Mainstream media continues to decry the
World Surf League’s “cruel” and “depressing” mid-year cull: “Have
grace and mercy completely vanished from this swathe of humanity?
If you have tears prepared, shed them now.”
By Chas Smith
"Hey WSL, what is wrong with you guys?"
We surf fans, we watchers of webcasts and
listeners to Joe Turpel, have now had a month plus to really sink
our teeth into the World Surf League’s “mid-year cut.”
Theoretically, I suppose, we knew it was on the boil some time ago,
or at least before Covid, but was shelved until this year though
still, I didn’t think about it until Bells where the professional
surfers, themselves, tried to stage a coup.
It was quashed by Erik Logan’s rusty cudgel and on to Margaret
River everyone marched, we surf fans, we students in shades of
Rabbit Bartholomew, wondered which of our gladiators would live and
which would die gruesome public deaths.
And yet, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum.
Mainstream media, for reasons either unknown or related to the
new Apple television series “Make or Break,” have taken a precious
moment to turn eyes away from war in Ukraine, Johnny Depp, Amber
Heard to focus on the plight of those professional surfers who died
those deaths and/or were sent back to the salt mines of
Snapper.
De-leagured as it were.
The Guardian’s headline screams, No one really likes it’:
brutal rule change breaks hearts in World Surf League
with Kolohe Andino quoted as saying, “It’s just kind of hard the
whole cut thing. No one really likes it. We’re all friends on tour
and we all love each other, so you don’t want to knock the guy off
tour. It just seems like it’s a TV show a little bit, like drama
all the time. Watching the women’s the other day it was just
heartbreaking with the girls that were losing. They were crying all
day.”
Yahoo! Sports ups the ante by declaring, ‘Devastated’: Surfing world
shattered over ‘heartbreaking’ scenes with legendary
surf photographer Jimmy “Cane” Wilson adding, “Watching Owen
Wright’s interview and he has a day and a half to make a decision
on his career. Is this mid-year cut supposed to be fun and
exciting, cause all I feel is sadness?”
Others weigh in too, begging the WSL to stop the cruelty and
asking WSL leadership “What’s wrong with you guys?”
Etc.
But who could have guessed the plight of guillotined
professional surfers would rank amidst the sufferings of the world
and/or Johnny Depp + Amber Heard?
Did the World Surf League overplay its hand here? Will public
perception turn sharply against?
Wild times.
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Apple TV’s Make or Break docuseries a
“near-absolute triumph” says surfing’s foremost authority Matt
Warshaw, “You may not like the show, and that’s fine. But don’t be
the two-star troll who comments without understanding the
assignment.”
By Matt Warshaw
Make or Break is "bliss compared to the
smiley brain-dead presentation we get from the
WSL itself."
Ten years ago somebody posted a two-star Amazon review
for the book version of Encyclopedia of Surfing, noting that “it
is an encyclopedia!” and because of that they
“haven’t bothered reading it.”
And folks, this is why EOS has a 4.4 star Amazon rating instead
of the perfect 5 to which all encyclopedists aspire.
The point being: a thing should be judged—whatever the thing is,
book, movie, TV show, etc—based primarily on what that thing set
out to do. If you go online to buy an encyclopedia and three days
later take delivery on an encyclopedia, your lead criticism should
not be that it is an encyclopedia.
Keep this in mind because I am here to report that the new Apple
TV+ reality show Make
or Break, which debuted on Friday and is co-produced by
WSL, is a near-absolute triumph.
You may not like the show, and that’s fine. But don’t be the
two-star troll who comments without understanding the assignment.
Remember what Make or Break set out to do.
It is not a documentary. It is not even about riding waves,
exactly. Make or Break is a reality show set within the
grind and turmoil of the WCT, and as a viewer, to my eyes anyway,
that grind and turmoil is bliss compared to the
smiley brain-dead presentation we get from the
WSL itself, and hold that thought, we’ll circle back in a
moment.
So judge Make or Break on those terms. And if you still
don’t think the show has come out of the gate scoring a
low-to-mid-range 9, then you haven’t watched enough reality TV, and
shame on you for even taking part in this conversation—but also
congratulations on avoiding what is by and large a basement-level
zone of entertainment.
Reality TV has been off my radar for 30 years.
I watched Season One of MTV’s The Real World in
1992—back when teenaged Kelly Slater was eyeballing his first world
title while the rest of us scandal-hopped between the Menendez
Brothers and Joey Buttafuoco—but decided after two or three
episodes that reality TV was not for me, and apart from
sniff-testing our sport’s own dependably cringey offerings (see
here and
here
and especially
here), I haven’t watched since.
Not until I read
JP Currie’s BeachGrit article on Make or
Break, anyway, which includes an enthusiastic riff
on Drive to Survive, the Netflix smash hit set in the
gilded snakepit that is Formula One racing.
The same production team is behind both shows, and Drive to
Survive, Currie writes, has proven to be so incredibly
watchable—even among us geeks for whom the world “formula” conjures
algebraic Xs and Ys instead of car racing—that a
knockoff based on our very own World Championship Tour was
practically three-quarters of the way to an Emmy before it
debuted.
And thus much of my recent Covid convalescence was spent
watching Season One of Drive to Survive—which is every bit
as good as Currie says.
Even so, I did not share Currie’s belief that a WCT
spinoff was a near-sure thing. Two reasons. Formula One
racing, batshit crazy as it is on so many levels, is understandable
to anybody who has sat behind the wheel of a car and thought about
crashing, which means anybody who has sat behind the wheel of a
car. Riding waves, viewer-relatability-wise, is the very
opposite.
Second, the Rockefellerian levels of money involved
with Formula One (a championship-contending team will blow through
something close to a half-billion per year) means that the people
involved—owners, managers, drivers, everybody—must perform under
levels of pressure that people in our little sand-flecked
world cannot even comprehend.
Mullet-flaunting playboy billionaire Vijay Mallya, for example,
former Member of Parliament and owner of the Force India FI team,
up to his neck in debt and alleged financial crimes after
bankrupting his once-successful commercial airline, fled India just
ahead of the law during the filming of Drive to Survive.
Formula One and pro surfing, in other words and despite what JP
Currie thinks, is not an apples-to-apples proposition.
But I’ve just watched the first two episodes of Make or
Break, and guess what? It doesn’t matter.
Pro surfing cannot compete with Formula One for the reasons I’ve
described above, yes. But we have attributes of our own, things
that I often do not see because the subject is so near and dear,
and the Make or Break’s producers have zeroed in on those
people, places, and characteristics.
Zero chance the show will match Drive to Survive for
viewer share. But with Make or Break we nonetheless
have something that feels true to the sport (the tiny sliver
of the sport that is competitive surfing, anyway), while also
having the potential to be a modest hit in the general
marketplace.
We have Tyler Wright and Gabe Medina, both of whom, to my
admittedly biased eye, are more compelling personalities than any
of the Drive to Survive gasoline alley hotshots.
We have women in general. Survive is a high-bred
sausage party.
We have sharks, and while I appreciate the drama an apex
predator brings to the table, I was both grateful and impressed
that the producers chose not to overplay the shark fatality just
prior to finals day at the 2020 Honolua Bay Maui Pro. The death was
instead presented, correctly, as a trigger for the WSL’s quick and
bold decision to move the event to Pipeline, where the women
competed for the first time.
We have this quote from the lovably manic defending world champ
Ítalo Ferreira: “The more waves I catch, the more waves I
break.”
And pro surfing still, 35 years after the
WCT’s kitchen table beginnings, retains a DIY element,
which it turns out can be played to an advantage. There is a scene
in second episode of Make or Break where Gabe Medina admits
that he did not want to travel to Australia last year (“people
close to me, they made me go”), and because the trip is
last-minute, and because these are pro surfers and not Formula One
drivers, two-time world champ Medina picks up the phone and calls
three-time world champ Mick Fanning to ask if Mick will coach him
through the Aussie leg. Mick says no but kicks the job over his pal
Andy King.
And just like that Medina and King are a unit.
An agreement must have been signed at some point, but
otherwise, as far as I can tell, there were no managers, agents, or
corpos of any kind involved. Just a few phone calls and text
messages between Gabe, Mick, and Andy.
Did it work? Gabe got two wins and a runner-up in Australia,
moved into the ratings’ lead and never looked back.
(World-title-wise, that is. The personal and professional hurricane
Gabe walked into shortly thereafter will be, along with Kelly
Slater’s 2022 Pipe win, the main storyline of Make or
Break’s Season Two.)
Oddly, surfing itself—the editing and pacing, not the
wave-riding itself—is the weakest part of Make or Break.
It’s an easy fix (show full rides), and I’m guessing
the producers will figure it out as the show
progresses.
If they don’t, I’ll watch every episode anyway.
I cannot sign off without gently putting the boot to the WSL.
There is a real absurdity in the fact that the show within the show
(Make or Break) is 100-times better than the actual show
itself (WSL’s presentation of competitive surfing).
More than an absurdity, in fact, this may be a fatal deficit on
WSL’s part. But it just occurred to me that the WSL cratering
midyear in 2023 would guarantee a fantastic third season for
Make or Break.
(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.)
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Dylan Graves hurling buckets at Bend a few
years back. Vans
Teenage surfer killed in horror river-wave
accident after being trapped under water for six minutes, “Other
surfers flung themselves into the water in an attempt to free him
from the underwater panels that make the wave”
By Derek Rielly
“There was nothing we could do and it was a
helpless situation. It was terrifying.”
In the Deschute River in Bend, Oregon, is a pretty wild
construct, twenty-six air bladders stuck on the river bed
that can be manipulated in real-time to create a rideable wave.
Idea was real simple: Add a little tech to nature and you get a
cheap wavepool for landlocked shredders, paddlers, kids on rafts
and so on.
Gerry Lopez, who lives nearby, digs it.
Now, the joint is closed following the death of
seventeen-year-old local surfer Ben Murphy on Saturday.
Murphy was held underwater for six minutes, trapped by the
underwater panels that make the wave, and only removed from the
water when he was washed downstream after the wave was shut
off.
Despite CPR on the scene and cardiac shock treatment at the
hozzy, Murphy was pronounced dead. Howevs, a faint heartbeat was
detected shortly after and the kid was moved to the ICU for
treatment.
“The St. Charles staff was more than amazing and worked to keep
Ben comfortable and his vitals slowly improved for the first eight
hours,” Ben’s dad Patrick Murphy wrote on Facebook. “He was on
oxygen, tons of medication and was sedated to keep him
comfortable.”
A TV news report told viewers the teen had survived, although
Ben’s organs gradually began to fail and he was pronounced dead,
hours later, by hospital staff.
Surfers jumped into the river in attempt to pull Murphy out.
Another local surfer, Stetson Talley, who’d previously worked as
a lifeguard and who was one of a group of surfers who tried to free
Murphy said, “There was nothing we could do and it was a helpless
situation,” he said. “It was terrifying.”
Talley, who’s been surfing the wave or the past three years,
said it wasn’t unheard of for surfers to get their feet caught in
the cracks between the grates and that all of ‘em had been able to
get their feet out before being sucked under.
Three years ago, Dylan Graves surfed the place with Gerry Lopez
as part of his Weird Waves project with Vans, the short explaining
the mechanics behind the wave.
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“Tantric discipline” by WSL at Margaret
River Pro ensures epic finals day, “If the top five surfers today
were those heading to Trestles to contend for the title, would you
argue with it?
By JP Currie
Toledo, Florence, Robinson, Ewing, Ferreira. Tell
me that a match-up between any two of these men, at any wave on
Tour, would not be a spectacle worth watching?
I’ve got a loose approach to gardening. I keep
the grass short, tend to some modest veg, and leave the rest be.
There are young trees I’m protective of. Some are of uncertain
origin and species, and my mind was to let them grow and see where
we ended up.
Leave them alone, they’ll figure it out.
My dear mum has a very different approach. She relentlessly
prunes and burns and weeds. She cuts to encourage growth.
Where my garden is charmingly unkempt and wild, hers is
manicured within an inch of its life. She removes the weaker plants
so that others might thrive and shine.
Lately, she turned her hand to my garden, nicking and snipping
with her pruning shears. She pulled out some of my young trees by
the roots. I complained. I argued. I told her not to cut that one,
and just to leave that other. But she didn’t listen.
In the end she was right. It’s better for being cut back.
It was a lesson in growth.
You must consider diversity as well as beauty. Space used as
well as space created. Nourish but don’t smother. Prune but don’t
hack. Get rid of some things to stimulate others.
Watch them flourish.
If the top five surfers in the world today were those heading to
Trestles to contend for the title, would you argue with it?
Filipe Toledo, John Florence, Jack Robinson, Ethan Ewing, Italo
Ferreira.
Tell me that a match-up between any two of these men, at any
wave on Tour, would not be a spectacle worth watching?
Within this group there is diversity of culture, approach,
strength and character. There is no weakness.
There’s a long way to go, of course, and the return of one
Gabriel Medina to consider, but this is a top five to tickle any
tastes.
What began as a story about the losers became something very
different. Margaret River had its own tale to tell.
It would not be a story of people hanging on by their
fingernails, but instead of those showing their claws.
From dawn to dusk the entirety of the men’s competition was
completed. A tantric discipline assured the best conditions of the
window and we finished in the dying light of the final hours of the
waiting period.
It wasn’t a particularly tricky call, given the forecast, but
mark it down as a slippage of the hangman’s noose for Jessi
Miley-Dyer nonetheless.
Let’s just cut to the business end and the flowers that bloomed
amidst the West Australian dunescapes.
Filipe Toledo still holds a slender lead in the rankings despite
losing a tight heat to Nat Young in the round of 16. The latter has
buds burgeoning with as much promise as any point in the earlier
iterations of his career.
However, a production disaster meant much of their heat went
unseen in favour of a phone in with Medina. It was the best heat of
the comp so far, with the man in the yellow jersey, no less, and we
missed it.
Italo looked sparky at times, short of a little pizzazz at
others. He was more like his old self, muted and relaxed in post
heat pressers in a very deliberate way. He spoke about good energy
with Jadson, with whom he was staying. But he’ll need to find the
tipping point between vigour and rage going forward.
Barron Mamiya is a surfer I continue to admire. He has a
tigerish power and poise that makes you believe he might attack a
section with blinding ferocity at any given moment. He lost to Jack
Robinson in one of two heats the eventual victor might have lost
today. Robinson’s opening 8.93 was highly questionable, especially
in context of Barron’s waves.
Just 0.13 pts separated the two at the end, and in this you
might surmise that it was close enough to have gone either way, but
this in itself is a problem. Several heats at Bells Beach were
decided by fractions of a point. There were fewer at Margaret
River, but there were incidents where the scoring range between the
judges was an entire point or more.
This should be mitigated by dropping the high and low scores and
taking the average, but on several occasions there were two judges
with identical highest scores and two with identical lowest,
therefore in the three counting scores there was still a point
differential.
This isn’t just a major problem, it was decisive in the outcome
of the event.
Jack Robinson had a scoring wave in his quarter, semi and final
where there was a full point of difference between the judges.
In other words, for three of the six waves that won him the
event, the judges couldn’t agree if the surfing was in the good or
excellent range. In the case of his final with John where the
differential between their heat totals was only 0.64 points, this
judging discrepancy altered the outcome of the event.
See for yourself.
8.0 in the Quarter final vs Jordy – 8.5, 7.5, 8.0, 7.5, 8.5
8.10 in the semi against Ethan – 7.5, 7.5, 8.5, 8.5, 8.3
8.07 in the final against John – 7.3, 8.5, 8.5, 7.5, 8.2
To say this is simply not good enough would be a gross
understatement.
How can heats be justifiably decided by fractions of points with
this spread between judges?
It seems pedantic to constantly harp onto the judges, but this
is a failure in basic competence.
We won’t get transparency or explanation, and I find it odd that
surfers don’t demand it when careers and livelihoods are on the
line. The rise of sports betting in America has led to stat
corrections and in-depth referee reports. Could we see the same
here?
Perhaps that way madness lies.
I’m beginning to think we should just throw the baby out with
the bathwater and recalibrate how we think about professional
surfing entirely.
Perhaps embracing the concept of entertainment is the way to
make our peace with it. When we try to package it like sport it
wriggles and squirms. So why bother? Let’s take it for what it is:
a frivolous, watery dance predicated on rhythm, luck and mystical
energies that none of us understand.
And all said and done, the most entertaining surfers in the
world are more or less the ones we ended up with in the finals at
Margaret River.
A sagely nod to Matt McGillivray, the only surfer to step up to
the plate and forge a lonely redemption arc.
Florence and Ewing were the standout surfers of the event, and
it wasn’t particularly close.
I’ve fully fallen under Ethan Ewing’s spell. I’m almost
compelled to go back and watch his previous stints on Tour to try
and discern the differences between then and now. How did he
conceal such power and talent?
He slices under the lip so precisely that his board might be an
obsidian blade. His head, shoulders and arms are in perfect
synchronicity. They do everything yet nothing. Watching him from a
distance is like looking at clockwork. You can see that it works,
but to appreciate it you need to examine it very, very closely.
Even then you’ll still be baffled.
John Florence looked unbeatable even when he was eventually
beaten. He seemed a victim of his own success at Margaret River.
There was lots of chatter in the booth about his connection and his
winning percentage of 85%. The speed he carried through transitions
was unmatched. His carves buried the entire rail to within an inch
of the nose.
The problem, however, was that we’d seen it before. It was still
unique, but it felt familiar. Even the extraordinary can become
mundane.
Perhaps John was conscious of this when he threw a
hip-dislocatingly beautiful tail slide in the final. It was the
most radical turn of the competition and although he was rewarded
with the highest score of the match-up with an 8.5, really it
should’ve been higher. Any other surfer attempting this
successfully on their opening turn would surely have been given a
high nine. If only anyone else could do it.
Regardless of the loss, Florence is now second in the rankings
and that’s great for us and him.
But we’ll see Gabriel Medina in Indonesia.
“I see opportunity,” he said when asked how he felt about coming
back. “It’s makeable. They are waves I like, they suit my
surfing.”
I’d burn my whole garden to the ground just for him.
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Maui hotel sued after tourist asks employee
for beach recommendation, follows advice, breaks neck due being
slammed into sand by wave and is permanently paralyzed!
By Chas Smith
No good deed.
We live in litigious times. There is no slight
too benign, too non-existent for which to drag a friend, a foe, a
service industry worker to court and attempt a financial
bloodletting. A Maui hotel the latest in a long string, this
particular story beginning all the way back in 2012 when a visitor
to the Valley Isle approached an employee and asked for a pleasant
beach he could enjoy with his family.
Though not hotel-adjacent, the employee suggested Big Beach
south of Kihei and part of the Makena State Park and provided
driving instructions.
Following them to a tee, the man, and his family, soon parked
and found themselves gazing over the turquoise waters and natural
beauty. The family went for a swim, the man did not but later
changed his mind and joined them.
According to court
documents, he bobbed for ten or such minutes then “as
he began a half-walk, half-breaststroke towards the shore, a
breaking wave struck him from behind, causing his head to strike
the sandy bottom of the ocean.”
The incident led to permanent paralysis, a sad state of affairs
to be sure, and if anyone, here, has ever been to Big Beach, he or
she would know that it is favored by hell-seeking bodyboarders and
bodysurfers. I, myself, had had enjoyable swims there with the
gorgeousness of the water combining with its ferocity in creating a
very fine time.
Many signs are posted on the beach, in fact, warning of this
ferocity but the visitor does not remember seeing them and is
pinning his troubles on the hotel itself, via lawsuit, declaring
that the employee should have warned him of the dangers.
Is his case ironclad?
Windfall soon?
A golden wheelchair in the future?
More as the story develops.
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Jon Pyzel and Matt Biolos by
@theneedforshutterspeed/Step Bros