"I cannot imagine another example, in pro-level sports history, where the finale is so likely to fall short of what it could and should be."

WSL Finals Day 2022 is a wrap, and we won’t dwell too long, but I watched the entire damn event and need to get a couple of things off my chest.

First, I’m okay with the ten-surfer one-day title shootout format.

Yes, it means that the best performer over the course of the year—the surfer who, in the old aggregate-points format would have been the champ—might get kicked down to runner-up. Carissa Moore being Exhibit A.

But if the shootout is a bit less fair to the pros, it is way more entertaining to us viewers. A tidy half-day of competition, no throwaway heats, guaranteed drama start to finish.

So far, so good.

Yet the WSL continues to shoot bullets into its own foot, which at this point is hardly even a foot, just a pulpy mash atop a mound of spent ammunition, and building up to a “historic” Finals Day climax held in wind-chopped shoulder-high Lowers when just three weeks ago the pros were slaying green-blue dragons at Teahupoo (or not slaying; both our new champs barely drew their swords in Tahiti) is a level of corporate sporting mismanagement so extreme that, ironically, it circles all the way back to historic.

As in—I cannot imagine another example, in pro-level sports history, where the finale is so likely to fall short of what it could and should be.

Finals Day at Pipeline. Problem solved.

But how did this become a problem in the first place?

The pain in your head goes away when you stop hitting it with a hammer. The mediocrity of Lower Trestles being the hammer.

Am I wrong? WSL decision-making is so bad it feels like performance art, in which case maybe I am in fact missing the point.

It would not be the first time.

Before moving on, and even though I have taken a small dig at him above, I’d like to say that Filipe Toledo is a fully deserving world champion.

No asterisk.

Toledo does not ride big heavy reef waves, in fact he doesn’t even really try, and this is not ideal. But he was so much better than everybody else this year in high-performance surf, so much faster and cleaner and ahead of the performance curve—note, by the way, that he didn’t go to the air once in his Finals Day heats against Italo—that the bigger crime would have been for the title to go anybody but Filipe.

The comparisons now being made between Toledo and two-time world champion Damien Hardman are, for me, off base. I’m okay with Hardman’s world titles as well, even though, like Filipe, he had no interest in big surf. But Damien got to the podium by way of calculation and dead nerves and bottomless poise. Heat after heat, contest after contest, he did not put a foot wrong. Damien beat you with overwhelming proficiency.

Filipe, on the other hand, motored into those soft dishwater rights at Lowers last week and rode like someone we will meet and love in the next Incredibles movie. Scroll to 5:19 on this clip and see if you agree—although the point I’m trying to make may not work out of context with how everybody was performing, and while I know you non-CT folks will tolerate this contest hoo-haw up to a point, I will not ask you to go back and watch earlier heats and risk breaking the trust we have thus far built up.

Filipe Toledo and Stephanie Gilmore are both righteous champions atop a glitzy, flimsy, hapless professional organization. They should be better served, and who knows, maybe things will improve CT-wise in 2023.

But right now they deserve to be simply and loudly celebrated.

Vicki Williams, who in her surfing heyday went by Vicki Flaxman, looked like Steph Gilmore but with 25 added pounds of lean muscle in her arms, shoulders, back, and thighs. She out-surfed all of the women and most of the men at First Point Malibu during the early 1950s, and if Finals Day (or my possibly-too-lengthy recap of Finals Day) has left you wanting to get your feet back into the earthbound and slightly delinquent foundation upon which our non-sport sport was built—Vicki Williams, 90 years old and serving for the win at this moment on some godforsaken heat-blasted pickleball court in Sun Valley, Idaho, is here for you. New Encyclopedia Of Surfing hire Ella Boyd talked with Williams at length, and you won’t regret setting aside 20 minutes to read the whole thing, but for the moment let’s enjoy this short excerpt.

Did you know pretty much everyone who surfed Malibu?
Yes, pretty much. Unless they were from the Valley. You know, we weren’t even supposed to be on the beach at Malibu. There had originally been a big wire fence because of that estate right on the point. They’d fenced everything off but we tore the fence down, and that’s how we got to the beach.

How was it being around celebrities [from nearby Malibu Colony]?
We kind of thought they were weird. They were older and they didn’t surf. The Malibu scene was local, very local.

Do you think people even knew about you guys surfing or did they just not pay much attention?
Nobody paid any attention. They didn’t know what it was, or what we were doing. They’d see the surfboards on the car, but they didn’t really know.

Did you go to San Onofre?
We did, and everybody laughed at our boards!

Why?
‘Cause we had these new balsa boards, which were smaller, and the guys down at Sano laughed and said, “Oh my God, how do you ride those potato chips? How do you ride the soup?” And we said, “We don’t ride the soup; we’re in the curl, honey!”

I’ve often said that I love surfing, not surfers. But sometimes I really love surfers.

(Like Matt Warshaw’s flavour? This story comes from his weekly mail-out, called Wednesday Wrap, which is sent to all good surfers who cut three bucks a month to subscribe to his bottomless archive of surf history. Join here.)

"Surfing is California's state sport. And while no one… no-one… controls the ocean, it looks like she's delivered," says Newsom in message to surf fans.

Two years ago, you may remember, beaches were closed, as was all commerce, and people were locked inside their hovels with threat of jail and wildly punitive fines if they tried to get a little sand between their toes, over a virus that had leaked out of a US-funded lab in China. 

San Clemente’s shaper to the stars, Matt Biolos, who shuttered his biz at the behest of California’s extreme-left governor Gavin Newsom, made regular mention of Newsom’s “communist” bona fides in a series of posts. 

Now, following a promo video to excite fans for Finals Day at Biolos’ home break Lowers from Newsom, and perhaps a little sore his client Carissa Moore was shafted for her sixth world title, “Bear Jew” Biolos has, again, shucked all politesse. 

“I think you all know this better than I do. Surfing is California’s state sport. And while no one… no-one… controls the ocean, it looks like she’s delivered,” says Newsom, apparently unaware he’s burying himself under a tsunami of irony.

“What a two-faced pile of shit,” writes Biolos. “Two years ago, YOU CLOSED OUR ACCESS TO OUR OCEANS! Come on @WSL. Keep the creepy, lying, two-faced fascist politicians out of surfing!” 

Agree? No?

And do you remember those dark days of yore or have you, like me, pushed ’em all out of your head?

It was hard to ignore how far ahead in the rankings Carissa Moore started the day and how much she lost by the end of it.

You have one shot and one opportunity.

There is always something compelling when an athlete shows up, really shows up, and does it on the day. All or nothing, for all the marbles.

On Thursday that’s exactly what Steph did to win her eighth world title. Making a run from the bottom of the draw straight through to the top, she used her trademark style sharpened with a progressive edge to win on the rights that suit her so well.

It should be a fairy tale story.

From fifth to first, after a rollercoaster season with more troughs than highs, Steph won the title. She also broke the record for women’s world title count that’s stood since 2006. Onshore winds turned the waves to shit, but Steph kept rolling. She only needed two heats to beat six-time world champion Carissa Moore. Steph once said that she expected to Carissa to be the next Kelly. Who’s chasing Kelly now?

But even as Steph wrote a dramatic sports story and celebrated her success, she acknowledged the long strange ride she took to get there. Steph started her season by missing Pipeline due to a positive Covid test. She bobbled at Sunset, where she has won in the past, and scraped into the final five, still several time zones from the rankings lead. This wasn’t supposed to be her year — until it was.

Carissa is the rightful world champion, Steph said from the podium with characteristic grace. It was hard to ignore how far ahead in the rankings Carissa started the day and how much she lost by the end of it. I doubt Carissa especially liked being reminded that she should have won. Surely that felt like salt in the wounds.

It wasn’t Carissa’s best year. She told me at the beginning of the year that she didn’t get her usual time off because of Olympics obligations. She came into the season more tired than usual. Still, she was far and away the rankings leader by year end. After winning the one-day final at Trestles last year, she knows how to do this event. But not this year, not this time.

So, what do we make of this year’s format changes?

In her post-heat comments and later on Instagram, Johanne Defay was forthright about her dislike for the one-day final.

“Surfing as a sport is not an exact science,” she says on Instagram. “That 35 minutes in the water did not reflect my year or the competitor and surfer that I am.” It felt to her as though her whole season was lost in a single 30-minute heat. Finishing third in the world, of course, is hardly nothing.

Steph says it’s time to change the system. Presumably she means an end to the one-day final. If there’s anyone in position to change how the tour works on the women’s side, it’s Steph. Over time, she has quietly done just that, most notably in pushing for better conditions during the women’s heats.

And Steph is right.

While a one-day championship works for many sports, the sheer randomness of the ocean rules against it. Do we get the same results — mens or womens — if the conditions had stayed clean or the waves had been bigger?

Maybe, maybe not.

And it’s hard to argue that Trestles is the measure of what World Tour surfing should be. The year-long world title race mediates the judges’ weird quirks and the ocean’s wild ideas.

While Steph is changing the system, the mid-year cut also needs a rethink. A twelve-woman draw is a joke from a sports league that makes a lot of noise about equality. Prize money equity only goes so far when there are so few seats at the table. And, surely a heat draw where a win in round one sends surfers straight to the quarters doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. The cut and reduced draw should have raised the stakes; instead it highlighted how arbitrary a judged sport in ever-changing conditions can be.

What the mid-season cut and the one-day final have in common is a brutal finality.

Certainly, the point of competitive sport is to distinguish between winning and losing. There’s no sugar-coating that reality. But in the context of surfing, where so many variables fan out beyond the competitors’ control, the results felt almost arbitrary. The waves could stop. The judges could lose their minds. Oh hey, look, you’re out.

In creating both the cut and one-day final, the WSL has confused cruelty with drama. They’ve assumed that their audience — that’s us — wants to see dreams crushed rather than fulfilled. And it’s true, sometimes we do. Sometimes we’re assholes, and we watch heats to see someone lose.

But didn’t Margaret River feel the opposite of fun, as one after another, surfers got sent home? It didn’t feel like the kind of drama I look for in sports. It felt contrived and artificial, drama for drama’s sake.

So many of the younger generation of women — the women who are most likely to change the sport and push it into the future — were sent home at mid-year. Only Gabriela Bryan from the rookie class survived. It felt like a step backward rather than forward for women’s surfing.

At the end of the day, Steph won this one and it’s impossible to hate the idea of Steph holding the record of most world titles. Her contribution to women’s surfing is undisputed and her surfing in right points is unmatched. Who wouldn’t want to be able to surf J-Bay like Steph?

For her part, Carissa has all the pieces she needs to chase down Steph’s new record, if she wants it.

Carissa remains the most complete surfer in the women’s sport.

She has said she wants to improve her backside barrel riding, and there’s signs she’s starting to do it.

Now’s the time, Carissa. Go get it.