Longtom: “The Freshwater Pro is cruel and unusual punishment and I refuse to cover it!”

We don't get paid a hundred grand for losing all year. We slug it out for peanuts for our own personal satisfaction and to give the People a free buzz without being slathered in bullshit.

Since Cote and Patty O dropped the 2020 tour schedule last week that initial feeling of disappointment has been morphing into a conflagration of quiet fury within me.

It feels like I swallowed a whole blue agave plant and it’s fermenting inside me.

But what could I do? I can’t bake cakes like Chas, can’t register my anger via posting on their Facebook page because it’s all fulled up with disgruntled fans.

One thing I can do is boycott Surf Ranch.

Like you, like Chas, I thought I wouldn’t have too. High-level informants involved in the production team were told the tub was being scrapped from next year’s Tour. Damned with faint praise by Kolohe Andino, openly mocked by Jeremy Flores, universally panned as a doomed experiment by surf fans the Tub should have retreated back to its by now natural niche: as a novelty venue for things like Founders Cup and a high-priced corpo retreat.

It ain’t a championship Tour stop. Especially one now stretched out over six days. That’s cruel and unusual punishment and I refuse to cover it.

Will that make a difference to WSL. No. Should it? Probably not.

But no-one on this planet has devoted more time to watching and writing about pro surfing in the last twenty-four months than me.

Every heat. Every location. Over a hundred thousand words.

Thats a four-hundred page novel in twelve-point font. Four times as long as Camus’ L’Etranger.

A guy who does it for a living, who gets paid to watch it, who needs the money, is saying no mas. That’s where your sport is at, from the perspective of those who analyse it in forensic detail and attempt to shape the narrative. Not from the point of view of trying to make the organisation look good but placing it into context, real and imagined.

You hear me Elo? Soph? Patty O?

A guy who does it for a living, who gets paid to watch it, who needs the money, is saying no mas. That’s where your sport is at, from the perspective of those who analyse it in forensic detail and attempt to shape the narrative. Not from the point of view of trying to make the organisation look good but placing it into context, real and imagined.

We don’t get paid a hundred grand for losing all year. We slug it out for peanuts for our own personal satisfaction and to give the People a free buzz without being slathered in bullshit.

You could have thrown us a bone. Yeah sure, we got G-Land, but you took away Keramas. That’s robbing Peter to pay Paul. Ulu’s would have been better, anyhow. Keep the jungle jungle. Take the Tub away and bring back Trestles, or better yet, Trestles and Cloudbreak.

For a tour with bottomless money backing it to not have Cloudbreak on Tour is a bad look. Especially after your Golden boy backed it for a three-year deal that was mysteriously reneged on after a single year.

Pro surfing breaks down into a pretty simple tripartite formula. There’s the waves, the surfers and the format.

All three need reform.

There’ll never be more than five on-fire surfers in a given year. Surrounding them with an extra thirty is just too much deadwood.

The format is being tinkered with every year. Some progress has been made, to be fair. Overlapping heats has been a huge innovation. The front end, rounds one and two, is a dud.

As for the waves, even the most superficial look at history should educate non-surfing management as to what works, what is worth investing in and what should be dumped.

Pro surfing still stands diminished from it’s capitulation at Cloudbreak in June 2012. It still requires its day of redemption and reckoning in fifteen-foot glacial blue cylinders.

Who in the current roster would go? We know John John would.

We assume Medina would.

That should be the first order of business laid down on Dirk’s desk.

Whatever it costs, whatever it takes.

I can’t watch, even for money, the dreadful predictability of pros safety surfing Surf Ranch because they could not get enough practice waves in. Can’t watch ’em squat down for that tube. I’d rather watch a VAL tube-dodging. I really would. That would be more entertaining.

I don’t know what I’ll do next September.

Maybe Derek Hynd, who has formulated a small Rebel Tour called the RAT Tour, might have something worth covering.

All’s I know is what I won’t be doing. Watching that fucking pool.

Listening to that weird industrial silence in the moments before the train leaves the station.

Will you join me in speaking truth to power and boycott the tub?

Cry is free, so is boycott.