"I heard a lot of people complaining, more than I’ve ever heard, just about that one guy…"

The Pensacola surfer and comic Sterling Spencer has added his considerable voice to the attack on Erik “Elo” Logan following the sudden, and still mysterious, disappearance of the WSL’s high-profile CEO.

Logan, who is fifty-two, was disappeared by the WSL mid-event at the Vivo Rio Pro, no reason given, only a curtly worded press release that neither thanked nor exalted their high-profile CEO.

“Today, the World Surf League (WSL) announced that CEO Erik Logan has departed the company, effective immediately. As the WSL begins the process of identifying a new CEO, Emily Hofer, WSL’s Chief People and Purpose Officer, and Bob Kane, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Legal Officer, will jointly lead the company and continue to drive the WSL’s mission to showcase the world’s best surfers on the world’s best waves as the global home of competitive surfing.”

Despite cultivating what may have felt like enduring friendships on tour, at one point world champ Filipe Toledo edged close to BFF status, any allies of Logan have been conspicuously silent. Even the WSL’s preferred media outlets joined the pile-on, their sudden shift pointed out earlier this week by Chas Smith.

The Inertia, which previously praised Logan as “visionary” and “cool guy, someone we should emulate” mocked his departure by likening the fallen to fat Elvis in a cruel headline reading “Erik Logan has left the building.”

Stab, which has attempted to recreate a miniature Wall of Positive Noise around its offerings, recently excoriating subscribers who dared question why the premium surf blog ran gambling ad with an open comment reading: Thanks for the input. Just so you understand, the money isn’t impossible to resist. It literally allows us to keep our staff employed. One month of Betonline promotion = three people’s salaries. So would you rather that we put three people out of work (also meaning we’d be able to create less content for you to enjoy) or put a little betting blurb at the bottom of our comp reports? We appreciate where you’re coming from, but for us it’s a pretty simple equation.

Now, Sterling Spencer, who is thirty-seven and the son of Gulf Coast legend Yancy Spencer III, and who hit worldwide fame in 2010 when he posted a dubbed video of a kid trying to get Jeremy Flores’ autograph at J-Bay, with Flores strangling Spencer at the Surfer Poll awards the same year in revenge, has added his voice to the harangue.

After pointing out Logan’s non-surfing bona fides with several brutal archived clips, Spencer delivers his coup de grâce.

“Everyone hated the guy… I heard a lot of people complaining, more than I’ve ever heard, just about that one guy, everyone hated him, poor guy. I wonder what it feels like for him, literally, an entire surf community hates you and all he wanted to do was good.”

There is a slight upside, as Spencer points out.

“I think he’s rich so he can be depressed in a nice house.”

Dave has sat idly by while the WSL turned into the "bullshit wannabe tennis tour" that Bobby foresaw.

Recently, Surfer and Stab recommended that Dave Prodan, current Chief Marketing Officer, be groomed as successor to the ELo throne. While his pedigree and involvement may be what Dirk and others view as logical and prudent, he is absolutely the wrong man for the job.

To begin, Dave has sat idly by while the WSL turned into the “bullshit wannabe tennis tour” that Bobby foresaw. Along each step of the way, Dave was fully responsible for the hype and positioning of the company in this pivot.

On several occasions, and most notably with Connor Coffin on his podcast “The Lineup”, Dave sought to gaslight competitors and surfing’s stalwarts into drinking the WSL Kool-Aid. Dave asked Connor how great the mid-year cut is and Connor replied essentially “Yeah, it was so cool to lose my job in waist-high Winki so you could manufacture drama”. Dave listened to the surfer rep mouth breathing and slack-jawed that the surfer dared to speak ill of the league.

Reason number two is simple, Dave is the manufacturer of the wall of positive noise.

Everything from Tea-hu-po-oh-oh and greenwashing from the WSL starts with the man in charge of marketing. It can be reasonably argued that Prodan is simply doing the bidding of owners, but the failure to make any ding in the wall of positivity is a brand decision, plain and simple.

Dave oversaw the gutting of the core, brand alignments, announcer washing, and likely had some influence over decisions such as failing to allow “Hamilton” to adorn the backs of male competitors on women’s day. It is well established that Dave feels the WSL and the associated content are fair game for a soap box to preach his politics and virtue signal, and elevation to CEO would merely silence more surfers and perpetuate the moronic wave of perpetual positivity.

Dave is also a turncoat.

He is very impassioned when he discusses his days at the Rip Curl surf center in my beloved San Clemente and seeks to delineate himself as a core surfer, denouncing the privilege of his monolithic and frankly unimpressive career. From a mere marketing and branding position Dave has failed to elevate the bleeding brand and has taken something everyone once’s loved and has turned it into something so forgettable my league mates and I have failed to set Fantasy teams for two consecutive contests.

He loves to position himself as a passionate surfer who cares about the sport, but in reality, it appears from the outside that Dave is a mere corporate shill who will do or say anything to continue a globe-trotting life of privilege, happy to rub elbows with competitors and talk surf on a podcast he has turned into the Dave Prodan show.

We as surfers want change, not a continuation of numbers conflation, not gaslighting us in an attempt to agree with what they’re doing, not perpetual saccharine and nauseatingly sweet conversations, not an over bloated tour of the world’s best surfers in the world’s worst waves.

We want to see amazing surf, amazing surfers, in contests that can be watched in a day, with a message we resonate with.

Dave won’t deliver. Full stop.

"WTF Max Holloway can surf???"

If you’re into watching human beings beat hell out of each other in a 750 square foot cage, you’ll know, and possibly adore, the preternaturally gifted Hawaiian striker Max Holloway, the self-described “best boxer in the UFC.”

Holloway, who is thirty-one and a former featherweight champ (these days he’s the #2 contender), is the husband of Hawaiian surf star Alessa Quizon (once the gal of Caio Ibelli) and grew up on Oahu’s west side, famous for Sunny Garcia, Johnny Boy Gomes, Makaha and so on.

So he’s been around surfing, even if boxing is his game.

As he told Rogan,

“I know all the big-wave surfers, Makua Rothman, and they always tell me, Zeke Lou, Kana Asing, hey, fighting is so crazy, I tell them, guy surfing is crazy, they’re like, no fighting is crazy! Guy, I’m fighting with a human being and I can kinda control what they do at certain times and what I do. When you’re surfing, you’re fighting mother nature my guy! If you fall off and if mother nature wants to throw you three times you’re going to get thrown three times!

As for safety equipment, says Holloway, “You got a puff-up vest? What if it doesn’t pop?”

In a recent Instagram post by Perfect Swell, the company behind the Waco pool, we see Holloway and Quizon riding back-to-back waves at the lauded Texas tank, Holloway competent enough while Quizon, as expected, concusses the wave with her endless beautiful strokes.

Fans were thrilled by the event, “WTF Max Holloway can surf???” but less so by the Reels format that cropped out most of the wave, “Worst camera work I’ve ever seen. 3 people surfing and he managed to miss all of them.”

Holloway’s wave pool adventure comes on the heels of another Hawaiian MMA superstar BJ Penn who nearly became surfing’s first pool fatality three years back when he was sucked outta the tank and into the engine room.

“Last year when I got sucked into a wave pool engine room and thought I was going to die… I kept thinking “don’t die for your kids” I was surfing for a about an hour and the line started getting longer to catch the wave. I was sitting next to the owner of the wave pool by the “wall” where the waves come from. The first wave it shoots out is a dud to get everyone ready for the next wave. The dud wave came back and because I was so close to the wall the wave swallowed me and pushed me and my surfboard underneath a huge cement wall. I remember feeling like I was getting sucked in a pipe and at that moment I got scared. It ended up pushing me into a big dark cement room that fills up with water to push the next wave for the wave pool. It felt like I was in the movie SAW or Final destination. The room would fill up with water to the top and I would hold my breath and then it would push the water out to make the wave and it was really rough inside there. Everything I bumped up against in the room that hurt me got infected. I got a bad sinus infection and a couple facial fractures from getting knocked around the cement walls and from the fractures the dirty water got in my face and infected my whole sinus. I was on antibiotics for three weeks for my face. While I was in the wave pool engine room I knew that one of my friends outside from big island is a legendary surfer and I knew he would come in there to rescue me so I stayed calm. A lot of other people might have panicked and maybe gave up but I just stayed strong for my kids. Anyway to make a long story short I survived that mother fucker 😛😛😛 !! The name of the people and water park have been left out. I not the kine guy shows up to your house to play and gets hurt and tries to sue you so all love ❤️ to everyone who helped me get there and helped me survive 🤙 Maybe I was the first guy in history to get sucked into a wave pool engine room while it is in operation but no matter what happens in life and no matter how scary it is if I can offer you any advice I would just say to “stay calm”. If I didn’t fight tough cunts my whole life I might have panicked, but it was just another day in the office.”

 

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“Officials reported 200 sharks swimming fifty yards from the beach…”

The Sharks of NYC got many ways to make multiple incisions in every part of ya from your inner sanctum to your extremities. 

The Manhattan Hammer heads will bludgeon you into submission with tales from their night out at Chelsea with P-Diddy. The Bulls on Wall street could sell you on just-patented rocket jet packs to beat the AM rush hour. And the Tigers of the Bronx don’t show their stripes till ya hip is already three bags into their maw. 

And now, you can add the beaches of Long Island as another part of NYC that’ll mow the joy outta ya when you’re getting a reprieve from the summer months with a little ocean therapy. 

On Independence Day, sharks hit two swimmers at Fire Island (a place in the seventies that would make The Village People forget about the YMCA) and another swimmer in the Hamptons (many would say well deserved).

A 49-year-old man was bitten on the right hand as he paddled off Fire Island Pines. The second was the punctured  thigh of an adult woman as she swam in Cherry Grove. The third was a gash in the right knee of a 47-year-old man in chest-deep water in Southhampton.

Drones spotted swarms of sharks after the bites. 

The day before, a fifteen-year-old surfer was bitten at Kismit beach and a gal of the same age was hit on the leg while swimming near Robert Moses’ beach. 

Local surfers and fisherman say Thresher sharks are, likely, the culprits.

Robert Moses State Park, on Fire Island’s western end, opened to swimmers ninety minutes late Tuesday morning after officials spied a school of fifty sharks swimming two hundred yards from the beach. The school was believed to be made up of sand tiger sharks. The sharks grow between seven and ten feet long and are common in New York waters, but do not often swim in large schools.

Local experts say the sudden attacks can be attributed to cleaner water and the proximity of baitfish closer to the shore. Not to be forgotten is the Gulf Stream that travels up the eastern shores in the summer months from the Caribbean and swaddles our old friends in liquid  blankets so warm it could stir an appetite in an NYC fashion model during runway week.