An open letter from a bodyboarder: “You whored out your culture and identity for money and now it’s being taken from you!”

"You sold your flagship companies to corporate raiders, your peak governing body to a New York billionaire, the very experience of riding waves to those celebrities and moneyed types who can cough up $80,000 for a day…"

Hi everybody, I’m a bodyboarder.

Remember me, I’m the guy you used to make fun of and hate, before you hated longboarders, hipsters, SUP riders, foil-boarders, SUP foil-boarders, VALs and anyone else you deem not as surfing core as you.

I started bodyboarding as a kid in the early nineties, right at the time in Australia that a non-surfing, now disgraced surf photographer stopped just short of calling for open violence against what was essentially a bunch of kids, because they were beginning to crowd up the lineup.

I copped the insults, the derision, the board flicks or “delayed” turns, the occasional punch or slap. Nobody, but nobody, was as cool as surfers in the eighties and nineties. And nobody but surfers were to be allowed into their self-nominated cool kid’s club.

You would sell the ideal and the image to non-surfers, confident that surfing itself was too tricky, took too much dedication, required too much skill and patience and daring and bravery and all the other glorious adjectives you assigned yourselves, for the poor exploited suckers you were marketing to too ever actually take up surfing itself.

The cool kids club mortgaged their image, their style, their language, and their culture out into the mainstream world, and grew rich and successful of the back of it.

Jimmy Slade on Baywatch, Quiksilver in Times Square, surf stores in Wagga Wagga.

You would sell the ideal and the image to non-surfers, confident that surfing itself was too tricky, took too much dedication, required too much skill and patience and daring and bravery and all the other glorious adjectives you assigned yourselves, for the poor exploited suckers you were marketing to too ever actually take up surfing itself.

They would have to make themselves content to just ape the aesthetic and hope that some of the cool kid’s club cultural credibility would rub off on them.

That was one of the big problems you had with bodyboarding. It let the masses short circuit the narrative, skip the years of skill acquisition and dedication required to join the lineup.

It gave those masses outside the cool kid’s club the opportunity to open the door and come in.

And you tried to push it back closed with the mockery and violence.

You sold your flagship companies to corporate raiders, your peak governing body to a New York billionaire, the very experience of riding waves to those celebrities and moneyed types who can cough up $80,000 for a day at your biggest identity’s wave park. You created Luxury boat charters for doctors and lawyers.

Now, the financial good times didn’t last forever, but the economic beast you’d created to fund your lifestyles still had to be fed. Maybe if you opened the door just a little and let only a select few, preferably with money, from the outside into the cool kids’ club, it would be ok.

So, you sold your flagship companies to corporate raiders, your peak governing body to a New York billionaire, the very experience of riding waves to those celebrities and moneyed types who can cough up $80,000 for a day at your biggest identity’s wave park. You created Luxury boat charters for doctors and lawyers.

European backpackers can own a little piece of replica heritage with longboards and fishes copied from surfing spiritual heyday for $1500 each.

And the cream on the top? You get to go to the Olympics!

But, here’s the thing.

Now that the door is open just a little, the masses of aspiring surfers you created by selling the cool kids club aesthetic want in.

The weight of numbers has become too much. They’re crowding up your favorite breaks, they’ve gain control of your governing bodies, they’re diluting and reshaping your culture, and recreating the cool kids’ club in their image.

The surf school graduates, the #Vanlife influencers, the VAL’s, the ELO’s, all those exploited but previously excluded, WANT IN.

The weight of numbers has become too much. They’re crowding up your favorite breaks, they’ve gain control of your governing bodies, they’re diluting and reshaping your culture, and recreating the cool kids’ club in their image.

They’re telling the world, “This is surfing now”.

You whored out your culture and identity for money and now it’s being taken from you.

The masses are coming for you again, but in this new age, you can’t respond with open mockery and violence against their assault anymore.

So, you wring your hands, try to give credence to “grumpy locals” as the only true voice of the cool kid’s club, create silly performance pieces about satirical insurgencies.

You’re trapped in a nightmare of your own making.

And I’m over here, watching all this unfold, reflecting on the choices the surfing world has made, the actions and the behaviours that have led you to this point, and thinking to myself, “He who laughs last, laughs longest”.

Enjoy your future, cool kids.