"Slater, in middle age, is
anti-factual, irresponsible, and flagrantly narcissistic."
I fired this piece up last Saturday, mid-afternoon,
during John Florence’s Round One heat at Pipeline, and while my
feelings for the WSL remain as Pushme-Pullyu
as ever, my God it feels great to again be CT
live-streaming.
Professional surfing is radically, stupidly untrue to the
surfing experience I’ve been living for the past three-plus
decades. But along with Mason Ho
clips, CT events have long been the only form of surf
media I dependably enjoy—and Mason is a distant second,
because the stream is both real-time and communal, and logging
onto the BeachGrit comments thread this morning felt like
walking into Cheers.
That said, and while the Round One surf is incredible, this is
not 100% entertainment and uplift and femur-splitting tubes. WSL
commentary is mealier and more corpo-speak than ever, hours pass
before any surfers are actually eliminated, and I’m never more than
a few minutes away from being irritated anew that Pipe is the 2022
season opener, rather than the closer, as God and logic
intended.
Kelly Slater, meanwhile, continues to be a gnat-sized
existential crisis flying inside my head.
It started with the wavepool, but the buzzing
gets louder with each of his new anti-vax vaporings, especially
during the recent Novak Djokovic episode (“The Left hates
logic,” Slater said in the comments section of a covid-related
NYT Instagram post, adding, “It’s very clear vaccinations
will not fix this situation.”), at which point I had no choice but
to
Neil Young my entire catalog of affection and
respect for Slater.
Or that’s what I thought, anyway.
Kelly, 50 years old and
15 pounds above fighting
weight, precision-dropped into his first wave of
the contest, at Backdoor, pulled in, spelunked his way to daylight
and finished with a rainmaking forehand carve, earning an 8.57
score from the judges and a pathetic flip-flopping cheer from yours
truly.
Slater, in middle age, is anti-factual, irresponsible, and
flagrantly narcissistic. But in those stretched-out moments at
Backdoor, live and during the many replays to follow, watching this
aging surf Jedi weave through the shadows, calm and utterly in
control, I am tractor-beamed into wanting his score to go higher,
and hoping that he stays on track this week all the way to the
winner’s podium. This feeling leaps right over the thought
process.
Then regret follows, and for a while (as in right now) the two
overlap and I am as ungrounded as Buster Keaton
doing the splits between two moving cars.
Reigning world champion
Gabe Medina pulled out of the Masters, saying he is
“not well” and has “emotional issues to deal with.” As with Slater,
I have at times struggled to get past the Gabe’s
politics (this video
hookup with Bolsonaro and Bibi being the low
point), but I have an appreciation that borders
on awe for his no-fucks-given hitman approach to competition, and
his polite but staunch refusal to play the happy back-slapping
world champ.
What all WCT-level surfers do while competing not surfing
as we commoners know it, and to repeat what I said at the top of
the page, it is in many respects a perversion of the sport. I just
want to get wet, raise the heart rate, and if possible snuggle
up to a little piece of Zen; championship Tour surfers are doing
parkour while sidearming ninja throwing-stars. Fun is not
completely off the menu for a title-contending pro, but it is
secondary to winning, and Medina understands this better than any
pro surfer I’ve ever seen.
He is a
bullshit-free competitor, and whatever his underlying
reasons are for taking time off—working through issues with his
family, dropping all that heavy world-tour armor, not traveling,
removing himself from everybody’s expectations (his own included),
checking in to see if he still loves surfing for its own sake (my
guess is all of these things)—it speaks well of Medina, the most
private of athletes, to enter this key juncture of his life and
career with what appears to be a bullshit-free attitude.
If Medina never comes back to the CT, that’s fine. He is the
best all-around competitor of his generation by a wide margin, and
a fourth world title would only underline this fact, not establish
it.
I expect Medina will return, though, and there are plenty of
examples from surfing’s past to suggest he’ll in fact come
back stronger. Tom
Curren had his most dominant year as a competitor
after a one-year layoff.
Joey Cabell more or less quit surfing twice (once to
work on cars, once to open the Chart House), and returned stronger
both times, both as a free-surfer and a competitor.
Margo
Oberg won a world title, failed to defend, dropped out
for five years, and came back to win another three titles. And Mark
Occhilupo’s mental health break may have saved his life, and the
return that followed is surfing’s greatest comeback story.
The thing you don’t want to do, as Andy Irons proved, is come
back before the work is done.
(You like this? Matt Warshaw delivers a surf 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.)
