If only these walls could talk etc.

Surfing’s most enduring filmmaker, certainly its tallest, the Los Angeles-born Jack McCoy, is selling his architect-designed Sydney home for around three-mill US.

McCoy, who is seventy-three and who’s been in rough health with an unspecified illness the past few years, bought the old Crackerbox House, those ugly, post-war joints made in the nineteen fifties, at 51 Trappers Way, Avalon Beach, in 1998.

Eight years later, McCoy and his wife Kelly hired the noted Australian architect Peter Stutchbury, famous for designing “structures so sensitive to their site they converse with the bush, the shore or the paddock surrounding them” to create what they would re-name Paradise View by Stutchbury.

Stutchbury is a classic sorta cat.

Six years ago, when The Australian interviewed him, the life-long surfer was living in a tent after a divorce.

Reluctant, at first, to expose his “very personal abode” to further publicity, Stutchbury agrees to a tour of the once vacant block where his tent rests on a 48 square metre wooden platform incorporating an en suite, a bedroom and a prefabricated kitchen that walls one side of a shaded veranda. “It makes you realise how little you need,” he says, boiling the kettle for mugs of tea.

His desire to pare back coincided with packing up the West Head house where he’d lived with his former wife, landscape architect Phoebe Pape and their three children. “As I was taking everything out and putting it in boxes I thought really and truly…” The pink bathtub that had stood in one of the tree-high pavilions he’d designed for his family now sits amid straggly acacias out front of the tent. Inside there’s a fridge, a single gas burner to cook on if it’s too wet for an open fire, a flat-screen TV on top of the chest of drawers in the bedroom, and an old shearer’s table where we sit.

Dressed in jeans and elastic-sided boots, his silver hair laps the collar of his pale blue shirt. Now 60, he no longer surfs regularly like he did in his younger days, camping along the coastline, but his casual style suits this place. “The only hassle with a tent is the flapping,” he says of the wind that gathers force, snapping at guy ropes under a darkening sky. Once the squall hits I’m wishing for a sweater. “You’re seeing it at its worst,” he apologises. “This is as confrontational as it gets.”

Back to McCoy’s joint, it was built on the wrong side of the northern beaches’ peninsula if you want to check the surf, it looks across the flat Pittwater side, boats, pretty sunsets, that sorta thing, but with its minimalist, floor-to-ceiling, feel the outdoors vibe, it’s easy to agree with the selling agent who calls it “jaw-dropping.”

Fairfax real estate page Domain noted the house had been visited by “some of surfing’s biggest names over the years, including Kelly Slater, Andy Irons and Joel Parkinson.”

McCoy’s been riding out the COVID thing up at Scott’s Head on the mid-north coast, five hours drive out of Sydney, where he has another joint.

Make an offer here. 

Take Pipeline out of the world title equation and what have you got?

I’ll start with this: I am an avid WSL fan.

I can’t get enough competitive surfing. I’m a groupie of the highest order. The old adage goes: the cursed punter would bet on two flies crawling up a wall.

I’m even worse. I’d spend half my Sunday watching four-person heats in Portuguese at a Brazilian two star if it’s all there is on offer.

Despite the bin-fire served up over the Covid period I still support the League.

I even run a fantasy comp with some mates. On the WSL platform (sorry Surfvival). It’s accompanied by a Whatsapp group chat. All the participants as one-eyed and easy-pleased as me.

I’ve come dead-last three years running. But that’s not the point.

The very fact micro-communities like this exist, dependent on the WSL ecosystem, is a sign that they’re still doing something right.

Usually at this time of year, coming into December, the chat would be running hot. A world title race on offer. Requalification dramas. The thrill of the finals.

As much as we’d consume any comp the WSL feeds us, there’s nothing like the excitement of the big league. And the Hawaii leg is the cherry on top.

But now, the chat is eerily quiet.

Only the odd clip being shared here and there. Why? Because there’s a Pipe-sized hole this Christmas.

Yes we still have Haleiwa.

But the egg nog-dipped crescendo of the Banzai Pipeline and the associated world title / Triple Crown drama is as much a part of my Yuletide routine as frenzied last minute shopping and annually-defrosted familial trauma.

I miss it.

Sure, I’m just one fan. The WSL has a bigger plan at play.

But I’m still allowed to feel robbed. In fact there’s no World Championship events at all between September 2021 and February ‘22 (give or take a day: Pipe waiting period starts on the 29th Jan)

That’s five months off air. Talk about a momentum killer.

I realise other sports run on similar seasons but if anything the year-round nature of the WSL season was it’s selling point. Now, instead of my pals discussing WSL-led narratives – Gabby’s dogged determination, Felipe’s recalcitrance, Wade’s litreage, Morgan’s hair – we’re left to fill the void. Do our own research. Ruminate as to why the WSL is like it is.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. It’s a common feature in history.

When the proles aren’t busy they tend to turn on their masters. Give us this type of downtime and conspiracy theories thrive. Conjecture and opinion rule.

Erosion of trust in institutions is the natural result.

We hold the WSL up to the light. Tilt and rotate so that it is illuminated from every angle. Like a cheap Christmas decoration, we find some sparkle on the surface. But apply any real pressure, any real scrutiny, and it crumbles in our hand.

I get that a lot of the changes to the Tour have been positive.

But Pipe. December. World Title. Why you gotta go mess with that?

To quote Gabby himself on the changes to the format. “I don’t know about business. I don’t know how it works. They tried to do something different.”

But is different always better?

It’s a common theme among C Suite execs like Erik Logan. Move into a new organisation. Create change for change’s sake. September, according to the WSL, is a good month for waves at a variety of global surf spots.

But it effectively rules out the competition ever again finishing at Pipe.

Why?

Is it because in his time running the show Erik Logan has positioned the WSL as a media house where the audience themselves, not the surfers or the comps, have become the product?

Where all decisions are no longer based around the mantra of “World’s best surfers in the world’s best waves” but instead “How can we best market ourselves to potential advertisers?”

Is it because the WSL is being slowly hollowed out and commodified so that it is a more attractive, “safer” option for big spending corporates to waste their money on?

Turning a deadshit, dumbcunt but still unique sports outfit into a generic, compliant, corporate glory hole?

While at the same time forgetting about the tradition, the culture, the fans, that created it in the first place?

Or am I being too harsh?

Reading into it too much?

Probably.

Most of what I’ve just said is, I’m sure, a load of shit.

But idle minds beget impure faults.

We wouldn’t be having this conversation if Pipe was about to start!