The WSL finds a solution to a non-existent problem…

The WSL, as we learned from Gra Murdoch on Australian surf forecast site Swellnet, has changed the rules in an attempt to hogtie its biggest star and dual world champ Gabby Medina.

They now threaten disqualification for any last-minute interferences like the one he laid on Caio at Pipe.

(Watch Gabriel’s deliberate interference on Caio here.)

Gra did a great job putting the rule change into context by comparing it with other sports where rules had been changed to bring single dominant athletes back to the pack.

Missing was the bigger question: why?

And also: to what effect?

For a league that has now pivoted to be an entertainment/media organisation devoted to storytelling it seems a bizarre oversight – or is it sheer ignorance? – that the greatest story in its league remains opaque, and now under threat from zealous rule changes.

I’m talking about the Yin-Yang dynamic and rivalry between it’s two biggest draws.

Character is destiny, character flaws even more so.

For athletes in a professional sport over-aggression can be equally as damaging as submissiveness. For that theatre to play out we have the two greatest surfers of the generation, John John Florence and Gabriel Medina to witness.

Why would you rob fans of the potential dramas in a rivalry that could sustain the sport for a decade?

Imagine Shakespeare’s plays getting the WSL rewrite: “Ah look mate, that Hamlet is too indecisive. That King Lear, we’re going to need to tone down those passionate outbursts, he’s a bit too mad.’

One too aggressive, one too submissive.

The difference between what you expect to see and what you actually see is drama.

Take the drama away from heats, even the possibility of it and pro surfing becomes an incredibly tough sell for an audience saturated with digital opportunities for entertainment. That’s what made Zeke’s physical dominance over John so compelling. We suspected John John’s unwillingness to “go to the mat” in competition but until we witnessed his capitulation we had no idea how that would play out in real time.

Ergo for Medina.

Chas and David Lee Scales made the point in The Grit podcast after the Caio priority incident in Portugal that Medina is a shitty villain. In the sense that being a bad villain means he’s bad at it I totally agree. It backfires on him as often as it helps him. It’s cost him world titles.

In terms of shitty being inauthentic, I totally disagree.

His acts of aggression are spontaneous and ingrained as well as calculated and pre-meditated. There’s nothing manufactured about it. When he came to the Gold Coast as a newly minted twenty-one-year-old world champ and threatened physical violence against “enigmatic” Irishman Glenn “Micro” Hall Pete Mel couldn’t pull the mic away from him fast enough.

Which is what makes it so fascinating, you never know when the next Medina drama will unfold.

Something is happening here and I may not know what that is: that’s a Medina heat. That’s what keeps me watching.

It’s what makes the rule change so incomprehensible.

By removing an avenue for the Medina character flaws to express themselves you remove drama and theatre from the sport. You reduce the strength of the yin and yang polarity between him and JJF.

Why would you rob fans of the potential dramas in a rivalry that could sustain the sport for a decade?

Imagine Shakespeare’s plays getting the WSL rewrite: “Ah look mate, that Hamlet is too indecisive. That King Lear, we’re going to need to tone down those passionate outbursts, he’s a bit too mad”.

You want to witness a sport without drama and intrigue, minus any of the possible Game of Thrones dramas, watch the current Aussie QS events being held in two-foot beachbreaks. An endless grind of two turns and a closeout finish.

Whole hours pass of four-man heats separated by a point or two.

The difference between first and last practically unintelligible. Vaughan Blakey is doing a heroic job in the booth, should get the call-up to partner his brother for the big leagues, but the actual content of the heats is dull as cold dishwater.

As a guiding principle the WSL rule book should have a commitment to making the Sport more interesting over time, not less. And the deeper irony is that Gabs wasn’t even exploiting a competitive advantage via the rules that needed to be shut down.

It was a solution to a non-existent problem.

In the final analysis, by legislating Gabs aggressive instincts out of the sport they help him more than any other surfer on Tour.

They remove the possibility of those sudden explosions that came from nowhere and totally blow up heats.

It just makes a thirty-minute heat a more boring, stale and predictable way to pass the time.

I don’t see how that is good for the Sport.

What about you Medina haters, what do you see?

World number sixteen gives vulnerable adult learner a little wet-rub during pre-contest warm-up.

Depending upon which side of the fence you occupy, surfer or VAL, this clip will fill you either with horror or energetically nodding your head in agreement.

The background, if necessary.

Griffin Colapinto, twenty-one, from San Clemente, the world number sixteen, is freesurfing at Manly beach, in Australia, in prep for the qualifying event there. Races down the line, second hit, spins, sees a VAL attempting to takeoff as he comes around, lightens his feet, gently takes him out.

Pretty standard fare for a city beachbreak, armies of VALS all of whom appear to’ve been struck blind and deaf.

Who knows where they’ll appear next?

Taking off down the line? Ejecting above your head?

https://www.instagram.com/p/B9kFTUMnRpQ/

Griffin wasn’t thrilled and dressed his IG post with a Dane Reynolds quote, taken from an excellent Stab magazine interview. 

“Do you ever feel like people who paddle around you cluelessly aren’t good at surfing and can’t possibly be intelligent?”

The response was mixed.

From the VAL army,

franmerurqui It has nothing to do with intelligence and I don’t think it’s right to make fun of a learner’s mistake. We’re all having fun!

bcolapinto
Some surfing stupidity…. So, what you are saying is that you were not intelligent when you were learning? In fact, because you are the pro, I believe you should have the control, avoid that clash and explain to him what he did wrong … I don’t know what is happening with surfing nowadays… A lot of idiots in the water..

bbilro
Stupidest Person Award for the dumbest and riskiest acts. Griffin Colapinto

joelchapman
Pro surfer says “people who aren’t good at surfing can’t possibly be intelligent”. 🤔 If anything is @kookoftheday worthy, it’s this post. Not the surfer who you ran over.

Then a bunch of hits from pro groupies, and a few who don’t buy the pro surfer entitlement thing.

taz0.2
Not everyone dropped out of school, lived in a beachside mansion, and had daddy buy him surfboards. Odds are that most people in the lineup are just doing their best to have fun. Don’t get upset when someone can’t levitate out of the water to get out of the way because Griffin Colapinto decided that he wanted to speed down the line and air rev over someone. You’re a good kid, Griff. Don’t be a prick.

(One clever follower wrote, “You mean the Coffin brothers.”)

The most prescient, of course, was this.

sigg1980
Is it just me.. or.. are there a lack of pros on here responding? Lmao.. Dane layin low on this one.. “sorry this is your potential PR nightmare not mine”.. prob did agree with Cola in private though. Lmao

How do you play this?

PR diz or VAL got his just desserts?

Surfing equals green in modern corporate language.

Doesn’t it feel, I don’t know…intrusive… to see the word “surf” used in advertising?

It’s as gross as a CFO throwing double shakas as he wobbles through the office making his requisite, self-centered small talk?

And, what copywriter wrote that Jeep garbage?

Actually, knowing the way it goes, that copywriter probably had a perfectly sane idea that got squashed and revised through countless “alignment” meetings by vice-presidents with finance degrees to the point where we’re at: Surfing sand. Surfing streets. Surfing conference calls. Surfing the open office. Surfing the gibberish I type on a sticky note so I appear productive (which is much more important than actually being productive in the open office).

There’s a Beckett-like absurdity to corporate garbage language, and laughing at the serious use of utterly stupid buzzwords was getting me through my Monday, until I saw a stack of trade magazines in the trash.

The magazine cover was clouds, sky, airplane. The usual for one of these trade rags that industry “leaders” swap at conferences without ever reading.

(The irony that what I ghostwrite for work goes in mags like these that are immediately thrown away is not lost on me; and I try to think of it like my own sand mandala.)

The headline caught me.

All caps, sans serif, like what Apple was using ten years ago: SURFING FOR EFFICIENCY.

The article informs its one reader (me) that “air-wake surfing for efficiency” shows “significant promise but substantial challenges,” leaping ahead optimistically with news that Airbus and Boeing tested how to save gas by flying planes in formation. The writer toots that, “Commercial aircraft would fly in extended formation, up to one nautical mile apart, on what the industry prefers to call ‘cooperative trajectories.’”

However!

Despite the fact that “the physics of wake surfing are on a firm footing, there are many technical and operational questions still to be answered.”

And then there’s a good bit of the article devoted to pumping the brakes on air-wake surfing, specifically because “only the trail aircraft sees a fuel saving” so they’d need to work out “who gets preference.”

But that doesn’t really matter, because the article accomplishes its only point, which is to tick the “sustainability” box.

And it does so while co-opting the new corporate meaning that surfing equals green along the way.

Which leads me to wonder: What surf terms could be turned into buzzwords that office people use seriously?

Tell you what.

We’ll brainstorm on this messaging, leverage our collective learnings, maybe take the conversation offline, and circle back next week.