As chaos threatens to carry-over into the new decade the only surfer constant this past decade, as he was in the previous and will be in the current: Mr Robert Kelly Slater.
Did we really just sleepwalk into a new Decade without an epitaph for the old one? I believe we did.
Chas alluded to an avalanche of (upcoming) listicles, writer Karl Von Fanningstadt took a swing at the rankings of the various World Titles but the greater task of writing the Epitaph for the recently concluded twenty-tens remains undone.
With BG now recognised by mainstream media as the website of record for surf, I think the important historical task belongs here.
Warshaw, of course, has written beatifically on the subject but dragged his analysis out to the start of the decade. Ours begins in twenty ten.
Farewells twenty-tens, you was book-ended by death. Andy Irons died November 2010, the surf industry, as we knew it, officially kicked the bucket with the sales of Rip Curl and Hurley in 2019.
I can’t help feeling those two facts are connected. Andy’s death and all the official and unofficial BS that went with it shattered a fragile truce between the base and the industry. The surf industry never again enjoyed “buy-in” from surfers. We saw it now as something alien. Something malign. Pundits said that wouldn’t matter, the kids in the malls were the main customers anyhow.
Billionaires, hedge fund traders, venture capitalists suits of all flavours; visionaries who saw – what? – in pro surfing. Presumably money, but more likely, charmed and seduced by a meeting with Kelly, they saw a lifestyle and status upgrade. A present from a billionaire to his wife. A plaything, in short. Picked up for a song. It didn’t seem the same without Dane, even with Dirk Ziff pumping millions into it.
Politics has taught us one thing: you lose the base and you lose everything.
There was a Messiah waiting in the wings who could have resurrected it. Dane blew up in the early twenty tens. There was no quibbling, no debate. He was the best. And when he turned his back on it, not just the industry but pro surfing was adrift in a very big sea, with a lot of very hungry sharks.
Billionaires, hedge fund traders, venture capitalists suits of all flavours; visionaries who saw – what? – in pro surfing. Presumably money, but more likely, charmed and seduced by a meeting with Kelly, they saw a lifestyle and status upgrade. A present from a billionaire to his wife. A plaything, in short. Picked up for a song. It didn’t seem the same without Dane, even with Dirk Ziff pumping millions into it.
Despite the cash injection, with Dane gone, the Tour went back to the conservative Aus power surfing tradition. Stale years followed before the herald of the major transformation of pro surfing took his first Title. Medina’s 2014 Title ushered in the Brazilian storm. They owned the rest of the Decade. With the retirement of the Australian stalwarts Taj, Mick and Parko, John John Florence stands alone against the Brazilian onslaught.
Pro surfing was not a goldmine for the new owners. Paul Speaker stood aside in January 2017, his chief achievements being the acquisition of the ASP for nix and a purchase of a majority stake in the Kelly Slater wave pool.
Matt Warshaw called the 2015 reveal of the Slater pool surfing’s BC/AD moment. That maybe true. I prefer to think of it as our version of splitting the atom, and like that event the ramifications and future contingencies will be impossible to predict. At the end of the Decade the number of commercial wavepools globally can still be counted on two hands.
Australia became ground zero for our beloved shark apocalypse, most likely as White shark numbers began to recover after two decades of protected status. Western Australia suffered a horror run before Ballina had a year of terror. The land of the free is now in full catch-up mode as White sharks populations in the Atlantic and Pacific continue to rise.
Skeleton Bay became the premium “free” surfing location on Earth, with other mysto spots in West Africa sparking the allure of the hunt for the perfect wave, an ideal which may come to seem quaint for future generations raised on the reality of techno-surf on demand.
Australia’s loss of prestige in competitive pro surfing, as far as biological males go, was counter-balanced by it’s dominance in freesurfing. Noa Deane, Chippa Wilson, Craig Anderson dropped insurmountable edits. Torryn Martyn became a mid-length hero in the age of the Vlog. Mick Fanning transitioned seamlessly into a retirement as paid vagabond, ably assisted by Mason Ho.
A big-wave Tour came and went. Ireland blossomed as a big wave venue. Mavericks faded and Jaws cemented it’s spot as the premium big wave location on the Planet.
More people surfed, less people cared about pro surfing. It was the decade of the VAL. Celebrity VAL’s owned surfing. Val kilmer, Matt McConaghy, Elle McPherson, The Hemsworth bros, Mark Zuckerberg. Murfers went mainstream, the dream of longboarding the Pass with a million pals was about the most potent fantasy in popular culture as the twenty-tens drew down to their dreadful conclusion.
Sophie Goldschmidt, a tennis playing CEO, who had barely heard of surfing five years ago, took up the reins at the WSL and went full steam into wavepools and gender equality. Present history judges the first action harshly while the second came to fruition as sixteen-year-old Caroline Marks walked off the beach after surfing two-foot onshore D-Bah with the same first place prizemoney as Italo Ferreira, despite having to defeat only half the number of fellow competitors. Womens sports remains in the ascendancy, with surfing now at the front of the grid.
Chaos loomed as VAL numbers exploded and local lineups groaned. Localism itself, or at least the violent assertion of it, ended up in the dock with the famous assault case of Mark “Carcass” Thomson on Jodie Cooper.
Still, some elders, including former World Champ Nat Young continued to assert that the more surfers the better and that, in fact, the planet would be better off as a result of the increased level of “surfer consciousness”.
It was as if Satan himself was offended by this suggestion.
He ended the decade raining hellfire on the surfer consciousness dominated east coast of Australia. Fires claimed the properties of Derek Hynd, then Nat Young himself, the factory of Darren Handley and many, many more at hamlets up and down the east coast of Aus.
As chaos threatens to carry-over into the new decade the only surfer constant this past decade, as he was in the previous and will be in the current: Mr Robert Kelly Slater.
Now, the paperwork is up to date, yes?
Did we miss anything?
