Erin Brooks, thirteen, at Waco, with straps, howevs.

World surfing tour rocked as influential surf broadcasters launch wild fusillade at upcoming Surf Ranch Pro, “Erin Brooks has done a better turn in the Texas pool than the entire 44 CT in five years of surfing the GOAT pool!”

“Should we just send the CT to Texas to surf against a bunch of 13-year-old girls and see what happens?”

The WSL is on its knees tonight suffering if not mortal, then substantial damage, following a wild fusillade launched at the upcoming Surf Ranch Pro by the world’s most beloved surf broadcasters.

In between swizzling the fruit in their Old-Fashioneds and speaking through gusts of rank whisky breath, Jed Smith and Vaughan Blakey, performers on the podcast Ain’t That Swell, delivered a fatal choreography of blows to the unloved wavepool event, which runs May 27 through 28.

After the 2021 event, BeachGrit’s tour reporter Steve “Longtom” Shearer, jerked awake long enough to pull his head out of his pretzel bowl and write,

We’re five years into this thing now.

Five long years.

The gap between the rhetoric, that tubs were going to loose a tsunami of radical innovative surfing, and the reality, conservative surfing, is becoming clearer every day. It’s become what Orwell termed the “inadmissible fact.” It’s put us in upside down world, where Chris Cote, when he hears the train says, “ This never gets old” means “there’s something deeply wrong here but I can’t dare acknowledge it”.

Five years.

Can someone on the pro wavepool side of the argument explain to me why, given the basic repeatability of the wave, some new trick is not conceived, mastered and then executed to a stunned judging panel ala vert skating or snowboard half-pipe?

Wasn’t that the whole point?

Smith and Blakey sent a similarly cunty zephyr up the nostrils of the WSL.

“The GOAT pool, basically,” says Vaughan, “is challenging the world’s best surfers, with all their might and imagination to do one interesting thing on it.”

“We’re asking the best surfers in the world to, essentially, rip off a couple of turns and thread a three-foot pit,” says Smith. “Is that really the ratings bonanza that ELO and Ziff are craving so much at this point?”

Vaughan,

“This is the weird thing, Erin Brooks has done a better turn in the three foot rampy fucking Texas wave pool that the entire 44 CT in five years of surfing the Goat Pool…Should we just fucking send the CT to the fucking Texas wave pool against a bunch of thirteen-year-old girls and see what happens? If you think about it, like, Erin’s frontside barrel roll is a more dynamic and interesting turn than anything Filipe or Gabriel have done at the wave pool.”

Vaughan did open the door a little to the possibility of the event being salvaged.

“The only thing that can save the GOAT pool is if they’ve got some new element to it that we don’t know about it. Have they dropped something into this pool that is going to blow our minds?”

Unlikely?

Or are you thrilled, nevertheless, by sixteen hours of heats on identical waves, over two days, with static Stay Turned messages every ten or so minutes?


Open Thread: Comment Live, Day Four of Gold Coast Pro where surf fans long for a kiss on our hearts and one much lower down. Much lower…

Professional surfing for the win.... or something.


Logan (pictured) with similar characters. Photo: Instagram
Logan (pictured) with similar characters. Photo: Instagram

World Surf League CEO Erik Logan superimposes own face over Kelly Slater’s body in deeply disturbing stan video!

Trigger warning.

It’s difficult to think of a more awkward sporting CEO than our Erik Logan but, then again, it’s also difficult to think of a more awkward sport than surfing. The World Surf League chief, in any case, was invited onto a Bloomberg Business podcast where he proceeded to congratulate himself then congratulate himself for congratulating himself by superimposing his own face over Kelly Slater’s body in a deeply disturbing video post.

Trigger warning.

Yikes.

In other news, and on another podcast, World Surf League Chief of Sport Jessi Miley-Dyer implored her followers to not be afraid to speak up.

Unless you are an inspirational one-armed surfer from Kauai named Bethany Hamilton. In that case, keep your trap shut and fall in line.


Wild rich man takes million dollar cigarette boat surfing at San Francisco’s notorious Ocean Beach: “Captain Booya was drinking and gave it the full send on the outside set!”

Challenger Series.

But what would you buy, first, if you just so happened to come into a small fortune? After helping the homeless, giving money to your family, multiple charities, becoming title sponsor of the World Surf League, of course. Would you go shopping in Milan for a whole new wardrobe? Exchange your current vehicle for a new EV Hummer? Purchase a million dollar cigarette boat at take it surfing?

Well, a San Francisco man has already beaten you to that punch.

Two short weeks ago, the notorious Ocean Beach, made famous by William Finnegan and Matt Warshaw, received a clean pulse of 15-foot swell. Anyone who has ever stood on the Upper Great Highway, there, and peered out has certainly been mesmerized by the angry lines marching in, by the sheer vastness of that playing field, by the gumption required to paddle, duck dive, paddle, duck dive, paddle duck dive for hours.

Impressive.

And although the human will to overcome and push to the outside is impressive, it is also somewhat impressive to see a rich man destroying his toy and, possibly, his body.

“That’s two broken legs right there,” a spectator of the show can be heard musing.

“Captain Booya was drinking and gave it the full send on the outside set. Big air to flat water. Everyone in the boat was hurt except the driver. The hull cracked in half and the boat still made it back to its dock in Tiburon,” filmer Pete Koff declared on his YouTube channel.

Very cool, but back to you. Have you decided upon your first acquisition?

A jiu-jitsu trophy?

Nice.


Dane, on a twin in 1978, captured by another brother, now gone, Warren Bolster. | Photo: Warren Bolster

Hawaiian surfing icon Dane Kealoha, dead at sixty-four, after battle with cancer, “A glowering power surfer remembered as the best tuberider of his generation”

"Dane was on the cutting edge of progression, inventing the backside pig dog technique at Pipe. A truly gifted tuberider."

A few days ago, obits started appearing for the great Hawaiian surfer Dane Kealoha, who would’ve been the state’s first world champ in 1983 if not for the bloodymindedness of the then ASP.

While unsubstantiated rumours are our bread and butter, this one was a little more serious, so I rang around his pals and found out that Kealoha, while still alive, was desperately battling a late-stage cancer.

Sadly, Dane Kealoha passed away earlier today. 

The shaper and former top competitor Maurice Cole as well as the 1977 world champ Shaun Tomson had written movingly of a pal they’d known for half-a-century.

“Sitting in the airport on my way to France for a month,” wrote Cole. “I just found out that brother Dane is not travelling very well at the moment so putting it out there he needs lots of prayer ! Been working like crazy the last few weeks , that’s why I’ve been a bit quiet all orders done will be back in five weeks from month before I go to J Bay. The photo was taken of Dane and I in the 80s at Burleigh , pretty wild day’s but we surfed even wilder.”

 

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“When I first met Dane back in 1976, he immediately became one of my favorite surfers – absolute raw power and foot to the floor attitude. No close together ballerina feet softness, but a powerful and beautiful classically pure Hawaiian style, charting back to the great Eddie Aikau,” wrote Tomson.

“Dane was on the cutting edge of progression – inventing the backside pig dog technique at Pipe and winning the Masters in 1983, and carving up Backdoor and Sunset with creativity and ferocity.

“He was a truly gifted tube-rider, attacking the spinning tunnels with machismo, commitment and an attacking rhythm like a Hawaiian warrior going into battle.

“At the dawn of pro surfing and the start of the twin fin era at the Stubbies event in Australia, I watched Dane catch a wave at high tide 2 foot Burleigh Heads. There was barely enough clearance between his twin fins and the rocks as he leapt to his feet and started to pump down the line – faster and faster like there was a turbo beneath his feet – I had never seen anyone generate that type of speed on such a small wave – in fact, on any wave.

“I had won the World Title a few months before on my single fin and looked down at it – I knew it was instantly obsolete in small waves.

 

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A post shared by SHAUN TOMSON (@shauntomson)

Dane’s run-in with the ASP in ’83 ended a career spanning 1978 through 1982 where he finished, ninth, fourth, second, third and sixth.

In 1983, y’see, the ASP removed their sanctioning of the three Hawaiian events and banned ASP surfers from competing.

Dane said fuck it, won two of the three events, including the Pipe Masters and the Duke at Sunset, and was subsequently fined a thousand bucks, which he refused to pay.

Stripped of his tour points, Dane, then only twenty five, quit pro surfing and all full-time competition.