"One of my life purposes is to show and hopefully inspire vulnerability."

Six days ago, Californian surfer Griffin Colapinto shocked surf fans by beating the world’s sharpest surfer in waves waist-high and under at the MEO Pro Portugal.

Colapinto, who is twenty-three, beat two-time world champ John John Florence in his semi-final before besting Filipe Toledo in the final. Kelly Slater and Kolohe Andino were scalped in earlier heats. 

His bulletproof confidence shown through the event, one in which he would rule as lord and master, has now been revealed as a chimera after Colapinto released two pages of his event diary today. 

Under the heading Portugal Feels, Colapinto writes, 

“I have had mixed feelings about this contest. At 1st I think I’m going to do good then when I’m in the water I feel like a little kid not knowing my place. It’s been hard trying my different equipment not quite sure what I’m going to ride in the contests. I’ve also noticed myself having bad self-talk and mind movies of myself losing in the contest. My surfing feels inconsistent. I may be making this feel too much about the contest when the funnest things are away from it that I do with our crew and friends. I will make the fun stuff in-between what I am here for. The contest can be a bonus.

“I think about being back on the Challenger Series and what other people will think of me. The bottom line is I determine my happiness. Not what other people think. My pursuit for my World Title is a game I’m playing with myself, to see what I’m capable of.” 

Colapinto expanded upon the themes of self-doubt and not living under self-deception in the message page. 

I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to post these journal writings but I remembered that one of my life purposes is to show and hopefully inspire vulnerability. You’ll notice the vulnerability in my spelling and hand writing;) hehe I Did these writings about a quarter of the way through our Portugal trip and a day before the contest started. It’s pretty nuts what the mind will throw at you when you’re under pressure. I feel one of the best ways to handle it, is to get it out of your head and on to paper. Although the hardest part is being truly honest with your self. You really gotta ask yourself a question like, “Am I feeling confident going into this?” If you feel the friction in your stomach when you ask yourself this question then you probably aren’t feeling the way you wanna feel. So if you feel the stomach friction go from there and say “no I am Not feeling confident” so now you accept the elephant in the room. Then you ask yourself “why”. Then you will go deeper and start realizing how you are viewing your situation and More.. Moral of the story is ask yourself questions and figure out how you can get yourself to feel better. This message is for the people that seem to keep getting knocked down but never give up. Your time is coming

 

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History did thus record Colapinto in heroic pose on podium at Peniche, destined to shake the world.

The power of evocation sends shivers down the spine.

“No athletes and officials from Russia will be invited to participate or attend ISA events until further notice."

What is history but one bloody thing after another?

It’s 2022 and we are still settling things by blowing each other to rags with the guns and bombs that serve the mega rich?

I sure wish we had a Swedish female special needs teenager to warn us that for the good of mankind, among other things, this is no way to behave.

And speaking of behaving, even though surfing has nothing to do with going to war against your brother man (unless you wanna go surf Snapper or maybe take longboard contests away from Joel Tudor), our beloved International Surfing association is locked in a shit fight with the Russian Surfing Federation.

Who’d a thunk it?

Firing the first salvo, the ISA is standing with Ukraine,

“No athletes and officials from Russia will be invited to participate or attend ISA events until further notice… will not consider staging any ISA events in Russia for the foreseeable future…The global surfing community is shocked and appalled by the awful act of aggression by Russia and Belarus’ role to facilitate their invasion of Ukraine…We are unequivocal in our views on this crisis and we stand in full solidarity with Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. This is a human tragedy that requires us all to take a strong stance and send a message that such violence will not be tolerated nor forgotten. The ISA’s decisions serve to ensure the safety of the public, athletes and officials, and protect the integrity of our competitions…We remain in contact with the Ukrainian Surfing Federation to offer support to the Ukrainian surf community and we hope peace is restored as quickly as possible”.

The RSF responded with its own defensive maneuver,

“Today, the Russian Surfing Federation held a meeting to discuss the position on the sanctions that all Russian athletes fell under due to the current political situation in the world. Following the Russian Olympic Committee and in support of our talented athletes, we want to note that sport cannot be politicized; sport unites, does not discriminate, and cannot act as a tool of manipulation; the exclusion of Russian athletes from international competitions is illegal and contrary to Olympic principles. For our part, we will immediately send our application to the International Surfing Federation and the European Surfing Federation in order to protect the rights of our athletes to participate in international competitions and take all possible measures to stop discrimination”.

And there you have it, the power of strongly worded emails.

Jesus.

Why don’t we just send in the businessmen that caused all this and have them hash it out?

Personally, I like that idea. Like the Russian-black-market-Levi’s-501-Jeans seller billionaire who just offered a million bucks to anyone that would go and arrest Putin.

Or maybe just take Putin to the Maldives and teach him how to surf?

But for God’s sake, please, keep him away from the Goldie. I can already sea Rabbit standing if front of the Russian tanks at the Kirra gazebo.

And we need Rabbit alot more than that Russian bloke.

"Our first and last and greatest shaping guru."

Yesterday, news from Princeville, Kauai, that Dick Brewer, the eighty-five-year-old designer and shaper of “incredible North Shore guns” was facing his last days on earth. 

Before he climbs the golden stairway, pushes open the gilded gate and squeezes into God’s loving arms, I figured, good time to hit Matt Warshaw, he of the Encylopedia of Surfing, for a take on Dick’s wild, wild life. 

Following a series of posts from his wife Sherry warning of his imminent passing, Dick Brewer has just posted a farewell to the world on Facebook. When he does ascend to heaven, it’s gonna be a real big hole in the shaping game. For those who came in late, what did Dick Brewer bring to the table? 

Incredible guns, just Sabrejet-level equipment for North Shore surfers in the ’60s and ’70s. On top of that, and maybe even a bigger deal in terms of his place in surfing, was the Brewer character. He was the guru, the man on the mountain, the shaper everybody knelt down before. Figuratively, mostly, but I think maybe literally too!

How good are his boards? 

Tom Parrish of Lightning Bolt fame and the post-Brewer gun king, said this about Dick. “He stands alone in just about every regard. If you go back to the early ’60s and see how advanced his designs were, then add in every single change for the better, from fixing the deck rocker, to coming up with that three-stage bottom rocker, to miniguns, full guns, and much much more—there is just simply nobody who did what Brewer did. Now, here’s something else about Brewer. He was a huge natural talent when it came to design. But he wasn’t all that interested in finishing his boards nicely. Contrast that with Diff [Mike Diffenderfer], who probably shaped the most beautiful boards ever made, but who did not have that kind of innate sense. We’re splitting hairs, a little, because Diff’s boards were really good too. Nobody touched him when it came to fine sanding. But if you’re talking about pure design, then it is Brewer, hands down.”

Gimme a little background, he’s from the mid-west, yeah? Minnesota or somewhere? Split his crummy life in his twenties to become a legend in the Islands? 

Born in Minnesota but moved to Long Beach, California, with his family at age three. Dick was meant to be an engineer, like his dad and grandfather, and he worked on dragsters before surfboards. Then in 1960 he went to Hawaii for the first time, loved it, moved there for good and almost immediately was working out how to build better guns. His reputation later was for being kinda spacy, but originally and for quite a few years Brewer was coming at board design from an engineers perspective, kind of like what Bob Simmons did in the ’40s and early ’50s.

There’s conjecture on Brewer’s contribution to the shortboard revolution, when boards were losing six inches in length every session until the logs were whittled down to seven-foot blades. What’s your take? Did he simply refine what was being done by McTavish and co or was he a revolutionary? 

Brewer was already trimming down the longboard into something closer to what we’d recognized as a gun. But where he was basically improving on something that already existed, McTavish and Nat showed up with those hideous but game-changing deep-vee boards, and those things I think forced Brewer to re-think the next move. He would have got where he was going either way, but the vee-bottom sped the process up.

He had a wild, and not always happy life, junkie, infant died in a car wreck, which he survived. Can you describe that mid-seventies period? 

It’s murky. Drew Kampion’s take is probably the only one we’ll get, and I think Drew did his best, but I think the whole deal was more crippling and permanent than what we get there. Brewer was still the guy for Waimea boards, for a long time—Bugs had a big yellow Brewer in his quiver, all the way into the 1980s—but for the most part, Waimea aside, Dick wasn’t really a force after about 1973. Bolt took over the space Brewer had owned for 10 or so years prior.

Few lawsuits in there, too, yeah? What’s the juice on those? 

Drew’s article gets into all that, and again Drew I think wants to paint Dick as the victim, and maybe there is some truth to that. But my take is that Brewer was a terrible businessman. Great shaper, but not the guy you want reading and advising on the contracts.

From memory, he was pulled out of obscurity in the nineties when surfing got hit by a wild nostalgia streak and enjoyed a second wind for his harvest years. What happened there?

No, I think it was that he made some amazing tow boards for Laird Hamilton. Which makes sense, in terms of Brewer getting back to engineering high-speed equipment.

And, now, Dick ain’t here. What’s the sum of his life?

Apart from the boards being gold-standard, and apart from being our first and last and greatest shaping guru, Brewer’s contribution was to look outside of surfing. His engineering background, everything he knew about cars, about machining, about speed and drive and torque—he brought all of that to bear in the shaping room. Lucky for our sport, he wasn’t born and raised on the beach. He loved surfing best of all, but he was smart enough to look beyond surfing. To our great benefit.

(You like this? Maybe time to subscribe to Warshaw’s Encyclopedia of Surfing, yeah? Three bucks a month, can y’believe.)