Question: What will “America’s Hawaiian” Kolohe Andino do now that stablemates Julian Wilson, John John Florence are rumored out the door?

Let's help a Brother out!

The demise of once-proud Hurley will be the subject of a Pulitzer Prize winning book, one day, titled “The Merchant of Venice Beach-Adjacent: How Stab Magazine Came Under the Magical Spell of a Beautifully Plus-Size Floridian Boy with Rings on His Fingers and Bells on His Toes.”

Oh wait, sorry. That’s my other Pulitzer Prize winning book. The Hurley book, titled “Blueflame Alliance: How Surfing’s Greatest Brand Was Co-Opted by Plus-Sized…” something. I’m not finished yet but anyhow facts and rumors fly fast and furious. Hurley now makes beard oil, entire divisions have been laid off, the greatest team ever assembled is allegedly dispersing as zero contracts are being renewed.

Rob Machado?

Gone.

Julian Wilson?

Allegedly to Lululemon.

John John Florence?

Allegedly negotiating exit in brave protest.

Kolohe Andino?

Hmmmmm.

The other quarter of the U.S. first ever Olympic Surf Team has been entirely silent in the utter gutting, the apocalyptic massacre.

There must be interest in America’s Hawaiian no?

Lots and lots of interest.

So, where do you think Kolohe will land?

Which brand or company would fit best?

Let’s help a Brother out!

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Listen: Surf Journalist hallucinates he is the lost sixth Coffey Sister before proceeding to have complete mental breakdown live on air!

Ruby-Lee, Ellie-Jean, Bonnie-Lou, Holly-Sue, David-Lee n me.

But where were you when you first heard the announcement that one-time president of the Oprah Winfrey Network, confidant of Oprah herself, Erik “ELo” Logan was ascending to the most powerful chair in organized professional surfing? To that mesh-backed Herman Miller Aeron Chair and not the price point one either. No, the $1395.00 one with adjustable Posturefit SL, fully adjustable arms and 2.5 inch roll-away resistant casters featuring Quiet Roll™ technology?

I was upstairs, reclining on a vintage chaise lounge working on edits for the next book Reports From Hell, out this June, when my phone buzzed then buzzed then buzzed again.

In truth, the news of ELo’s power consolidation was neither shocking nor particularly interesting. Longtom penned a gorgeous accounting of ex-WSL CEO Sophie Goldschmidt’s reign but, in my mind, the second Erik Logan waltzed through Santa Monica’s mahogany door he became the face of the brand.

And so I shrugged and yawned.

Boring with nothing new to report. The World Surf League will continue to transition from a professional surfing tour to a media company exactly like it has been doing all year long.

But yesterday, surrounded by surf history, across a fine office table from David Lee Scales, I lost my ever-loving mind about the whole matter and went on a completely sober-yet-wildly-unhinged 40 minute rant claiming ELo will never understand because he has never struggled with surfing, never wrestled with surfing, never been possessed and made mad by surfing.

What?

Struggle? Wrestling? Surfing as some ecstatic torment?

What the hell was all that about?

And tell me, give me your honest opinion… is surfing a simple, empty slide along the waves, nothing more or less, or is it some cosmic battle, a grand mystical spirit quest through Eriador and the Wilderland all the way to the gates of Mordor?

What is it to you? Why are you here?

After ranting, I learned that the podcast’s sponsor, Manscaped.com, also sponsors the very famous Coffey Sisters.

The Coffey Sisters, David Lee and I are on the same team and for one brief moment I felt the unspeakable joy of being part of that illustrious family.

At the end, maybe that’s what this whole surfing life is all about. Ruby-Lee, Ellie-Jean, Bonnie-Lou, Holly-Sue, David-Lee n me.

Listen here!

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"So you're saying there's a chance..."
"So you're saying there's a chance..."

Whore of Babylon: World Surf League to allegedly gift two coveted wildcard slots to reality television winner of next year’s Ultimate Surfer!

We are living in a democratized utopia!

Did you ever think you’d live to see the day when professional surfing sank to a far more embarrassing level than professional modeling or professional singing? Congratulations, you’ve made it. For it was revealed just today that the winner of ABC’s upcoming reality show Ultimate Surfer will receive not one but two very coveted wildcards spots to the winner, theoretically, for a respected and honest action sport athlete manager just posted to his Facebook account:

“CASTING: World Surf League and Pilgrim Studios are looking for contestants who think they have what it takes to win Kelly Slater Wave Co. Surf Ranch. Rumor is winner gets two CT wildcard slots.”

Also, officially from Pilgrim Media:

The World Surf League and Kelly Slater are teaming up to give America’s greatest up-and-coming surfers a chance to win big on ABC’s “Ultimate Surfer.”

On this exciting new competition show, the most promising surfers in the country will battle it out at World Surf League’s state-of-the-art Surf Ranch Wave System Facility in California for a grand prize provided by WSL, which will include two spots on the WSL World Tour and $100,000 per winner!

One woman and one man will win the titles of America’s first female and male ULTIMATE SURFERS.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a competitive surfer or not. If you have the confidence, ambition and skill to compete against the best, then…

Whoa!

Two whole slots.

Brazil and… Portugal?

Brazil and… Bells?

Mikey Wright and.. sorry the other injured CT surfer vying for the wildcard too goodbye?

But let’s speak quite honestly and frankly right now.

Do you really care? Wouldn’t you rather see the winner of some random broadcast television reality show get smoked in the early rounds than Mikey Wright or the other injured CT surfer?

Are we not accidentally living in the golden age of professional surf democratization?

Yes?

Discuss.

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“We're only scratching the surface of how this technology can be applied,” said Sophie, “and it is completely game-changing for the sport. If you can imagine in future, we’ll have world-class waves, ten-foot-plus waves, coming towards an audience with a stadium coming up out of the water, with amazing broadcast and camera angles, just an electric atmosphere, it can be floodlit at night – it’s just a beautiful thing and it’s so interactive.” Her assessment that “I think the fan experience was significantly enhanced” was strangely out of touch with the brutal assessments being made in the real world by the real fans of the sport. | Photo: WSL

Longtom on outgoing WSL CEO Sophie Goldschmidt: “Whether Sophie killed the dream or happened to be holding the baby when it stopped breathing will be determined by the historians of tomorrow!”

If Elo can't turn the Wozzle into something like Redbull Media house and lay down some black ink how much longer before the WSL slips sweetly into unconsciousness?

I feel a bit sad Sophie has left the building: Farewell Soph, we barely knew ye.

It can be hard to decipher the denseness of the wozzle corpo-speak but what we know is Ziff called Soph in for a little chat and the upshot was “we mutually agreed it was time to make a change.”

That, if I’m not mistaken, is just a very polite way of saying our Soph got the sack, that the three-year experiment in making pro surfing work as a (mainstream) sport under Sophie’s reign has failed.

An objective analysis of her time at the top is warranted, I think. An office farewell party with spritzers and pu-pus and maybe a bare arse on the photocopier if things get out of hand.

The origin story is compelling: former tennis pro, come Adidas, Rugby Union and tennis marketing exec. gets headhunted by a WSL recruiting arm while holidaying in Bali.

Has barely heard of the sport. Knows none of the surfers.

Wozzle were explicit in their desire that Sophie G would continue the Quixotic quest to mainstream the sport of professional surfing, saying in an opening presser that
“Goldschmidt will advance a range of athlete development programs to help grow interest in the sport, while creating tailored fan experiences through new formats, live content and other media.”

She claimed that the sport was in “audience growth mode.”

The shiny new contraption that Sophie was headhunted to sit astride and ride into the glorious future of mainstream sporting success, was of course, the recently acquired Kelly Slater wavepool. Sophie gestated and birthed the contest debuts of the Slater tub, first behind closed doors with the Future Classic, in September 2017, then the Founders Cup in May 2018 and first CT event September 2018.

It was the highpoint of her tenure as CEO, a time of unlimited possibility and purple prose.

“We’re only scratching the surface of how this technology can be applied,” said Sophie, “and it is completely game-changing for the sport. If you can imagine in future, we’ll have world-class waves, ten-foot-plus waves, coming towards an audience with a stadium coming up out of the water, with amazing broadcast and camera angles, just an electric atmosphere, it can be floodlit at night – it’s just a beautiful thing and it’s so interactive.”

Her assessment that “I think the fan experience was significantly enhanced” was strangely out of touch with the brutal assessments being made in the real world by the real fans of the sport.

The bigger problem for her captaincy was losing momentum with the tub build-outs as the timeline got away from her.

Early 2018 with the Tokyo Olympics looming on the radar and it still appeared that the WSL would be able to take total control by holding the event in a Slater tub.

“We are trying to get a wave facility built in Tokyo in time,” said Sophie in February of that year. “Hopefully, if we can get it built, there’s a good chance that the Olympics would take place in one of our facilities.”

Wishing and hoping wasn’t good enough and surfing in the Olympics will take place in Mother Ocean, at least through Paris 2024.

The roll-out of the tubs and the whole promised revolution in pro surfing that was built around that vision looked moribund by the end of Freshwater Pro 2019.

Strangely, it was the release of the Mic’ed up Slater Ep from that contest – with it’s solipsistic atmosphere-less atmosphere – that seemed to kill it.

The closing shot of Slater addressing what looked to be 50 people meandering in front of a stage where Jack White was about to play was a whack with a cold spoon to any pretense of surfing ever being a mainstream sport.

It couldn’t even be a mainstream sideshow.

With all her eggs in the wave systems basket Goldschmidt lost Cloudbreak and Trestles from the roster in her first full year of stewardship. The loss of Cloudbreak she blamed on a lack of Fijian Govt support despite Kelly Slater’s Outerknown company inking a three-year deal to support the event just the year before.

The loss of Trestles was never explained.

Despite an incredibly successful, for fans anyhow, Keramas/Ulu double after the Margaret River cancellation in 2018, she was not able to cement that obvious Bali leg as a permanent part of the Tour schedule.

Keramas has been lost from the 2020 Tour. Grajagan has been gained.

Soph bobbled a bigger ball at the start of her reign when a proposed Tour revamp threatened to go horribly wrong. The paperwork for a proposed Feb Pipeline contest to start season 2019, with a play-off style ending proposed for the Mentawais to decide the World Title went tits-up when Honolulu refused to sign off.

Hastily jettisoning the radical restructured Tour idea, Soph resurrected the original December Pipeline permits to finish the Tour.

End result: a shaky status quo maintained.

Growing the sport via growing the audience looked like it was going to get a filip with a two-year exclusive deal with Facebook proposed in 2018.

A huge propaganda programme preceded the roll out, scheduled to start at J-Bay. Exclusive, which meant all fans were now harvested in the Facebook ecosystem. It was a debacle, with a massive fan backlash forcing a public apology and a retreat from the exclusive nature of the deal.

No word on an extension of the deal as it expires this year.

Soph went hard on pushing the Wozzle as a friend, even defender of the environment, especially Mother Ocean. It relaunched WSL Pure as an activist organisation and made pledges to be carbon neutral by the end of 2019.

Silence about whether they achieved the goal is probably a good indication they failed to reach it.

Greenwashing looks even more hypocritical when the proposed Coolum wave ranch is tied in with a massive canal estate development on coastal floodplain. The QS, with a massive footprint which dwarfs the CT, was left out of the pledge to be carbon neutral, with no roadmap to include it.

Our outgoing CEO had a low-key style. Sophie spotting at events, usually scurrying around in the background, or last person on the stage to deliver something just as the broadcast was about to be skyhooked, was a small but culturally significant sub-genre of hardcore surf fan activity over the last three years. It’s peculiar delights will be missed by connoisseurs.

Her press strategy was the by now familiar route of backdooring the surf media and talking straight to the business mags, effectively in the process treating the surf fans she held in such high esteem like shit on her shoe.

No-one has yet been able to demonstrate how this strategy leads to the kind of “it’s all about the fan” outcome so earnestly touted. Surely you’d go straight to the surf media, booze up and make pals with some editors/journos and bask in the eternal sunshine of positive coverage.

No? Not the way to win friends and influence?

She didn’t give us much to swing for. Elo promises to be far more “our guy” in that respect. More fun. More fan interaction. The teeth, the hair, the tan. You could build a league on those teeth alone.

But that dream’s dead.

Whether Sophie killed it or just happened to be holding the baby when it stopped breathing will be determined by the historians of tomorrow. We’re in the post-sport, story-telling world now.

For how much longer, who knows.

Sophie let slip that the owners (Ziffs) were in it for “business reasons” for the long haul.

How long is a long haul?

“Five-to-ten years,”she said.

Well, we are past the five and trucking towards the ten.

If Elo can’t turn the Wozzle into something like Redbull Media house and lay down some black ink how much longer before the WSL slips sweetly into unconsciousness?

Sophie will be remembered most for her push to gender equality. Whether her hand was forced by the publication of a podium shot featuring male and female winners with different size cheques or had the intent all along is irrelevant. She made it happen.

From top to bottom of the WSL, guys and gals now get equal pay.

For equal work?

Debatable, especially in the big wave realm.

Still, Sophie bequeathed a WSL with blue sky everywhere you look for female athletes.

With utmost fairness, what grade should we write at the bottom of her report card, after a less than three-year spell with her hands on the tiller.

She kept the lights on and the broadcasts free.

For that alone I give a C.

Too generous?

Howbout a C-minus?

What say you surf fan?

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Watch: Filmer nearly captures disemboweling of oblivious surfer by “ravenous, frenzied, combative” Great White shark in North Carolina!

Also a sick little tube.

We surfers, we wave riders, are nothing if not single-minded. Focused, like lasers, on our Pastime of Kings. Nothing can get in our way, when thinking about surfing. Nothing can pull our attention from either sitting and thinking about sweet little tubes, watching another surfer get a sweet little tube or filming a surfer nearly getting dismembered and disemboweled by a ravenous, frenzied Great White shark in the midst of a food orgy then swinging the camera to capture a sweet little tube.

And let us head straight to North Carolina’s Outer Banks where the sun is shining, the water extra warm and the sharks attacking for it is there we lay our scene.

“I don’t think the guy even saw it,” said Logan Marshall, a filmmaker from the Outer Banks.

The water was warm, the surf was up and there were dozens of dolphins playing in the water off Cape Hatteras as Marshall was filming surfers in the waves.

“Everybody just had a weird feeling” out on the Outer Banks beach Monday, he said in an interview with McClatchy News.

They were north of Rodanthe, North Carolina, about a mile from where another surfer was bitten, possibly by a shark (read: obviously), that same day, Marshall said.

That 26-year-old surfer was in the ocean when he was bit on the foot at about 2:30 p.m., according to the National Park Service. He was taken to a hospital with what the NPS said was a “non-life threatening injury.”

“It was two days of pretty sharky waters,” Marshall said.

“I’ve never seen it that populated with sea life,” he added. “I’ve never experienced anything like that.”

The best part of the entire video, though, is right after almost watching the passive surfer become devoured, Logan Marshall swings the camera, catches a little tube action and “Yessessss” like he has forgotten all about the potential bloodbath.

We surfers, we wave sliders, are… the best.

But no surfing in North Carolina, nor South Carolina, nor the eastern seaboard for at least two weeks, no matter how unseasonably warm the water is.

Sharks.

Everywhere, sharks.

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