"It sucked. I hated it honestly."
Much like Sarah Lee, nobody doesn’t like Conner Coffin. The Santa Barbara darling, and professional surfing mainstay, was a wonderful surprise in the 2021 season, making it all the way into the top five ahead of “Final’s Day” at Lower Trestles and making Morgan Cibilic look foolish with his well-rounded style.
The ceiling very high, headed into the 2022 season except… things did not go quite as planned.
Coffin stumbled out of the gate at Pipeline, losing to specialist Barron Mamiya, lost again at Sunset to a resurgent Caio Ibelli, did just fine in Portugal but then came undone in the first round of the Rip Curl Pro Bells Beach, an event that he should dominate.
With that loss, and another bad result at Margaret River, the beer enthusiast was kicked off tour as the World Surf League’s much-ballyhooed mid-season cut took effect. To make matters even stickier, Coffin is the surfer representative, having to stand in the gap, as it were.
Well, sitting down with the WSL’s Chief Strategy Officer Dave Prodan, recently, Coffin pulled no punch. He describes how his tour fate was decided by “waist high onshore shit Winikipop.” How the waves were garbage, more or less, the first five events, crushing livelihoods. Dealing with the hatred, amongst his professional surfers, about the cut. “It sucked. I hated it honestly. Big price to pay…” he ends with as Prodan giggles uncomfortably, eyes wide, mouth, framed by well-manicured beard lightly agape, then tries to re-spackle the Wall of Positive Noise by calling this year’s G-Land “really good” before casting blame on magazines of yesteryear for poorly representing the early “dream tour” as all fantastic.
Spice occurs around the 43-minute mark and may even get hotter but I ran out of listening time though… ouch. Three-alarm fire.
Zing.