World Surf League CEO Erik Logan hangs
linguistic disaster on world’s second greatest surfer Stephanie
Gilmore forcing stylish champ to stagger through public square in
needless shame!
By Chas Smith
Gr8.
I just, moments ago, hopped
off a best pal’s sailboat after two days offshore, no phone
coverage, savages paddling themselves everywhere on an ocean kayak
found floating miles from anywhere, entirely disconnected
from external reality.
Little did I know, back home, that
the world’s second greatest surfer and newly minted champion
Stephanie Gilmore was being forced to stagger through the public
square under the weight of a linguistic disaster hung around her
neck by none other than World Surf League CEO Erik
Logan.
Gilmore, who is known for her
effortless style, not one hitch, zero awkward, won her eighth title
last week, the most ever by a female, bested only by Kelly Slater
pansexually.
She roared all the way from the
fifth spot to hoist the cup there on Lower Trestles’ cobbled
stones, thrilling fans everywhere including, but not limited to,
the aforementioned Logan. After her victory, he stood onstage with
neatly trimmed beard, overly-aggressive sunglasses, black company
polo and said, “Stephanie, I want to be the first to say this to
you and to the world. You are the greatest and we will spell
“great” with “eight.”
There were crickets and so he
repeated, “great with an eight.”
As hideous as it gets. Ke11y a
visual masterpiece by comparison.
Unbefitting and sad.
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Surfing hall-of-famer Barton Lynch on his
beloved surf culture’s ongoing destruction, “We have our spiritual
leader selling soft-tops at Costco, the world’s best surfer
choosing not to go to Teahupoo and the WSL turning its back on
Pipeline and choosing Lowers as a finals venue!”
By Derek Rielly
“What is the loopiest concept for you to
understand?”
The world champ and former WSL broadcaster Barton Lynch,
who won his crown at perfect eight-to-twelve-foot Pipeline in one
of pro surfing’s greatest days, has never been one to pull
a punch, as they say.
Lynch, who is fifty-eight, was the sport’s most popular
broadcaster before being dumped by the WSL for, it is rumoured, his
role in the activist group Voices4Choices, which questioned vaccine
mandates and the role of government during the COVID pandemic.
Lynch has since poured his considerable skill and insight into a
podcast called The Stoked Bloke Show, which he operates with Peter
King, the musician, pro surfer and former bandmate of Kelly
Slater.
In the latest episode, Lynch lists four reasons why surf culture
is “upside down.”
“It’s the craziest thing,” says Lynch. “We have our spiritual
leader selling soft-tops at Costco, the world’s best surfer
choosing not to go to Teahupoo and instead go on a sailing trip
with his family and friends (co-host Peter King posits that since
John John had an eighty percent chance at winning Teahupoo, which
would’ve propelled him into the top five, if Finals Day was at
Pipe, he probs would’ve showed in Tahiti), we have the number one
surfer in the world (Stephanie Gilmore) with less points than two,
three, four five and we have WSL turning its back on Pipeline as a
finals venue and choosing Lowers.”
Lynch takes a breath and asks the listener,
“What is the loopiest concept for you to understand?”
Acclaimed surf historian weighs in on
world-title showdown furore, “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”
By Matt Warshaw
"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.
World’s hottest surfboard shaper shocks
fans with wild online harangue at Californian governor Gavin Newsom
and World Surf League, “Come on WSL, keep the creepy, lying
two-faced fascist politicians out of surfing!”
By Derek Rielly
"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.
And do you remember those dark days of yore or have you, like
me, pushed ’em all out of your head?
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Mystery envelops Florida’s central coast as
man found slumped on surfboard in lineup with gunshot wound to
mouth; no one on beach heard gunshot, no weapon recovered.
By Steve Rees
Strange things.
A Vero Beach man is in critical condition after
being pulled from the water on Thursday morning. The man was found
“slumped over his surfboard” on Wabasso Beach, in front of Disney’s
Vero Beach Resort on Florida’s central coast.
The man was found to have a gunshot wound to the mouth.
Police are now investigating it as an attempted suicide.
According to Indian River County Sheriff’s Office records, the
man, believed to be in sixties, was seen drifting on his board near
third reef (about 500 feet out) at approximately 10 a.m. Lifeguards
and resort workers brought him to the beach where he was taken to
Lawnwood Florida Hospital.
Interviews of people on the beach reveal no one heard a gunshot,
and no weapon has been recovered.
It’s a bit of a mystery. The whole of it, I mean.
We can’t divine why this guy put a gun to his face and shouldn’t
try. But we can understand his intended place of rest, the offshore
refuge, the field where Dora described as all the pains of life―the
screaming parents, police, priests, politicians, etc.― being thrown
over the falls and leaving us free.
Or maybe Dora’s hyperbolic description is wrong as our attempted
suicide victim knew what still awaited back on the sand.
Maybe he was just full and was ready to get up from the life’s
table.
I think more of the Stoic philosopher Seneca who asked, “what
difference it makes how soon you depart from a place which you must
depart from sooner or later?”