Julian Wilson has $US1.5 million lawsuit
against former sponsor Hurley dismissed
By Cedar Hobbs
Who blinked first, Hurley or Wilson?
Last month, Julian Wilson initiated a $US1.5 million
lawsuit against Hurley for their alleged wrongful
termination of his contract.
The crux of Hurley’s alleged reasoning centered on Wilson’s
failure to compete in 2020. The contract had apparently entitled
Hurley to reduce Wilson’s compensation if he failed to compete in
at least five World Tour events in a year.
The WSL cancelled the 2020 Tour following the outbreak of the
COVID-19 pandemic.
It’s unclear why Wilson dismissed the suit, as the documents
filed on Wilson’s behalf are lacking any substantive information,
but it’s likely that the parties settled.
Wilson’s attorneys would have likely threatened suit in the
initial negotiations and he (plausibly) would have had little
incentive to dismiss the suit without reaching some settlement
agreement, as even the hint of litigation is substantial leverage
in the U.S. (lawyers are an expensive bunch).
It’s possible that Wilson blinked first in light of a threat by
Hurley (aka Bluestar Alliance) to litigate the matter to the hilt,
but it seems unlikely given Wilson was represented by a
high-powered legal firm specializing in media and
entertainment.
Wilson and Hurley entered into the original seven-year agreement
in 2014.
Then, in 2019, Hurley was purchased by Bluestar Alliance.
According to Wilson, Bluestar announced its intention to shift
away from athlete sponsorships following the acquisition.
Bluestar was allegedly unhappy with many of the contracts they
had acquired, “reportedly looking for loopholes in contracts. … to
use as leverage to renegotiate terms.”
Wilson also alleged that Hurley had attempted to postpone his
payments, telling Wilson that if he did not agree to the
postponement, Hurley would face bankruptcy.
Since Bluestar’s acquisition, Hurley has culled several
high-profile athletes.
Rob Machado, a Hurley sponsored surfer for twenty years, was
dropped in January of this year.
John Florence left Hurley after he was reportedly offered $2
million to void the remaining $12 million left in his contract.
Carissa Moore was rumored to be in a contract dispute with
Hurley earlier this year, though she still remains on the team.
Wilson is still sponsored by a myriad of brands, including Red
Bull, but for now, the nose of his board looks a lot like ours.
The flouting of contracts isn’t exactly novel news for Americans
(see American removal of Native Americans), but it still feels dire
when corporations can essentially opt out of expensive surf
sponsorships with little consequence.
A dark time for surfers in the paid-to-shred biz.
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Former staffer writes eulogy on death of
SURFER: “The final bit of content? A photo of an air at a soulless
wavepool posted to Instagram. About the saddest way this lumbering
old lion could be put down.”
By Justin Housman
SURFER was not simply an “asset” but a living,
breathing part of our culture…
I saw my first cover of SURFER magazine (October, 1991
issue) when I was twelve years old, standing in line at a grocery
store in landlocked Visalia, California (Hi Chas’s wife!),
my chubby hands each clutching a tube of chalky Necco wafers.
The cover image was a long-haired dude in a wetsuit and booties
floating a big chunky end section, with the photo divided in two:
black and white on one side, color on the other (it’s my avy). I
didn’t know what I was looking at, but I knew it looked cool as
hell, so I pestered my exhausted mother until she bought the
magazine. I took it home, fell in love, and it shaped the rest of
my life from that day forward.
My mom moved me to the coast a year later, a miraculous gift
from an otherwise non-existent god. With that grubby SURFER
magazine as my only guide, I spent the next couple years turning my
landlubbing ass into an actual surfer. 30 years later, I still have
that issue at the bottom of a box, a few dozen other issues stacked
neatly on top, a layer cake of memories three decades deep.
Every so often, I tip a bottle of bourbon into a glass (one ice
cube), fish that ancient mag out of the box, and in a whoosh of
nostalgia am transported instantly to a time when surfing was the
most mysterious thing in the world to me, impossibly cool, and a
culture I desperately wanted to be part of.
That a kid who’d never seen surfing in person could buy a copy
of SURFER 200 miles from the ocean at a low budget grocery store in
a low budget town probably has something to do with the demise of
the magazine. Mission creep, cancer-like growth, the mag leaving
the careful clutches of John Severson’s hands to be passed around
to ever more predatory corporations that practically gave away
subscriptions to inflate circ numbers to move more ads, selling
mags in places that made no sense, blah blah blah, standard pulp
publication trajectory of the past few decades.
SURFER wasn’t unique in that.
It also wasn’t unique in last week’s blood letting by parent
company A360 Media (gag). Powder Magazine, founded in
19-freaking-72, skiing’s granddaddy publication, was axed. Bike
Magazine, another giant, pushed off a cliff. Each of these
titles, like SURFER, were cherished, fueled dreams, had pages
ripped out and taped to walls, and for at least parts of their
existence, defined their sport’s culture.
None of them were given a farewell by A360.
Nothing.
SURFER was in its sixtieth year of publication. The final bit of
content produced? A photo of an air at a goddamed soulless wavepool
posted to Instagram. About the saddest way this lumbering old lion
could be put down.
Why not the dignity of a week-long online lovefest?
Let some of the old editors and scribes pen loving tributes?
Where’s the harm in that?
There of course is no harm, and if the media biz was run by real
human beings and not by Allbirds-wearing choads worshipping
accounting software, it perhaps would have occurred to people
higher up in the organization that these titles were not simply
“assets” but living, breathing members of our culture that deserve
proper eulogies, not Friday afternoon pink slips.
I wrote for SURFER as a full-time gig for much of the past
decade, so you’ll forgive a little rambling and sensitivity
here.
I’m also not naive to market forces or even partial to my era at
the mag. For my money, nothing will beat the early Steve Hawk years
in the nineties. Moody, mature, with just enough vinegar-splashed
irreverence to cut through the seriousness. The high-water mark of
the publication, no question.
I’m also not so naive as to think SURFER died last week.
It really died years ago, maybe sometime around the second
decade of this century, when the internet toppled SURFER from its
pedestal as the must-read magazine that each month gathered the
surf world together, so to speak.
Even from the inside, and especially as the issue count was
shortened year over year recently, I mourned the SURFER of old,
unsatisfied by what replaced it, the firehose of social media, and
websites all sharing the exact same YouTube clips, interspersed
with traffic farming listicles and self-help articles geared toward
you clicking on product links and the website getting a
kickback.
There’s a reason A360 is keeping only Men’s Journal,
after all, a magazine nobody cares about, but which surely
generates enough in affiliate sales (look it up, kiddos), to be a
cash cow for a media company that doesn’t give a shit about media
or journalism, or any of the sports their magazines covered.
Those problems are bigger than surf, ski, or bike mags, of
course.
Two decades into the internet eating media, we still don’t know
how to make websites profitable without ruining them, so addicted
we’ve all become to free content.
There is a lesson here in SURFER’s demise.
Support your favorite publications. You don’t like ads? Don’t
visit free websites. You don’t like staring at screens? Buy print
publications. We deserve whatever shitty media we’ll have in the
coming years if we refuse to pay actual money for it.
The Surfer’s Journal will soldier on, for who knows how
long, likely until those of us who grew up with print pubs give up
the ghost, our kids never having cared about non-digital
entertainment. The SURFER Magazine that you loved the most, or,
whichever weird-ass Australian title you grew up reading, was
likely at its best back when it was supported by subscription
revenue that covered the cost of printing, and made a little profit
before ads entered the picture at all.
It’s ridiculous to complain about the quality of a product you
pay nothing for, to demand an ad-free experience while reading a
free article. Editorial freedom combined with the trust of a
subscriber base is a powerful thing in media.
We can have the media we want, as long as we’re willing to pay
for it.
Which brings me back to that kid in Visalia, who changed the
direction of his life based on one copy of SURFER magazine, and the
42-year-old man who threw away his high school yearbooks but can’t
bring himself to pitch a thirty-year-old magazine into the
recycling.
I’m clearly not alone. SURFER meant a great deal over the
decades to an awful lot of people. It still will, but now as only a
memory, and that’s fine. Time moves on, tastes change.
Something needs to fill that gap. Something has needed to for
awhile. BeachGrit, god bless y’all, ain’t filling it.
Stab isn’t either. The Journal I guess comes
close, but it’s always felt sterile, standing at a distance from
its readers
. As Chas wisely said, “SURFER was the Bible of the sport. It
was what mattered. And now it doesn’t.”
Surfing doesn’t really have any media that matters anymore.
Nothing to rip from a mag and tape to a wall. Nothing to get
excited about when it shows up. Nothing to take us to new, faraway
places we’d never heard of, nothing to introduce us to new ways of
being a surfer, no cultural fire for us all to gather ‘round, to
warm our hands each month.
The media biz today makes that nearly impossible.
And for that, I’m sad.
We should all be.
Now if you’ll excuse me, time to dig out that old mag, drink one
for the old girl, and be happy I was able to make those memories at
all.
Oh, and PS: We never, ever wrote anything based on appeasing pro
surfers or advertisers. Drives me fucking insane when people who
have no idea how this works prattle on endlessly about that.
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Half Metal Jacket: The United States Army
drops “shark attack” basic training technique as Coronavirus
pandemic ends “up-close shouting!”
By Chas Smith
Ho.
Of all the things abandoned during the Coronavirus
Pandemic (2019- ), including handshakes, sitting shoulder
to shoulder with strangers, full restaurants and professional
surfing, I think I’m most sad to see the United States Army’s
“shark attack” go.
And of course you know what the “shark attack” is because you
are a surfer but also watch movies.
The “shark attack” is when a drill sergeant stands centimeters
away from a recruits face while screaming.
While the shark attack was intended “to establish dominance
and authority using intimidation and fear, to weed out the weak of
heart,” it helped to create “a chaotic environment that centered
around applying physical exertion under stress.”
“Drill sergeants were charged with assessing the trainee’s
ability to handle stress … by enveloping them in a manner that
emulated a shark attack,” Fortenberry said.
Sometimes, half a dozen drill sergeants would “gang up on
you and be absolutely relentless,” causing some recruits to cry,
said James Dalman, who was infantry in the Army Reserves and
National Guard for six years, on his website.
Although the shark attack method was “mean, nasty, and
overwhelming,” and a “deeply unpleasant experience, it does serve
an important purpose — preparing troops for stressful situation
including combat,” he said.
But now it is gone because screaming centimeters from anyone’s
face, even recruits’ faces, is not cool during Coronavirus.
I feel very sad because another surf reference has been removed
from the military but mostly because movies will suffer deeply. In
the future there will be no more Major Panyne…
No more Stripes…
No more Biloxi Blues…
No more Jarhead…
No more Officer and a Gentleman…
No more Full Metal Jacket.
Heartbreaking.
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Quit-lit: “Why do I still surf? I never
have any fun. For something that gave me so much joy, and great
memories, this sucks!”
By Karl Von Fanningstadt
Surfing, calcified as personal ritual…
He looks out the windshield of his poorly maintained
2014 Toyota Tacoma PreRunner, eyes aimed, blankly, at the
horizon.
He sees the waves breaking down the cliff, solid and glassy
four-foot runners. He should probably go out, he thinks.
He’s already driven all this way, might as well, except that he
doesn’t feel like it, not wanting to drag the albatross that is his
self-consciously bulked body and unceasingly diminishing mind down
the cliff trail.
It would be easier to go home and watch TV or sleep.
He sits in his truck, unable to decide whether to go out. On the
one hand, sinking even further into his mental quicksand, he just
doesn’t want to, on the other, there hasn’t been decent surf in two
months since he last surfed and it’s good now.
Thinking that there was potential, however small, that a session
could produce maybe one ounce of joy, he decides he’s going to just
do it. More likely, it will be a story he can talk to his mom about
next time she calls in order to make her think he’s fine.
He parks his car and pulls his performance five-fin convertible
shortboard, which he’s going to ride thruster because he doesn’t
think the setup actually makes a difference, from his board
bag.
He holds it out in front of himself, looking at it with
disgust.
“This board fucking sucks,” he mumbles, oblivious to the other
beachgoers who stare at him as they walk past.
Truth is, the board doesn’t suck, he just wants something to
complain about. He actually surfs it better than any other board he
has in the last eight years.
He makes his way down the cliff, opting for trunks and a top
because he didn’t want to hassle with his short-sleeve full-suit he
hates because it has a back zip.
All the way down he can’t stop thinking about all the lippers
he’s planning to do, but probably won’t be able to, because he
sucks, trying to temper the thoughts of the fat-assed black girl he
saw in the grocery store the other day.
He makes it down to the beach and counts fifty surfers out all
down the beach. There were only three or four guys out when he
first started checking.
He should have known.
Every white-collar young professional douchebag being able to
work from home these days, the beach is infested, every Bryce,
Aiden, and Connor trying to break off a piece of the surf
lifestyle.
He gets mad and angrily puts on his leash. It’s his own fault,
that fucking asshole.
Again, he should have known.
He walks into the water.
“Fuck that’s cold!”
He stops for a few moments, considering whether or not he would
be that guy who doesn’t even paddle out and just leaves, but
decides against it, because it would be embarrassing to walk back
up dry. He shuffles in the water up to his waist and then jumps
over a wave and starts paddling.
It’s usually a breeze for him to get out into the lineup, but
today he is struggling. His arms feel stuck in molasses, weighed
down by the past two months of inactivity. After a dozen minutes,
which feels unquantifiably longer, he makes it out to the inside
lineup.
He is out of breath.
“Why do I still do this? I never have any fun. For something
that was so great and provided so much joy to me, as well as many
great memories, this fucking sucks. I should just quit,” he thinks,
in between those thousand other non-sequitur thoughts that race
through one’s head at all times, in his case now, mostly “Big
butts!… baby back ribs!”
Such is the hackneyed facile life of a nobody who lacks
imagination and cannot even tempt himself to try at anything new,
his hobbies retained, calcified as personal ritual, in spite of
their staleness.
“Maybe I just need something different… god I’m
pretentious!”
Suddenly, he sees a set coming on the outside.
He’s not going to make it, it’s going to break before he can
lazy, faux duck dive with his knees under it, so he paddles for the
preceding pre-full set inside left and somehow catches it.
He takes off, bottom turns and hits the lip hard backside, his
tail, astonishingly, getting above it.
He plays with the wave’s lip, flicking its edges and producing
jets of spray with his jittery stick, until he rides it to
completion with one final cutback into a foamy, whitewater
explosion on the deep inside.
He thinks, “Whoa! Where the fuck did that come from? That
was fun!”
Feeling jazzed, he looks back out to the water and decides
against paddling back out, figuring that was the best he was going
to do. He notices a man on the beach taking photos of people in the
water who happens to keep glancing at him. Standing near the trail,
he’s going to have to pass the guy back up to the car.
“I wonder if that guy got that one?… Probably looked shit. I
mean, it will be embarrassing if he did, right?… yeah, of course….
Oh well… Maybe?”
He walks past the camera guy.
Nothing.
The guy ignores him, instead aiming his camera towards some
college-aged, young professional (he can’t tell how old anyone is)
kooks, snapping photos of them surfing their foamies on the
inside.
“Douchebags…”
He makes his way back up to the car, the thoughts about maybe
getting a new board and surfing more occupying his thoughts halfway
up the trail disintegrating in the morning air.
“Fuck me,” he says to himself, thinking about the effects of
childbirth on Nicki Minaj’s
implants.
The inertia of his cliché life decays any further thoughts of
him quitting… until the next swell at least.
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Requiem for a Dream: “It is incumbent upon
us all, everyone here, to stop and pour one out for Surfer magazine
then galvanize to screw the VAL!”
By Chas Smith
It's go time.
BeachGrit is a fantastic place. You
are here and you are what makes it fantastic. Oh, that reads so
cloying but is true. Derek Rielly, legend in the game, created
something, I jumped aboard and we’ve been doing our damndest to
simply provide laughs without filter for years now.
Something to talk about.
Something for us.
Sharks instead of advertorial even though you hate sharks and
would prefer advertorial.
We’ve all know, for years, that print is dead. Magazines don’t
work. Technology, humanity, has moved on and tastes have changed
and etc. etc. etc. but the death of Surfer really and
truly hurts.
I remember the first Surfer I ever owned. I was down in
Carlsbad, from Oregon, visiting my favorite cousins and favorite
uncle, Uncle Dave, who was better than Indiana Jones.
It was my birthday and they took me to Carlsbad Pipelines surf
shop. I could pick any normal priced item I wanted (no surfboards,
wetsuits etc.). I picked a Surfer magazine.
Uncle Dave tried to pivot me to some surf book, seeing that a
magazine is a lousy birthday present, but I held firm.
That’s what I wanted and I treated it like a rare illuminated
manuscript, dusting its cover, making sure none of its pages showed
wear.
Surfer magazine was something. An idea and feeling more
than semi-permanent nothing.
I went on to write for Derek Rielly at Stab, Chris Cœtê
at Transworld, became Editor-of-Living-Large at
Surfing for Travis Ferrē where we spat down the hall at
Surfer but, damn it, Surfer was the “Bible of the
Sport.”
It was what mattered.
And now it doesn’t.
Fuck.
But oh.
Is it time for BeachGrit to start printing magazines
simply to keep thumb in eye?