Still, Ultimate Surfer has not sold the sport out
in a way that matters. That ship sailed decades ago.
Gidget was the first to tell everybody that surfing is
the “ultimate” and we’ve been whipping that poor noun-adjective
hybrid ever since—from Surfing: the Ultimate
Pleasure, to Mark Foo’s own-death-foretold
“ultimate thrill, ultimate price” quote, to the 1995 Quiksilver
G-land Pro being headlined as “the ultimate event.”
It’s like when my mom told me, as a kid, to repeat the word
“elephant” over and over until the word dissolved in meaning from
huge wrinkled animal to gibberish.
Ultimate Surfer, the Kelly
Slater-fronted Surf Ranch-based reality TV show that debuted last
Monday on ABC, does nothing to restore meaning to
“ultimate.”
Where the examples above may have a loose or slippery hold on
“ultimate,” Kelly’s show is 100% detached.
It is the ultimate misuse of “ultimate”—unless we’ve kicked the
word over to mean “last in a series,”
meaning the sport is forever done with reality TV, in which
case well-played Champ!
All that being the case, Ultimate Surfer haters are out
here swinging too freely on both Slater and the show
itself.
Ultimate Surfer, to begin with, has not sold the sport out in a
way that matters. That ship sailed decades ago. Duke put his name
on cheap floral-print canvas sneakers. Perennial world tour
bridesmaid and I Ching-throwing mystic Cheyne Horan
enthusiastically flogged Sunkist orange soda.
“My job, basically, is to fulfill
the wishes of the company [Rip Curl],” Tom Curren told me in a 1996
interview, “and just do whatever they want me to do, in whatever
way they want me to do it. We’re all polluted and perverted to one
degree or another by being pro surfers, or working in the surf
industry.”
Ultimate Surfer hasn’t done anything to the sport, in other
words, that hasn’t been done time and again since we were riding
wooden boards and pulling lobster off the reef between sets.
Slater himself, furthermore, has not besmirched his reputation
with Ultimate Surfer, as a lot of hotted-up online commentators
have said.
That ship has sailed, too.
I’ve been a platinum-level Slater fan since George HW Bush took a hard line
against broccoli, and my awe and appreciation for
what Kelly Slater does in the water today, as he approaches AARP
qualification, is higher than it was 30 years ago. He is the goat
to which all other goats aspire.
But as far as Slater’s reputation for things done on this side
of the beach—statements made, causes defended (or not), projects
developed—we’ve got Jimmy Slade on one end
of the timeline and anti-vax-adjacent bullshit on the
other, and from where I sit Ultimate Surfer is Kelly
more or less shooting par.
‘So never mind the sellout argument, and never mind Kelly.
Ultimate Surfer fails for two reasons.
1. No Sunny Garcia. My viewing experience is limited, but I know
a reality TV star when I see one, and Sunny was a 175-pound
swinging fist of charisma in Boarding House: North Shore
(watch the full 2003 debut episode
here). Nobody in Ultimate Surfer is even close.
No star, no
ratings.
2. Location, location, location. Surf Ranch is to the ocean what
Ultimate Surfer commentator Joe Turpel is to Sunny Garcia. The
ocean, at the end of the day, is the only thing the sport has going
for it. Even MTV’s Surf Girls knew
this—although the show hedged its bets with
glistening-wet flesh and a thousand Roxy bikinis.
But if the ocean is our one thing, it is nonetheless a very good
thing, the best, yes, the ultimate thing.
And on Kelly’s show, the ocean didn’t make the cut.
Ultimate Surfer . . . you’re fired!
(You like this? Matt Warshaw delivers a surf history essay every
Sunday, PST. All of ’em a pleasure to read. Maybe time to subscribe
to Warshaw’s Encyclopedia of
Surfing, yeah? Three bucks a month.)
