A future rivalry between JJF and Medina is the most valuable commodity this sport owns, and they appear to be utterly clueless about that while they search for feel-good schmaltz…

I got to admit, I don’t really get it: The Medina hate; but it’s a real thing and after a relatively subdued year where his surfing seemed to shut down the haters it’s back in full force.

On the second-last edition of The Grit, Chas and podcaster David Lee Scales laid down the parameters of the case against Medina post Priority-Gate. I’m paraphrasing but the gist of the word salad ran something like : Egregious, little bitch, entitled dick, such a dick, “bad” bad guy, an affront to the beauty of surfing….etc etc. Lee Scales was so incensed he posited a hypothetical Brazilian surf fan and could not imagine being in their position where they had to defend Medina.

Andy Irons was the last true bad guy, a guy who elevated the middle period of Slater’s career, when he was in his prime to the status of a hallowed ground never seen before or since. Mythologising since his death largely overlooks the villain role Irons took on with such gusto, but it’s brilliantly captured in Jack McCoy’s 2005 Blue Horizon. According to Derek Hynd who worked on the film with McCoy, the final edit was substantially weaker with most of Iron’s incendiary commentary cut out at Billabongs’ request, which he saw as a death blow to Iron’s competitive aggression.

I should like a swing at that.

Medina is what this so often lame and limp-dicked* sport needs, and has always needed and so rarely gets. A bad guy, a dark prince, a villain.

Andy Irons was the last true bad guy, a guy who elevated the middle period of Slater’s career, when he was in his prime to the status of a hallowed ground never seen before or since. Mythologising since his death largely overlooks the villain role Irons took on with such gusto, but it’s brilliantly captured in Jack McCoy’s 2004 Blue Horizon. According to Derek Hynd who worked on the film with McCoy, the final edit was substantially weaker with most of Iron’s incendiary commentary cut out at Billabongs’ request, which he saw as a death blow to Iron’s competitive aggression.

Hopefully, there will no such emasculation of Medina’s aggro.

Signs are good.

The refusal to bow down after the priority fuck-up with Ibelli is encouraging. “Nothing is more deceitful,” said Mr Darcy in Jane Eyre’s Pride and Prejudice, “than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast”.

I think we can agree Ground Zero for the substantive issues of intense dislike for Gabby began in 2012, a year after he came on Tour when, as an eighteen-year-old he, lost a final to Julian Wilson that most thought he had won. Including of course, Gabby and a large family entourage headed up by stepfather Charlie Medina. Charlie threw some plastic chairs around, Gabe burst into tears and walked off the stage leaving Jules to douse himself in champagne. The western surf media tutt tutted and the die was cast.

Who ain’t had a little cry when things didn’t turn out rosy? I ran over our pet parrot and when telling the kids sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. I’ve got family who sometimes get a little out of hand, some Sicilian Uncles who like a drink and get slap happy from time to time.

Why should we hold that against the kid? Isn’t that toxic masculinity?

The Australian audience took a much stronger dislike to Medina in 2014 when he defeated Parko in a golden late afternoon light Final at Snapper. Parko went deep behind the rock and got tubed, without much else, while Gabby sat down the line and throttled the section into Little Marley with repeated power stabs.

Time has been kinder to Gabe than Parko if one reviews the footage, but the Australian audience felt he wasn’t doing it right and was somehow disrespecting the Snapper rocks local.

It was later that year, August to be precise, when I fell in love with the Medina approach. Quarter-finals at Chopes. Perfect six-to-ten-foot surf and he paddled Andino almost around the Island. Then paddled back to the line-up, then back deep again.

Andino sensed the aggressive tactic could not go unanswered and followed him like a puppy.

“We want to see surfing,” said Occy, behind the wooden desk with Ronnie and Strider.

Then Gabe calmly delivered. Ride after ride. How could you get a better bad guy than that? Andino still hasn’t recovered.

A bad guy who delivers on the surfing. Nobody catches more waves than Medina in a heat. He can put his best numbers up anywhere. First two waves, middle two, first and last, or right on the buzzer.

No one has improved skill set more in the last five years than Medina.

He took his backside tuberiding from competent to other-worldly, making Backdoor his bitch in a way no other goofyfooter has managed, effectively eliminating an insane competitive advantage to naturalfooters at the year end decider.

He pushes the limit on contesting a wave, and sportsmanship sure, but he is never stingy on delivering action.

UFC commentator Chael Sonnen said he was “huge on sportsmanship when coaching kids” but that in pro athletics, he was referencing UFC fights but the comparison with pro surfers is apt,“It’s different. There doesn’t have to be this childish aspect to it. You can have emotion. It is personal”.

Gabby makes it personal. Or at least seem personal.

Far as the skill set goes, and the “beauty of surfing” there is something raw, brutal and unconstrained in Medina’s surfing. From Pipe last year, Chopes, Bells, J-Bay, even Surf Ranch, it’s close to total dominance. Only one guy in the roster who can match it, on its own terms and he’s been sitting out with a busted knee since Brazil.

The prospect of future rivalry between JJF and Medina is the most valuable commodity this sport owns, and they appear to be utterly clueless about that while they search for feel good schmaltz that no-one gives a fuck about.

A “bad” bad guy? As in he doesn’t play the role well?

2015 Snapper round three against Glen Hall. World Title defence gets derailed by a Medina interference.

Medina in the presser threatens Micro.

“He tells me to fuck off and I’ll ……”

Pete Mel pulls the mike away.

I think he said, “Fuck him up”.

He ain’t the “bad” bad guy.

It’s the WSL that has done their level best to neuter the guy.

Come Pipe, I’m hoping, praying, that guy, my guy, comes strolling down that soft Hawaiian sand like a prize rooster and demolishes all comers, including the haters.

*Euphemism for sexual apparatus of all genders.

Matt Warshaw needs your money to help save surf history and culture from the abyss…

A few days ago, Matt Warshaw, the surf historian who spends his days at his Seattle home surrounded by surf-centric books and wrapped in a tartan robe parted at a forbidden delta, launched his biennial donation appeal, subscriber drive.

If you don’t wanna dive even deeper, sign up here (it’s three bucks a month, for christ’s sake) or donate  a little something.

If you’re late to the game, you’ll remember in December, 2017, when Warshaw announced he would quit and take his archive with him if thirty thousand dollars wasn’t donated immediately. Warshaw had made a deal with his wife in 2011 that if it wasn’t in the black within a year, expenses paid, he pulling out a modest salary, he’d shutter it.

One year turned into five.

‘It’s just kind of humiliating, to be 57 and making what I make. It feels like a judgement,” Warshaw said in 2017. “EOS, I think, does a such a good job at showing the world of surf in full. Look at us, maybe the most fucked-up wonderful interesting thing on the planet, it’s all here on the three sites I’ve made, in photos, video, and words — and for building that I get less than I did as a SURFER intern in 1985. It’s humbling. When I step away from the computer a few hours and think about it, I can get depressed.”

As Nick Carroll, another great surf writer who spends his days plucking at his dressing gown, wrote,

“Surfing is not culturally anything like it once was. It now has its very own .01% of very rich people. Eye wateringly, unnecessarily rich people. I hear about new ones every day. Most recently I heard about a near-billionaire ex tech guy who takes his chef and sommelier with him on surf trips, on chartered planes, and pays skilled older surfers to go with him too. Another one who has several people on permanent retainer combing the world for the best next surf trip he can take. Elsewhere this .01% is busy re-shaping the sport wherever they can, making it go to the Olympics, putting it on show in lakes, doing pretty much everything except just fucking leaving it alone. Here’s a thought for the .01%. You wanna be the modern Medicis of surfing? Well then be patrons. Fund the work of Warshaw and people like him. Don’t buy them, back them. Give everyone else in surfing a reason to like you.”

Anyway, the response was very good, Warshaw even squeezing six thousand American dollars out of us (which we’ve almost paid in full, one or two more instalments to go).

Now, he needs a little more.

And the advertisement-free Encyclopedia of Surfing, which is a fully registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, which means it’s tax deductible, has its phones and arms open for surfers who want to do something tangible for the culture they love and loathe in equal measures.

Warshaw, of course, has been responsible for some of the sharper stories on BeachGrit including: (On wavepools) “We’ve traded magic for Perfection!“, (On the death of filmmaker Bill Delaney) “It may be shameful but every time a famous surfer dies I get this initial rush, almost like a fire alarm going off!” and (On Kelly Slater’s Sound Waves episode), “I watched Sound Waves, Kelly Slater twice. It’s almost druggy, like MDMA!”

A man as precious and loyal, and as secretly wanton, as any that has walked the earth.

Here’s his spiel.

I’m a full-time EOS employee, developer Mark Augias is part-time—and that’s it for staff. This year’s fundraiser is mostly about getting another pair of hands involved. $50K in combined donations and new subscriptions gets us a new part-time person and throws some more hours Mark’s way. $100K gets us a full-timer, more hours for Mark, and a small raise for me—I’m doing EOS for $30K a year and I’d be lying to say I’m not looking for a pay bump.

What’s on our to-do list for 2020? Apart from creating and improving the pages you already know (Encyclopedia of Surfing, History of Surfing, Above the Roar), we’ve just added beta versions for two new EOS areas: Surfboards and Contests. Click here to see a Surfboard page, and here for a Contest page. Both environments are already functional and integrated with the rest of the site, but they need hundreds of pages to really lift off—which means added work hours, which means staffing up.

Meanwhile, we’re still doing the non-sexy stuff: digitizing movies and videos, scanning old surf mags, tagging, keywording, databasing. The preservation work isn’t glamorous, but it’s the most important thing EOS does. We have to grab this stuff now. When the last analog version of a surf movie or magazine disappears or is forgotten, that’s it, game over, kiss it goodbye. So again, more hands at EOS means more surf history and culture saved from the abyss.

Click here to watch the fundraiser movie.

And, once convinced, subscribe here and donate here. 

"As utilization of high-quality surf breaks rises in response to lower levels of shark activity around them, surf gangs are expected to become more tenacious and intense," say academics.

There is a saying in academia that professors must “publish or perish.” Meaning that to gain tenure one needs to have their research published and published often.

A major criticism is that the quality of scholarly work has declined in favor of quantity.

A recent study in the journal Sustainability found that surf spots with the highest levels of shark activity are less crowded than spots that have less shark activity. Specifically, “surf breaks in California that are associated with the highest levels of shark activity tend to be less congested, perhaps by as much as 28%, than their counterparts that are visited less often by sharks.”

I’m going to ask you to please suspend your disbelief because this finding is based on rock solid data.

The researchers explain, “Each variable is constructed by scientists at Surfline.com, arguably the premier website for information on surfing conditions at surf breaks around the globe. The ratings provided by Surfline.com are based on travel reports produced by experienced surfers who have visited each surf break. These describe conditions at each surf break, including congestion, wave quality, accessibility, water quality (dirtiness), ocean floor conditions, and shark activity, among others.”

Read: they went onto surfline.com (prior to its recent revamping) and copied down the travel information (what the researchers labeled “water quality,” Surfline called “poo patrol”).

I know this is a lot to take in all at once, but if you aren’t completely blown away by the study’s findings, then read its implications.

“The results presented in this study have implications for the relatively recent decline in the populations of large sharks at surf breaks worldwide… As utilization of high-quality surf breaks rises in response to lower levels of shark activity around them, surf gangs are expected to become more tenacious and intense, ceteris paribus, in their efforts to exert informal property rights over the surfing commons.”

It’s inevitable.

Read here.

(Or not.)