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?
