Get ready for a little night music!

There are good ideas and then there are great ideas. A good idea is to make a movie following three young surfers on a roller coaster action tour of the globe’s most exotic and dangerous surfing spots. They travel to Madagascar, Mexico, Bali and Hawaii seeking the ultimate wave, a 40-foot force of nature that travels at speeds up to 35 miles per hour.

A great idea is to make a television show about rock stars who have a passion for surfing and how the ocean has influenced their lives and music.

Guess what.

Today is your lucky day for… A day after the new Pearl Jam album is revealed band members from Pearl Jam, Foo Fighters, and Red Hot Chili Peppers announced that they are set to appear on a new television series next year.

‘Surfing Rocker,’ the new TV show is about rock stars who have a passion for surfing and how the ocean has influenced their lives and music.

The TV show will be feature Anthony Kiedis, Ben Harper, Billie Joe Armstrong, Kelly Slater, Taylor Hawkins, Kirk Hammett, Jack Johnson, Jim Lindberg, and Eddie Vedder. Surfing Rockers is set to debut on TV February 2, 2020 in Brazil.

And I seriously don’t know how the World Surf League’s President of Content, Media, Studios and Outback Steakhouse’s Bloomin’ Onion Erik “ELo” Logan let this concept slip through his fingers. It’s what we, in the biz, call “synergy.”

Speaking of, did you know Billie Joe Armstrong’s surf van is still for sale? If you act fast it can be your lucky day x 2.

Also, if you were tasked with making a television show about a subset of surfers which would you choose? Surfing Techies? Surfing Businessmen? Surfing Businesspeople? Surfing Chiropractors?

Other?

Any sport, anytime, anywhere.

We now know, more than ever, that in our modern world words have the power to hurt. I felt hurt when old mate from Zig Zag said BeachGrit were snark merchants and the comments were where “human hope comes to die”.

That seems not just unfair, but untrue. Hold that thought, please.

I know Chas has already had a swing at the following subject but it does deserve, I think, a story all it’s own.

After much research and deliberation I think we can make the claim, and have it both true and fair, that the 2019 Tahiti Pro had the worst commentary in the History of Sport.

Any sport, anytime, anywhere.

The big day before the finals was a true gift to the WSL as a sporting spectacle. The last such day was 2014.

Five long years ago. Five years in professional surfing is an epoch.

Five years ago the WSL did not exist.

Five years ago there was no Willian Cardoso, no Yago Dora, Wade Carmichael, Ricardo Cristie, Kanoa Igarashi.

Five years ago Filipe Toledo sat out Teahupo’o with an ankle injury.

For a professional league that has now laid on, what I call the narrative pivot, and considers itself, in the words of 2IC Pat O’Connell to be in the “business of telling stories” never has so much ripe material for commentary gone so unremarked.

A truly stunning negation of reality.

Ross Williams was the best of a truly woeful bunch but his fallback line “There are no easy draws on Tour, everyone is a weapon” sounded more and more peculiar as events transpired.

He first employed it as Kanoa Igarashi was giving a tepid performance, that was far from the worst of the day. A generous appraisal is that he was just thoughtlessly repeating a rote phrase.

The actual story was the exact opposite: here we had an actual world title contender who had not been tested in heavy water and was being found wanting, right in front of our eyes.

The story of the coral was comic.

Of course we want Coral Gardeners; not a pre-school kiddie between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn should be allowed to start school until they have mastered the art*. But to have the wozzle send in Joey and Kaipo as the pitch men, and call the play by play was…..it seems too snarky to call it weird.

Whatever is weirder than weird. Joe calling the glowing coral a “cry for help”; there is no precedent in the annals of sports commentary.

Barton was woeful. During the insane Italo/ADS heat Italo’s first wave was ridden in silence.

Action: Adriano De Souza standing tall in a huge watery cavern, one of the best waves ridden in five years.

Commentary (BL): So they literally take the coral and put it into the bamboo and let it sprout?”

(Lea Brassy): “Yeah!”

Missed: an eight-point ride from Italo (Interview with Bourez).

Missed: another eight-point ride from Italo (his best).

Missed the start of another one.

Missed the start of ADS’ heat-winning wave.

BL: “I can’t stop smiling (laughs) These are the days you dream of being a pro surfer (Cardoso safety surfs a shoulder without remark). It’s hard to get to the point of talking about coral but how was it for you?”

If I am being snarky, can you find me another example of a sport that on its day of days so spectacularly loses touch with the play by play?

I spent the weekend searching, looking through thousands of hours of You-tube videos and cannot.

There are clips of commentator gaffes, clips where a guy misses a Touchdown conversion and the commentator claims he kicks it, but nowhere does the commentary completely lose touch with the action.

Medina’s ten-point ride: “I was watching that interview more than the wave and enjoying Jeremy’s insights” (BL).

He missed the days only ten-point ride!

I don’t want to be unfair. I don’t want to trade in snark.

Is it over-reach to claim a new, world-historical low has been reached?

There’s an exchange somewhere between BL and Joe, about Owen and helmets and coral that is better that anything Monty Python every wrote.

And it’s serious.

Real sports have oversight committees or arms-length commentary. It feels terrible to flog this dead horse we all love so much for putting on free live surfing for us to watch, but how could they blow it this badly?

And, what was your favourite piece of commentary gold from the day of days?

I will never get past the “cry for help”.

My shameful secret: the worse it gets, the more I enjoy it.

One more: have we now officially entered the post-sport phase of professional surfing?

*A bootie ban in tropical waters is surely the best way to save corals. Keep schlubs from stepping all over it.

Keeper of surfing's history explains why Brazilian world champ holds the key to his heart… 

My work productivity, and maybe yours too, was WAY down last week during the final two days of the Tahiti Pro.

A WCT contest in great surf will always tug at my attention. When the surf is both great and death-defying, like it was at Teahupoo, I hold on to my laptop as I go about my day the way my son used to hold onto his stuffy, and do not miss a single moment.

I want the ups and the downs and everything in-between.

I want the hair-outs and the shoulder-rides as well as the perfect scores.

Unless something happens that needs explaining, however, I do not want to hear a thing. The mute button is Viagra for my WCT attention span —the quieter it is, the longer I last.

And the longer I last with a contest like the Tahiti Pro, the more it seems to become a movie or a play, writing itself as it goes, with plots and subplots and twists, and characters of every description, many of whom I have strong if temporary feelings for. Not real feelings. Sports-fan feelings, which are subject to change year to year, event to event, sometimes even heat to heat.

Bringing me to Gabe Medina.

Medina does not want to charm you or win you over. He is tactical and skilled and remorseless, picking off one surfer after another on his way to who knows how many world titles. I find it refreshing, purifying even, that Medina goes about his work with so few fucks given as to what we all think about him.

Not everybody swoons for his surfing. I always have. Riding aside, what I appreciate about Gabe is his lack of pretense. He does not want to charm you or win you over. He is the Bride, except male and dark-haired; he is tactical and skilled and remorseless, picking off one surfer after another on his way to who knows how many world titles.

I find it refreshing, purifying even, that Medina goes about his work with so few fucks given as to what we all think about him.

Then last April I saw Gabe on a video chat with Jair Bolsonaro and Bibi Netanyahu and Neymar, and you know me, I’m so left I can barely turn right at the corner to get my quad-soy latte each morning.

Ever since I’ve been trying to maintain the righteous dislike for Gabe I felt after watching that grinning four-way reacharound of a conversation.

But I’ll tell you something, and I’m at a loss as to whether this makes me proud or ashamed. As a WCT fan, surfing beats politics.

Watching Tahiti last week, I gave up. Gabby is still my guy. He met Owen Wright in the final, and with Owen holding a lead going into the last few minutes my eyes locked onto the screen, trying to conjure up a set.

It didn’t come.

Owen first, Gabe second, and me still sulking later that evening as I pulled the cork on a nice dry Alsace Reisling.

Being a fan means never having to say you’re sorry.

(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. This story is pulled from today’s letter, which also includes a link to a thirty-three minute cut of the 1968 World Championships, and which was won, controversially, by Fred Hemmings.)