"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore." Photo: World Surf League
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore." Photo: World Surf League

Economic anthropologists marvel as ticket prices for upcoming Surf Ranch Pro slashed by over 80% from inaugural run five years ago!

Chas Smith

By

THE MOMENTUM IS REAL.

We live in wild times, this much is absolutely certain, what with ex-Presidents becoming indicated and/or indicted, staunchly unaligned Scandinavian countries lining up to join NATO, banks collapsing and inflation eating savings’ accounts like a hungry hungry hippo.

Yes, money around the world is worth less and less, able to buy fewer and fewer items for more and more dollars, pesos, lbs, euros, etc.

Less and less, fewer and fewer for more and more outside of the magical wooden gates surrounding Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch in Lemoore, California, that is, for there an economic miracle has occurred.

The first Surf Ranch Pro, you will certainly recall, kicked off in 2018. It was summer, if I recall. Gas cost around $2.50 a gallon, a loaf of bread enjoyed for $1.29, a shave and a haircut for two bits and the aforementioned Surf Ranch Pro could be taken in all weekend for $199 per person.

A smashing deal considering the amount of live professional surfing, music, Michelob Ultra that was on hand.

Alas, simpler times. Some might argue better.

But we can’t live in the past, no, we must play the hand that Jerome Powell, and global financial crises, have dealt us. Gas soaring to nearly $5.00 a gallon, bread touching that mark too (organic), shaves and haircuts both sacrificed so the children can eat but the Surf Ranch Pro?

Well, the Surf Ranch Pro 2023 weekend pass runs a mind-meltingly low $39.00 for adults, $19.50 for Groms.

An over 80% discount from five years ago.

A financial miracle.

Economic anthropologists are certainly studying this unicorn especially in light of the wild, unprecedented growth of professional surfing. “Record breaking revenue” through the roof, vectors out of control. Is the World Surf League providing such low low prices as a salve for weary masses? Some other kindhearted reason?

THE MOMENTUM IS REAL.

Surf great Kelly Slater continues assault on trans rights as Kid Rock shoots up case of Bud Light in protest of Tik Tok influencer: “Hahahaha. No words necessary!”

Chas Smith

By

Stupid is as stupid likes.

Onetime rock rapper Kid Rock made much news, today, after pulling an assault rifle on three possibly innocent cases of beer and really letting them have it. At issue, Bud Light, maker of aforementioned beer, decided to give a trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney her own customized can as a one off gift along with, probably, monies to hold up a traditional can of the less-than-satisfying brew and saying sports things.

The campaign, lame like all influencer campaigns are, really made Kid Rock mad as he leveled an assault rifle then showed his middle finger to a cellular phone.

The world’s greatest surfer Kelly Slater, never shy anywhere on social media, very much enjoyed the post, commenting, “Hahahaha. No words necessary.”

Whatever your position on trans social media influencers, aged rock rappers, beer violence, etc. can we all just agree that Kelly Slater is a dumb shit?

I think we can.

The great uniter!

“I’m the only queer person on tour, so my wife is the only other queer person I know most of the time. I love everyone around me but she makes such a difference in a way only she really can.” | Photo: @tylerwright

Following shock last-place finish in Europe, surfing superstar and LGBTQ+ icon Tyler Wright reveals she’s “Never leaving home without her psychologist or her wife again”

Derek Rielly

By

“I didn’t take them to Portugal and I hated it to be quite frank. People don’t like hearing that, but it’s the honest truth.”

If there was to be a storybook ending, or new beginning, to the wild Tudor-esque drama already played out in the lives of the famous Wright surfing family, the marriage of Tyler Wright to Lilli Baker five months ago might’ve been it. 

Wright, a preternatural talent who won her first big event at fourteen and two consecutive world titles at twenty-two and twenty-three, as well as a historic win at the Pipe Masters in 2020, describes their connection as flush with “ease and openness. There’s genuineness, love, respect and appreciation. Being with someone who encourages you to be more you is always a good time.”

With her gang around her, which included psychologist Jason Patchell and super coach Andy King, Wright tore hell through the opening Hawaiian leg, hitting a second at Pipe and a third at Sunset. 

But, Portugal? Solo? 

“I didn’t take them to Portugal and I hated it to be quite frank,” Wright told the Sydney Morning Herald. “I just didn’t see much point in being there. People don’t like hearing that, but it’s the honest truth.”

Wright ain’t making the same mistake at Bells, an event she won last year. 

“The older I get, I realise I don’t really want to accommodate anyone other than myself in this arena. I’ve done a lot of work with my psychologist around why I’m re-entering this arena, why I keep competing. I’ve got my own challenges and so does everyone else… I’ve achieved everything I’ve ever dreamed of and originally set out to do. You have to be really in touch with why you’re still showing.”

Lilli, says Wright, delivers the love, yeah, but also… understanding. 

“I’m the only queer person on tour, so my wife is the only other queer person I know most of the time. I love everyone around me but she makes such a difference in a way only she really can.”

Patchell, a gun mind coach who also worked with her bro Owen at the Olympics, helps keep Wright’s emotions in check. 

“We actually don’t focus on the sport side of things that much, it’s the other things in life that have been quite chaotic for me.”

Wright, who is twenty-nine, has had a rough ol time these past few years.

You’ll remember her “season from hell” when she disappeared from the tour for two years following a mysterious “African” virus that left her bedridden and feeling as if her “heart would explode” if she stood up and being fleeced of half-a-million dollars from a family friend, a gorgeous honey blonde with a Kim Kardashian-esque figure and a love for horse racing and placing bets on their outcome, unsuccessfully, mostly, who’d been handling the superstar kids’ accounting.

Slater (pictured) practicing for his golden years?
Slater (pictured) practicing for his golden years?

Undercover reporter at North Shore’s iconic Turtle Bay reveals surfer who has won “multiple world surfing championships” working as bellman in wild expose!

Chas Smith

By

Kelly Slater? Is that you?

The eyes of the surfing world are, currently, cast toward Torquay, Australia and its notable Bells Beach. Yes, the “world’s oldest surf contest” is scheduled to kick off any moment now with a forecast so… unchill that those professionals dancing around the mid-season cut line should be rightly terrified. Yes, they will be forced to dance for their lives in “jumbled” waves with “unfavorable” wind.

Yikes.

It will be the fourth event in a row with very poor conditions but at least the first two were on Oahu’s North Shore with its haupia pie, Spam musubi, Turtle Bay resort filling in the long hours between Jessi Miley-Dyer calling the day’s competition off again.

But when was the last time you actually stayed at Turtle Bay? For me it has nearly been a decade but I have the fondest memories of that brutalist hulk perched upon those emerald mini-cliffs. The poolside mai tai is second to none and I’ve never had finer escargot than I’ve had at Lei Lei’s, no not even in France.

Well, apparently the hotel features much more as revealed by a Bloomberg reporter who went undercover in various jobs in order to expose mighty “White Lotus-esque” secrets.

The naughty bits are, in truth, relatively tame. European women sunbathing topess on the beach, chubby diners nipping extra eggs Benedict from the buffet and taking it to their rooms, honeymooners getting into lobby fights, influencers stealing golf cars and crashing them for the likes, etc. but one revelation shocked me to the core.

Namely, when working as a bellman, the sleuth made known that surfing was “a big priority for many on staff” and that one of the other bellman “has won multiple world surfing championships.”

Has won.

As in not necessarily finished winning.

And whoa.

For we all know one Kelly Slater, currently at Bells, is below that mid-season cut line. We all know that the next event, Margaret River, could very well mark the end of the winningest-ever surfer’s gilded career. We all also know that Slater lives part-time on the North Shore where he enjoys renting one of his homes for $36,000 a month. And, lastly, we also all know that the 11x world surfing champion is notoriously cheap, never picking up tabs etc.

Might it be that Slater is preparing for the end, moonlighting a few weekly hours at Turtle Bay in order to cash in on employee discounts for rounds of golf and/or Lei Lei’s?

Stranger things have, certainly, happened.

See: Armie Hammer selling timeshares.

Artist's impression of the new Perth tank, which is to be built in a wretched suburb called Jandakot, and, inset, Leo DeCaprio, from the movie Django.

New $100 million Perth wavepool slammed as a “depraved paradise” and a sign of Western Australia’s “gutted soul” in wild rant by prestigious news outlet!

Derek Rielly

By

"A wave pool at the arse end of the earth is a fitting folly to kick off the boom’s next era, which exists somewhere between a nang’s headrush and a meth comedown."

If you call yourself a surfer and live in Perth, as I once did in a terrible long ago epoch, you’ll be counting the seven hundred or so days until Andrew Ross’ Wavegarden kicks into life in a bleak part of that wretched town called Jandakot.

Ross, whom you’ll remember as the driver behind the Tullamarine tank, has endured innumerable setbacks to get the tank built in his hometown.

But…he got it done.

The tank set-up looks pretty wild, elevated walkways around the pool, caravans around the perimeter mimicking Slater’s set-up at Surf Ranch and a low-rise building which may or may not have been designed by an architect overlooking the familiar wedge-shaped pool.

Very hard to argue with if you’ve ever tried to surf the all but waveless Perth coast.

But in a wild rant for Crikey, an independent online news outlet usually focussed on politics, the joint has been described by Patrick Marlborough, a comedian whose written for left-wing tribunes Vice and The Guardian, as a “depraved paradise” in a state with a “gutted soul.”

Perth, y’see, has been awash in mining riches for so long it’s created “a unique greed that necessitated a unique stupidity…Nothing has embodied this stupidity like the $100 million Perth Surf Park as proposed by Aventuur… But what might pass as exceptional elsewhere seems more like the rule here… The park is set to be the largest in the southern hemisphere, with 150-metre-long waves and the potential for something called “beast mode” surf, the beasts from which might compensate for the black cockatoo habitat that will be destroyed in the park’s construction.”

Marlborough takes exception that Perth, which is rimmed by pretty white sand beaches, needs a tank.

“There is something mordantly comical about building a wave park in a place globally renowned for its pristine beaches and choice surfing spots. Of course, not everyone can access said beaches, such as those in our far-flung satellite suburbs, a reflection of the idiocy of our urban planning, the underfunding of public transport and public spaces, and the steady erosion of community and culture via the vast alien mindstate spawned by the atomisation of people sprawled across the state like butter over too much bread.

“A wave pool at the arse end of the earth is a fitting folly to kick off the boom’s next era, which exists somewhere between a nang’s headrush and a meth comedown. The burnout from the unshakable churn of the mining industry and the Remora businesses (and governments) that live off its scraps is embedded into the very operation of the city and the state, a kind of bone-tired wariness that’s meant to carry us beyond a finish line that’s always being moved back — no backdowns, no break rooms.”

I sure don’t agree, but kid’s anger and dexterity on the keys must be applauded.

Photo: Jack English
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