marine Biology, hearing Kaipo mangle the biology was like a series of sharp blows to the nuts.

Zooaxanthellae are single-celled dinoflagellates, not algae, Kaipo. I’m not about to tell you how Madonna likes her coffee. Likewise, you could find someone who knows what they are talking about.

That sure weren’t Koa Smith. Great guy, no doubt. Insane tube-rider but a guy who thought coral was that “hard stuff on the bottom”.

At some point, Koa riffing on how to save the reefs from global warming said with a straight face “the solution is to reduce your own carbon footprint”. I think he means you and me and everyone on the planet who doesn’t chase swells to Skeleton Bay and have the carbon footprint of an entire Pacific nation. It’s crazy beautiful but I will forgive each and every hypocrisy and idiocy, large small or medium if the WSL can do something to protect and preserve the orangutans.

Surely they could set something up at G-Land next year.

Each heat was scrappy.

Griff looked very smooth, very fluid and composed.

O-dog looked a little shakey but did enough to win.

Can you believe it was eight years ago he finalled with Kelly and was challenging for the Title?

Jack Freestone got one on the buzzer to oust Conner Coffin.

Small and crisp tomorrow for the loser rounds then some real surf.

I’m feeling Kelly and Italo.