The Wall of Positive Noise sustains severe damage.
The war between the World Surf League and its most popular commentator, Papa Barton Lynch, took a wild turn this morning, one that I did not see coming. Days ago, you remember, Lynch, who has spent much of the past two years in the booth explaining competitive professional surfing better than the rest of the WSL team combined, was told, by the League, that “his services were no longer needed.”
The 1987 World Champion had every right to be confused, furious, as he is the most popular single item in the World Surf League’s arsenal but took his dismissal with a wonderful, beatific grace and simply explained to his many fans that they would not be seeing him on the broadcast anymore.
Such was the outpouring of affection that Lynch, once again, took to social media this time saying, “Hello guys, I just wanted to do a sincere and heartfelt thank you from me to you, to all of you guys. You know I had over 900 comments on the post regarding my commentary position and… you know there was one bloke who was stoked I was gone which gave me a laugh but, overwhelmingly, there were a few Santas in there too, actually by the way, a few beard comments but overwhelming support and love and respect given to me from you and it makes me so grateful, you know, for this community that we have here on Instagram. You hear people talk about social media, social media… I say thank God for it eh? I love it! I love the fact that we get to connect. I love the fact that we get to communicate with each other, create community on here and that to me is everything. So, you guys are the best. Thanks for all the support and love. Talk soon.”
Are your eyes still dry?
Impossible for them to be, unless you are some sort of bot and/or Joe Turpel and I never, in my wildest dreams, imagined that what might just might bring down the World Surf League and its Wall of Positive Noise is a positivity so pure, so innocent, that it could pierce the shallowest of dumbs.
Like sucking on a stick of sugar cane after being forced to spoon down high fructose corn syrup in the hot hot sun.
Barton Lynch 2.
World Surf League 0.
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Truly a fountain of knowledge from a GOAT commentator, The Guru of Facts, and The All Time Great, YOU BLEW IT WSL, you really Don’t Get It Do You – yeah, let’s have More Reality Show Qualifying BS From Ultra Entitled Rich No Nothings – Tennis Tour Wannabes.. Sad Shit Show..
I dont know the JBay commentary team did a pretty darn good job , i dont see what if any real value BL would have added other than to stroke some old ozzies egos.
Holy Moses…
I mean, Barton!
Social media like Bitcoin is nothing but fools gold for the dumb masses
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That shit gets me in trouble too when I imagine a hot surf chick smiles at me. Is this a chance I should take? A minute of middle-aged madness ain’t no cure for a future lifetime of anger when my missus finds out. Such pragmatism just tears more happiness from my soul. A chance to go and have a good what-if wank is the only way I can get salvage the wreckage of another chance I failed to take…
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@ Jimmy
I’d love not to be a cynical cunt but this world just doesn’t give me a chance…
At the risk of sounding like a hypocritical dickhead, I will say this here on BG is more like a community. How so? Coz there are two way interactions between people and ongoing back and forths among the same group of people over a period of time.
I know who you are, you know who I am, we know who he is, she knows who they are etc etc. Not in person, but months/years of interactions say it is a community of sorts, albeit online.
But social media like BL’s Insta and others of the like? It’s just one bloke talking into a phone to a thousand absent nobodies hoping for a response. Something. Anything. When it comes back positive, they make another post and say “I love this community. I love my friends. I love my fans.” When it comes back negative, they go into hiding or shut down their accounts.
No offence to BL, don’t know the bloke, but go and have a look at his last couple Papa Smurf monologues. The only people he actually answers on his post are the ones he knows in real life. The real life surf community he knows in the flesh. The others? A quick tap on the like button will suffice for them, which is more than most celeb-adjacents bother doing.
That ain’t a “community”. That’s a weird kinda fan club
Barton’s biggest fan is himself.
He be rolling in this Papa Smurf shit.
A raving fucken lunatic is what he is.
Speaking of big beards, we’ve got a major East Coast Low on at the moment, with 4-5 m waves (according to weather forecast) (16 German male lower legs?) and winds to pick up to ‘bastard’ strength.
Should put a few more swimming pools into Poseidon’s fanny-pack along the Northern Beaches.
Might be a good time for me to go get reacquainted with going over the falls and the beachy rips. I’ll take a giant inflatable swan and ‘stay jazzed’. Will stream live on Instawhatsit.
Lynch, probably a descendant from the city of the tribes – Galway (the best city in Ireland by a fucking country mile) where the first Lynching took place – the governor hanging his own son for raping a peasant girl – no racial undertones whatsoever. And yet, Galway has the most disappointing coastline surf wise on the planet! Anyways those cocksuckers from Galway are in the final four for GAA glory (football- not the type of football you cunts are thinking of)!
So when do he and Cody Maverick host a WSL contest up in Shiverpool?
We gotta do an irony counter. Let this be number 1.
1. BL socialist wanting money from rich going to poor. Never had a 9-5 in his life and charges $300 for some kind of surfing lesson
Whoops deleted my comment by mistake haha even i hate me , but yea BL never walked in a working mans shoes , has pissed up all his loot now wants the working man to help pave his way through life again grow up BL , grow up DHynd grow up TC grow up Kong you all had your pot of gold and fucked it up.
Yeah mate, the irony the irony. Get out there and give free surf lessons BL. Make an online course full of your wisdom and sell it for less than a meat pie and a beer. Deeds not empty platitudes into your mobile phone mate.
I love it when people call social media a “community”. Normally it’s one bloke talking into his phone, often alone in his car, to a bunch of people he doesn’t know, doesn’t care to know, and wouldn’t know if they fell on him.
Then those people he doesn’t know respond to the bloke – a bloke they’ve never met – with a comment of some kind. No real time connection. No face to face connection. No emotional connection. Just a bloke talking to random strangers and random strangers saying “yeah yeah love you man.”
What a fucking “community”
Hi Stan
Youre ripping!!
Love u bro
I can’t begin to tell you how the tears in my overwhelmed eyes flow like the rivers of Babylon when I see the pure, uncensored positivity dripping from the loins of this beautiful, gritty community
hmmm , so he thanks God for social media, which brings up the question , which God does Barton believe in…or maybe there is a Social and Media God we could call the S&M God?
bloody sad , that he loves his S&M Instagram community , professes a need for more wealth trickling down to him from rich people , but seems to have a new found religious fervor with his Moses look …..damn shouldn’t/ couldn’t he have been happy , gracefully aging , surfer family man living in his multi million$ house on Sunset point already living a life most people could only dream about…..ahhhh the irony of it all!!!!
Yeah mate more holes than Swiss cheese. Don’t dare try to point out those holes lest you be filled with S&M bullet holes for questioning the questioner.
Follow the science, they say. Doubt 99% of ‘em could spell science, let alone follow it…
getting dragged down endless holes of me me me……..I mean social media as a community , nearly as a bad as say BG is a community….ouch!!!
Hey B, you want some stickers from the next batch?
Send me an address:
sammichjammich
AT
gmail
Haha careful mate, I didn’t go so far as absolutes. I said BG is more of a community than social media, but not really what I’d define as a genuine community. How can it be when you don’t even know what a single person looks like (though I reckon I’d recognise Reilly’s choppers in a Paddington crowd).
BG is a place we all congregate for however many minutes a day and waffle about shared interests. Social media? It’s one-way ego wanking full of narcissists and sycophants.
Yeah, BG. Is kinda water cooler stuff, for lack of a better term. Shooting the shit with peeps but then you go on about your day. I like it cuz it’s (occasionally) surf-related and there are weird resonant points that bubble up that intersect with my past experiences.
Haha. Agreed. So funny how some people regard keyboard communication as a reflection of community
the worry would be, if your only community was social media , or imagine BG…….ahhh, bit like some of the swillnet crew who just live on their forums all day everyday…….so life has become….online?
Another step towards singularity.
Take it he’s not riding your boards now .
he still has them , I think in one of the BG photo’s there’s a yellow 8 0….we agree to disagree……still love the guy……but the whole conspiracy/social media domain is a fake culture that just keeps on giving….orange is the new fake !!!
Amen brother Brutus
Hundreds of people reached out 2 let him know they thought he did a great job. If his reaction were any different or absent what would happen. I would assume he still needs income 2 pay for high property taxes and is expecting a future career, like most pro athletes and commentators on social media. If u want a community on social media I’ve had a lot of fun on sex chat, great times!! Also the jwt of you like scince!!
I remmber being in the surf with BL Kong Domma TC and few others , they treated us like scum hasseled the fuck out everyone and sat arround laughing at theas the took turns dropping in on everyone else in the line up , serious poor behaviour
Yet these days they would probably be generous to a fault.
Never forgive, never forget.
Cunts to a man, every one of them.
Not arguing with your as such but weren’t we all some kinda cunts in our youth? Some of us probably still are. I’ll bet if you called them out for it now, they’d apologise wholeheartedly.
I still remember thinking how a local skater who was like, 26, was ‘old’ and past it.
How quickly 26 rolled around for me.
Youth is wasted on the young.
Besides, clearly you weren’t top dog in that line-up, and you suffered as a result of the natural order of the surf ecosystem. Just sayin’.
No one’s top dog when those cunts rock up and start dropping in.
Your natural order of the surf ecosystem just becomes a full on shit fight. You must have forgotten, cb…..
Perhaps the way to win a proverbial shit fight in the line up, is to turn it into a literal shit fight. Take a shit in your hand and get up close to them and throw it in their face.
They will freak out and leave. You win.
No one wins a shit fight. Their main advantage is that generally speaking, they’re fitter.
yeah but you could be ‘shitter’.
No claim.
Imagine your rep as the guy who drove away the interloping pro arseholes who made a misery of your line up, by waving your own faeces in their faces with a shiteating grin.
Fucking legend.
You’d never be short of a beer.
Yea, maybe or maybe reinforce just another arsehole status ?
Moot point. No claim.
It’s all fun and games until someone starts chasing you round the peak with a handful of shit.
Lololol
You win.
You SEE!?!?!
If more people did that to drop-ins, then there’d be more respect for the locals.
I’m just gonna start hitting them in the car park for ease of deployment.
If you suspect errant pro activity, drop ye olde deuce into plastic bag and hold it in your teeth while you paddle out.
I’d look like a real shithead then.
Oh wait ….. I already……
join the club
I’d be up for that, but in my middle-aged orderly existence, I make sure to have an early morning coffee and resulting shit before I go for a surf.
Imagine how much of a fuckwit I’d look like if I groaned in strained pain as I pushed my arsehole to breaking point trying to get a shit out – then came up empty? Can’t even shit in my own hand when I want to take matters into my own hand…
Hey Stan, wetties don’t help.
Just sayin …
Yeah, I’d probably get lucky and squeeze out an absolute humdinger shit the size of a footy – only for it to squash over my balls coz I’ve got a wetty on. Can’t fucking win
work it down yer leg, turn to look innocent, then HI-YAH!!!! leg flick and voila!
WHOFLUNGDUNG!
Ka-pow! Right in the kisser with the corn.
Ha! If I was that fucken accurate with the kicking I wouldn’t be out in the surf gettin’ aggro, I’d be in Paris alongside Leo Messi!
Is he a noted corn-from-wetsuit-flinger?
I can’t keep up with all these modern sports.
especially if it’s disguised as a sandwhich!
Are you critiquing my advice?
You must have been complete dicks
I gather you never experienced a surf with Tom Carroll and his posse back in the day .
Several in fact over the years, here in the magnificent West of Oz, Nth and Sth and in Indo. Kong and Dooma were units agreed, However TC and BL absolute Gents. Biggest dick we had in the water among those lot and the like was our own Stu Bedford Brown. Kong settles when he realises he’s not the only one with a Bushido Cross.
How bout Carwyn Williams?
Nope, but a chick I was shagging threw up on his feet at the Hard Rock in France.
where does that leave us, SF? The BG derelects? are we not in the same boat, life raft, dingy, drift wood…water-winging it? clinging for dear life? call a spade a spade…we are a fucking community, albiet a super sub-set which has arisen amidst the hubris…oh, the irony…the horror…
might add that the Decades channel in Cali is running Twilight Zone Marathons this week…Discovery+ is prepping for another Shark Week…the Supremes killed climate change enforcement…and next week I’ll know if this spot on my bicep is radioactive…and if the power grid will keep the lights on and the beer cold and the veggies fresh…
I don’t care about BL, he’ll rebound. But I do care about you dudes, holed ups in man-caves preaching the truth…absent-mindedly following Chas’ lead-in and DR lead-outs…and as far as I know, nobody is bothering us…truth be told. Luv you too, Negs!
Speak on it
When I’ve watched surf comps with non-surfers (a couple of friends and a few family members), they’ve always said how engaging, knowledgeable and enthusiastically entertaining Barton is, and how shit the other commentators are.
Surely the woosle would know about his popularity with the non-surfing sport-watching audience they apparently crave…
Admittedly they may have been put off by some of his extracurricular activities, and looking like Papa Smurf probably doesn’t help, but if good looks (and voice) were important, then why was ever Shannon employed ?
Its the mystery of the millenium so far.
She stinks
It is surprising they hired Shannon. I mean you already have Laura/Rosie for the token blonde. You think they would need to check other boxes to stay woke.
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That’s a war crime right there.
You Go-rilla!
He was the ’88 World Champ Charles… Dooma was the ’87 World Champ. I’ll be here all weekend…
“Surf journalist”
Seemed genuinely moved by the support. Not too much is genuine these days.
Lynchy is on a mission. How will it work out? Judgement day is coming. That beard and bubbling who gives a toss attitude, charmingly disguised, might see him over the winning line to who knows where. I wish him all the best.
What will go wrong in SA?
Pottz.
Waaaaoooowwww – He’s coming back ?
Say it ain’t so, you beautiful human.
’89.
Will Rabbi Shaun be there?
Maybe he can marry jordy to semenya?