Kelly Slater and John John Florence. who spent most of his time at the pool looking at yachts in catalogues, at 2018's Founder's Cup. | Photo: Steve Sherman/@tsherms

Persistent rumour: KSWaveCo to shutter Solana Beach HQ at end of year; mass staff lay-offs; Florida pool cancelled due to cost overruns!

Safety, marketing, finance and construction workers sacked, new lease-holder sought for HQ…

Two months back, Chas Smith loosed the rumour that Surf Ranch was going to be shuttered at the end of 2019 and that the Freshwater Pro would become nothing more than a historical curio.

Shortly after that story appeared, the WSL responded with a rare statement, 

“The Surf Ranch Lemoore facility continues to invest in new staff and experiences and the WSL is excited about the venue’s potential in 2020 and beyond.”

And, five days ago, the WSL confirmed the Freshwater Pro’s appearance on the 2020 schedule, putting an electric tremor in the pit of at least one surf writer. 

And, yet…yet…

From our source in Solana Beach, he, or maybe it’s a she, can’t be sure from the name, says the lay-offs are already happening, the company shedding around fifty-percent of its staff from finance, safety, marketing and construction. Staff have been informed, he/she said, and will work until the end of year with two months of severance pay for most.

Other news: the KSWaveCo built Lemoore for fifteen-million dollars and the now cancelled KSWaveCo pool that was going to be built on thirty-acres the WSL had bought for six-and-a-half mill in Orlando was shelved not because of “extremely high water table” but because of cost overruns.

A predicted eighty-to-hundred-mill build was a little too hot even for a billionaire investor.

But, let’s be clear, here, rumours.

The KSWaveCo, which doesn’t list a telephone number on its website, was contacted via email for comment. Crickets, as they say, thus far.

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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.

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Revealed: Some places are better than others to be a surfer and Central Florida is that place!

Or, on becoming a god.

As previously declared, I am currently in New Smyrna Beach, Florida and for those not familiar with America’s naughty li’l dangler it is an hour and a half drive from Jacksonville to the north, a three and a half hour from Miami to the south, next to Daytona Beach where mustache men drive souped up sedans in one large circle 500 times.

Two days ago, I surfed very fun waves in trunks and felt good. The water was warm, the air was warm and even though the lineup was plenty crowded it didn’t feel that way. Many peaks. Much spread. Little ego. It was one of the most enjoyable surfs I’ve had in weeks.

Yesterday there was bad wind and not waves but it was Saturday and the number 1 college football team in the country was playing the number 2 college football team in the country, both of which happen to be in the SEC or Southeastern Conference. Now, those who care about such things know that the SEC dominates the college football conversation and to be in Florida, which also happens to have a team in the SEC, during a potentially historic game felt fated. I wandered through town to a sports bar, pulled out a stool, ate chicken wings, drank vodka soda with a twist of lime and only received slight frowns from the otherwise friendly locals for that second choice.

Did you know they call vodka sodas “skinny bitches” in Denmark?

Watching LSU throttle Alabama surrounded by southerners was a culturally rich experience. Fulfilling. There was a man who cheered loudly and had a long braided beard that he paired with a Trump 2020 hunting cap. A couple that looked fourteen but must have been twenty-one in matching shirts that read “Let’s get slothed” featuring a stoned sloth. A grandma who cursed Alabama like a sailor. A bartender who insisted on shouting “Roll Tide” in her weathered face. Smiles and backslaps. Groans and hollers but it was as if everyone was family.

Then last night, under the stars at the Florida Surf Film Festival, the very best surf film festival in the entire world, I chatted with Shea Lopez about outwitting Surfline, flying down to Puerto Rico before breakfast, surfing all day and being home for dinner and the all to easy plus plentiful plus short routes to Central America.

Hunter Martinez’s Lost in Thought played in the background, a fine film, and I thought to myself, “Some places are better than others to be a surfer and between fun warm waves, easy flights to funner warmer waves, college football, chicken wings and only slight frowns from otherwise friendly locals for being a skinny bitch, central Florida is that place.”

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Thankful: “I was just this morning reminded that I am the luckiest son of a gun on earth!”

Let's consider all we have instead of all we lack.

November is a month of thankfulness in the United States of America. A time to reflect on all that we have instead of all that we lack. Oh it’s so easy to get trapped in patterns of desire, craving more, needing just one more thing in order for everything to be ok.

Then one more thing after that and one more thing after that.

Like, I would finally be satisfied if professional surfers had their freedom. Or I would, at last, be complete if the 1989 World Champion Martin Potter hung up the headset for 2020.

But one shift, one adjustment will never bring satisfaction for satisfaction is all around us and I was reminded of that this morning. Would you like to read the passage that spurred my self-development? It would be rude of you not to and let us turn to the rich, both literally and figuratively, pages of Forbes magazine:

Only an hour past sunrise, a line already has formed outside Goofy Café + Dine in Waikīkī.

Tourists sneak a hearty breakfast in before they head out for a day of island excursions. Locals come in for coffee and loco moco – a hamburger patty served over rice topped with a fried egg and gravy. Even Makoto Hasegawa, director of operations for Zetton Inc., the burgeoning restaurant group that runs the café, stops by after his morning surf to recharge on an acai bowl before starting his workday.

As Oʻahu prepares to kick off its annual season of surf competitions this winter, Hasegawa and his staff have one dream: that legendary surfer Rob Machado will visit Hawaiʻi and their café to indulge in monster swells and the new special that they named after him: the Goofy Machado Acai Bowl.

On and on the story goes, describing why Rob is the staff and owners’ favorite surfer, how they hope to lure him (two cups of unsweetened acai blended with bananas, blueberries and strawberries to create the bowl’s base topped with a heaping spoonful of peanut butter that’s blended with yogurt to boost creaminess and nutrients. Manoa Chocolate cacao nibs, fresh, local papaya, chopped macadamia nuts, sliced banana, hemp-seed granola, and a drizzle of Big Island Bees raw honey complete the dish) and how they will all just melt into giant puddles if he ever dawns their door.

This heartwarming story stopped me dead in my crusty tracks.

I get to spend time with Rob Machado almost every day. I get to post up with him at the free cheese sample station while shopping for organic produce (him) and vodka (me) at Seaside Market. I get to smile and wave while passing him eating açaí bowls outside the local Sambazon while also quietly thinking that I hate açaí and that he is disgusting and likely pre-diabetic for eating the damned stuff. I get to chastise him sternly for being a dangerous parent when we drop our kids off at elementary school on bikes and his isn’t wearing a bicycle helmet because Rob forgot to put it on.

I get to see Rob Machado so much that he probably thinks we’re best friends or something.

It is time to recalibrate, right now, and admit that I don’t need anything else in my life for I am the luckiest son of a gun on earth.

Are you feeling thankful?

For what?

P.S. Goofy Café + Dine… if you make me a signature dish I’ll visit as long as it’s not gross açaí.

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The view from the inside! Reporter grills Japanese and American team riders. | Photo: @redbull/no contest

Jen See advises surf media: “Raise that middle finger high. Be rude. Be authentic. Avoid the cool kids and their velvet ropes!”

Recognize that a wink and a nod toward the sheer ridiculousness of the pastime that consumes us provides an essential guardrail against over-sentimentalizing the whole thing…

Last week on a Thursday afternoon, Deadspin died. You are wondering what the hell this news, which is now a week old, because I am not very fast with the typing, has to do with surfing.

She made us read about her bikinis, the red one and the mismatched one, and we put up with it.

She told Stab to fuck off, and we played along, even though we still sometimes go there. Do you think she knows? (Yes, I know.)

Now, she’s making us give us a shit about a website we never read and doesn’t even cover surfing. Who the fuck does she think she is, anyway? Fucking wannabe surf writer who has never been to Hawaii.

Does she even surf? Fucking jock, going to the gym all the time. She probably doesn’t even surf.

This part is true, actually. I don’t surf! There are no waves! I’m pretty sure there are never going to be waves again. I have tried every possible sacrifice, and none has so far worked.

Times are desperate. Send help.

Back in the time when magazines roamed the earth in herds (rather than the few hardy survivors who remain today), Chas had a column: This has nothing to do with surfing. Of course, wherever he started, he would end up writing about surfing.

I think that’s because eventually, everything is about surfing. This story is like that. It will be about surfing. I promise! And I would never go back on a promise.

Last Thursday, Deadspin died after management told the editorial staff in no uncertain terms to stick to sports. If you read the site regularly, you will know that straight-up sports coverage was one element of a mix that included an annual review of the Williams-Sonoma catalogue, withering critiques of the Trump presidency, and advice for layering season.

The editorial staff refused to bend to management’s edicts. Management fired the deputy editor (the editor-in-chief had already resigned).

The writers walked.

What made Deadspin good was the joy and talent its writers, allowed a long leash, brought to the project. The results were not always good! Blogging is writing as a live performance, and quite honestly, even the best among us, sometimes fuck it up. But the writers at Deadspin played this game better than most.

There will always be the lure of becoming an insider, of sliding under the velvet rope in the hope of becoming one of the cool kids. It won’t work, though. Writers can never be cool, not if they are actually going to do the work of telling stories that are authentic, and especially not if they’re going to be rude.

Until the end, it was one of the sites that I read more days than not — and I don’t generally care about mainstream sports at all.

What also made the site good and necessary was a relentless determination to puncture the egos and pretensions of the powerful, in sports and beyond. Those take-downs took many forms from detailed investigative reporting to straight mockery. Powerful people, in general, do not enjoy mockery. Oh it burns! It burns so bad!

And there it is, right there in the internet for everyone to see and all their money and power can’t make it disappear (Sometimes they can! But it requires lawyers and stuff).

Deadspin was one of the last of the “rude press,” says Alex Pareene, a former editor of Gawker, one of our era’s original rude media outlets. “Rudeness is not merely a tone. It is an attitude,” Pareene wrote in an essay published on Thursday. “The defining quality of rude media is skepticism about power, and a refusal to respect the niceties that power depends on to disguise itself and maintain its dominance.”

Around the time the Deadspin writers were heading for the exits, Chas dropped a post here asking what the surf media should look like.

If you could wave your wand, what would you want to read and watch about surfing?

(See, I told you! Surfing!)

You all had plenty of answers to this question. For me, the surf media should be fun. Leave the earnestness to the New York Times and their ilk. It should be authentic and real — while recognizing that authenticity is not only the job of writers and creators.

It’s a two-way street, and the characters who populate our little island need to meet us halfway. Give it naked emotion, both good and bad.

Show us what’s at stake, whether it’s a contest heat or an interview.

And recognize that a wink and a nod toward the sheer ridiculousness of the pastime that consumes us provides an essential guardrail against over-sentimentalizing the whole thing.

The surf media would do well to take a page from Deadspin’s playbook and be rude. Raise that middle finger high. In truth, the necessary skepticism should come easily for us.

How often have you read a surf forecast and believed it?

And do you actually think it was better yesterday?

No, of course you don’t.

Surfers already have the required skepticism burned into their well-brined souls. It remains but to use it.

There will always be the lure of becoming an insider, of sliding under the velvet rope in the hope of becoming one of the cool kids. It won’t work, though. Writers can never be cool, not if they are actually going to do the work of telling stories that are authentic, and especially not if they’re going to be rude.

Eventually, to be one of the cool kids or the pretty people, you have to sell out, and that negates the possibility of ever writing anything that’s good and real.

(Selling out because you need to eat is an entirely different situation. Please sell out, if you need to eat. That is just common sense and anyone who judges you for that can suck it!)

There’s nothing especially complicated here.

Be rude. Be authentic. Avoid the cool kids and their velvet ropes.

Write what’s real. Keep your stiletto at the ready.

Mock pretension. Find joy in the stupid details. Laugh as much as possible.

That’s it. That’s all there is to it. Now, let’s build it.

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