In truth, surfing never loved Erik Logan.
Some men are content with their own patch of dirt,
watching a few meagre seeds of a lifetime’s hard work
flourish around them. Content to live in peace, even if that means
being forgotten or unremembered.
Erik “ELo” Logan was not one of these men.
For Erik, no dream was too big.
He’d grown up in a fine neighbourhood in Oklahoma City, where
sometimes tornadoes would whip up dust clouds so fierce young
Erik’s tears would roll onto his chin like little soft balls. When
Erik wasn’t crying, which wasn’t often, he enjoyed dressing his
Action Men up in tuxedos with no pants, and pulling the legs from
daddy long legs.
Relentlessly driven by the tough love of all the strong women in
his life, Logan developed a catty confidence that was to see him
have early success in showbusiness. First, as Chuck The Duck, then
later, Cody The Coyote, where duties included singing country music
songs and sucking golfballs though gardenhoses.
Adopting other identities suited Logan, and he worked his way up
the sticky corporate ladder. Soon, dalliances with Oprah Winfrey
led to an ego which had become swollen like the bulbous purple head
of a little bullfrog, and this, eventually, would lead to his
demise.
In January 2020, the mysterious billionaire Dirk Ziff, appointed
him as CEO of the World Surf League. Logan stroked out on his own
into the shark infested waters of professional surfing with a
wetsuit made of armour and some clean, shiny Vans, falling head
over heels for surfing.
Here was where he could make his name! Because all the surfers
would just be like yeah brah and whatever. What could they possibly
know of the clever showbiz tricks and fruity wordplay he would use
to control them?
And yes! He could be a surfer! Why not? If Johnny Utah could do
it, so could he. He’d be dirty dancing with Swayze lookalikes
before he knew it, leading them a merry jig.
His dream was set.
In the early days, Logan could often be seen with his personal
Instagram photographer, doggy styling on a SUP. He preferred double
Vs to shakas, but was not afraid to use both. The early signs were
not promising. The sharks began to circle.
In truth, surfing never loved him. The waters were too muddy,
too full of wizened old creatures either entirely disinterested in
his presence, or quick to tear him from arsehole to nipple with the
ease with which one might draw a paring knife across the skin of a
peach.
He changed his look for surfing, adopting a cultivated rugged
appearance, like a man with fewer worries. A man who could
executive produce mediocre TV shows like Ultimate Surfer and Make
Or Break one minute, but wear a t-shirt with the chest tattoos of
his star athletes the next. He was not afraid to instruct his
athletes to remove their shirts. He was the boss after all.
He touched foreheads with Jack Robinson in Hawaii, showing how
connected he was to indigenous cultures. He was even thinking of
getting himself an outrigger. And he insisted Dave Prodan called
him uncle (which he was only too happy to do).
Logan was fond of the
passive-aggressive open letter as a medium of communication. He
penned two significant letters of pointed prose during his
tenure.
The first was a response to a group of surfing professionals who
had filed a petition against the Mid Year Cut, a new-old format
change for the WCT that saw poorly performing, browbeaten surfers
axed halfway through the season. This letter castigated the surfers
as if they were silly little children who should be seen and not
heard (preferably with tops off).
Letter number two again responded to disgruntled Tour
professionals, this time a contingent of World Champions in Filipe
Toledo, Gabriel Medina and Italo Ferreira, surfers from a nation
whose fanbase might not be Logan’s preferred flavour, being mostly
not rich and white, but who have almost single-handedly propped up
the World Surf League during his tenure.
Again, this letter had “a tone that lies somewhere between
a dictator and a domestic abuser”, according to one chronicler of
surfing on minor surf blog, BeachGrit.
Erik Logan did have one bright spot early in his career, the
first and only time he would engage with surfing’s gutter press.
Logan manhandled BeachGrit’s Charlie Smith
in a podcast debate, skipping jauntily around Smith’s ill-prepared
questions and aiming sharp little kicks to his ribs in
a neat little jig of corporate verbiage. Not since the heady days of Goggans
vs Smith had the latter been taken so roughly.
Indeed, Logan’s speciality was to deliver lashings and lashings
of mushy corporate word salad. He was particularly adroit at
window-dressing bare-faced lies, flubbing numbers, and wielding
amorphous statistical evidence, leading many to believe that
professional surfing was a runaway success under his watch.
But for a man who valued drama and narrative above all else, he
suffered an ungracious, flat ending. No drama, no narrative, Merely
disappeared mid-event to the tune of a rudimentary press release. A
vaporisation perhaps befitting a man who ran the WSL in a manner
not inaccurately compared to Stalinist Russia.
Logan’s Instagram states he is still “living life one wave at a
time”.
As an arbiter of surf competition and storytelling, that wave is
a closeout in perpetuity.
“No competitive pursuit boasts counter-culture roots
cunts as strong as like surfing.” Sydney Morning Herald
profile on Logan from March 2023: The Former Oprah Exec
Bringing Soap Opera To Surfing
