Am I right? Are surfers the greatest snitches on earth?
Did it ever occur to you, when you started surfing as a little boy or girl, head filled with dreams of fibreglass making a fizzing sound as you cut through the green walls, older surfers with broad brown backs and terrifying scowls getting any wave they wanted, society broadly…worried…about your obsession, that it would one day turn into a gulag of self-imprisoned snitches, crybabies and worryworts, reduced to cowering in their rooms in fear of a virus that only kills the old, the fat, the gonna-die-soon anyway?
(Editor’s note: Dear writer, learn to condense your lede. Perhaps think about using three or even four sentences to get your point across.)
You know where I’m at.
While bikers ride, runners run, surfers, with only a few exceptions, have taken to the various quarantine laws like French collaborators took to their German invaders, heads placed, joyfully, under the occupying jackboot, begging their masters for the opportunity to send their own people to the firing squad.
Public exceptions, of course, are Joel Tudor, and Derek Dunfee, the big-waver and photographer who, according to Coronado mayor Richard Bailey, “singlehandedly” brought together all the mayors in San Diego to talk about and eventually overturn the no-surf ban.
(Listen here.)
And, the Dana Point shredder who lost his twenty-two thousand dollar boat when he surfed, or tried to surf, Lowers during lockdown only to be undone by prying eyes.
The brave lockdown runners in France’s south-west, too, hiding surfboards in pine forests and using drones to search for cops.
Rare exceptions.
In Portugal, Kanoa Igarashi, once a national hero there, has his tyres slashed for surfing outside his Ericeira postcode.
In New Zealand, “We have people here with pitchforks and torches… everyone’s turned against each other,” says the comedian, pro-ish surfer Luke Cederman.
A surfer, there, “terrified to leave house” and threatened with being “shot, tasered, hung” for surfing during lockdown.
On Reunion Island, a police helicopter pounces on surfers at empty reef.
Here, “the high water mark of obscene tattle-taling in our time.”
Meanwhile, the WSL, a company owned by a non-surfing billionaire who bought the old ASP for a handful of shekels in 2012, and currently with “avid waterman” Erik Logan holding the CEO’s paddle, shrieks triumphant with its endless calls to stay indoors, offering up to $2500 for “real surfers” to post videos of ’emselves replicating surfing at home.
(Read here.)
Apart from surf, I got nothing else.
And so I wonder, am I right?
Is surfing number one in the sport of snitching?
Do any other sports publicly name and shame?
