"WTF happened to pro surfing now days? It’s a
circus run by clowns."
Surf fans are, currently, melting down after
the World Surf League called off the second day of the Lexus Pipe
Pro even though massive tubes could be seen, threaded, on Surfline.
The theoretical day, which kicked off at 7:45 am, Hawaii time, was
directly put on a thirty minute pause, followed by a fifty minute
pause, followed by a two-hour pause, forty-five minute pause,
thirty minute pause then called off entirely.
The World Surf League went straight-faced with the announcement,
simply stating on Instagram, “The @lexususa #PipePro is OFF for the
day. Next call: February 6 at 7:45 am HST.”
The aforementioned surf fans were not so… bland.
Johnny Boy Gomes kicked in the door with… “You gotta be kidding
me, cancel today‼️ WTF happened to pro surfing now days 🤪 It’s a
circus 🎪 run by clowns.”
…and was followed by an assortment of rage.
A sampling.
“What an absolute joke. Bring back the days when Keiran Perrow
was running the tour, he’d go out and get a bomb then send everyone
out there, WSL is a complete clown show.”
“Seriously is the WSL trying to lose all fans? I’ve never been
more embarrassed about a sport I love.”
“Just seen Italo get spat out of a monster barrel!! Who actually
made the decision to call it off??”
“Need another professional surf league to compete against the
WSL! Too soft and a men’s karen champion from last season!”
“Completely unfair to the guys that charge on days like today.
Simple fact.”
There were many clown GIFs and middle finger emojis
included.
Ariel Mann was the lone voice of support, for the “global home
of surfing,” penning, “Good call. Doesn’t look great at all.”
Do you have thoughts? Were you sitting on the Open Thread all
day, waiting patiently?
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Father of embattled world surfing champ
Filipe Toledo pleads for empathy in stirring online monologue
"I'm sorry, but they're not machines, it's a tiring
hour, and Filipe is really tired of all that!"
The father of world champ Filipe Toledo has delivered a
stinging attack at “the haters on duty” after Toledo’s embarrassing
fail and withdrawal from the Lexus Pipe Pro prompted an
unprecedented backlash from fans and media alike.
Fearsome winter swells have already injured five pro surfers
in a variety of incidents since December, with big-wave specialists
John John Florence and Australian Jack Robinson starring on day
one.
Toledo, though, was barely sighted in his round one heat,
waiting almost 25 minutes for his first wave – which did not barrel
and was scored 0.50.
A follow-up of 1.27 saw the Brazilian champion relegated to
the elimination round, from which he withdrew due to
illness. Toledo’s no-show continued a theme of several notable misfires
in heaving conditions, most infamously registering a 0.0 score at
Teahupo’o in 2015 and then opting not to paddle for waves in a 2022
heat at the Tahitian break.
…repeated questions have been asked over his big-wave
approach upon his two world titles and the WSL format that decides
the championship in a winner-takes-all shoot-out at Trestles in
California, typically a smaller, high-performance break.
“To the critics on duty, and the world champions who comment on
social media, believe what you want, I’m not here to prove anything
to you! My health is my priority! To those cheering me on, thank
you very much! We are together haha we will be back better and
stronger!’”
Now, instead of choking the matter of oxygen, Filipe’s daddy
Ricardo has given the story another day or two of traction with a
lengthy to-camera piece.
Daddy of Filipe Toledo, Ricardo, attacks “haters
on duty.”
“Hey guys good afternoon. Passing by here to leave a rant, and
to thank everyone who sent us messages of support, during these
days, in which Filipe has been severely attacked, as if no athlete
had the right to have a bad day, and was forced to always be fine,
and surf to win.
“Sometimes we forget that they are human beings, who suffer, get
tired, get exhausted, have pain, longing, bad days, and that will
not always meet the expectations of the haters on duty, and that
will cause so much hate, for simply not meeting the expectations of
some. I’m sorry, but they’re not machines, it’s a tiring hour, and
Filipe is really tired of all that!
“My affection and love to you my son, you have every right to be
tired and to have your bad days, and NOBODY can charge you for
that, NOBODY!!! If you are not happy, or you don’t like him,
unfollow him, delete your followers, but don’t talk about something
you don’t know and have never lived in your life, besides, it will
not change anything in our history, nothing in what was conquered,
but in The truth only speaks more about you, than about who you are
trying to attack! MORE EMPATHY, PLEASE!!!”
"A typical 20-something, amoral, douchebag
bachelor..."
Mankind was put on warning, hours ago, when an
artificially intelligent robot generating surf and surf-adjacent
content for the once-proud Surfer Magazine developed hurt
feelings and brutally lashed out at the source of its duress. Jake
Howard, as it’s called, took to surf journalist Chas Smith’s social
media in the wee hours of the night to bitterly complain about
being “slandered.”
The charge revolved around Smith opining on Howard’s defense of Brazil’s
Filipe Toledo for giving no effort/looking terrified
during the opening round of the Lexus Pipe Pro, comparing the timid
champion to Andy Irons and citing “hanging out” with both of them
at different times as evidence.
Smith wrote, “At the end, and this should go without writing,
Andy Irons and Filipe Toledo’s situations are so disparate that it
boggles how the robot wove them together.” A charge that remains as
true today as it was 24 hours ago. In case it does need to go with
writing, though, Toledo has all the talent, training, equipment and
then some, and yet has repeatedly shown that he doesn’t have the
heart to throw himself over scary ledges, going further and
excoriating his critics for daring challenge him. Mere mortals like
you and me have varying degrees of limited skill, no training,
middling equipment. All we have, at the end, is our guts. We, each,
fail often to live up to our own ideals as it relates to being bold
but still pick ourselves up and try, or else get leveled by our
peers, and that is why this whole Toledo business irks.
The lack of struggle and the lack of accountability.
Howard, anyhow and as mentioned, swung into Smith’s lightly trafficked
Instagram account with, “So weird how you have my
phone number, and one of your minions has been texting me for the
last 48 hours, and yet here we are, coping and pasting my words for
clicks and to slander me. You’re quite the man.” Adding, “Ask
homie’s ex wife about is literary output: ‘It was almost as if my
attractive, fun, sweet and loving husband had morphed into your
typical 20-something, amoral, douchebag bachelor. At least that’s
how he portrayed himself in his writing, and his readers lapped it
up.’”
Ex-wife a brutal and painful cudgel.
In truth, and exiting the third person, I have no beef with
Howard, just as I have no beef with my calculator or AirPod Pros. I
do have beef with thin-skinned, defensive access journalism, in
general, and Surfer Magazine, specifically. A dug-up
corpse being fed upon by Wall Street suits and no different than
Hurley, Quiksilver, Billabong, RVCA, Volcom or any of the brands
that used to represent something real.
But here we stand, Howard clearly piqued, and might we finally
have an opportunity for a great and public debate on the point, or
pointlessness, of surf journalism? What it should be and where it
should go? An expansion into what surf culture should mean in the
era of its Costco-ification?
"In print form, Stab was without precedent, an
essential protein or two away from being a new surf-media
lifeform."
The print version of Stab magazine, which was published
out of Australia from 2004 to something near 2014 (that’s where my
collection stops, anyway) was a distant cousin of a short-lived
early ’90s magazine called Beach Culture, in that
the graphic design jangled and jarred and did everything but reach
up and grab you by the throat.
Stab was also a bit like Playboy, softcore and lad mag-y and
happy to venture from its primary subject (naked girls for Playboy;
surfing for Stab), and also because the tone and voice for
each magazine so clearly belonged to one person—Stab cofounder
Derek Rielly, I think, would be
happy to be called the Hugh Hefner of surfing, and if the rest of
us think that’s icky and retrograde, Derek’s wolfish white-toothed
smile will only grow; kiss-my-lavender-scented-ass provocation
wasn’t job #1 for either man, but it was (still is, for Derek) Top
Five for sure.
Stab borrowed a little from Surfer’s Journal and Game Boy-era Surfing
World by splurging on 70-pound semigloss paper stock,
lux-quality inks, square-binding, and as a rule taking the most
expensive option in every aspect of the printing process.
Finally, and Rielly brings this with him wherever he goes, Stab
at times did a pretty decent imitation
of Mad magazine—it’s there in the cover blurbs (“If you
think our LAST ISSUE was bad, wait till you read this one!”), and
especially in the fantastic and much-missed Stab
Comics series, which pulls equally from Mad and
Playboy’s Little Annie Fanny strip, and that makes sense
because Annie was created by Mad founder Harvey
Kurtzman.
“Kelly Slater is an American Hero” ran
in the September 2005 issue. There’s a whole backstory there with
how pissed off Kelly was with Derek Rielly and the Stab crew in
general, but I don’t recall the details. In the second panel,
that’s Derek and Stab cofounder Sam McIntosh cowering under the
table, and you can probably figure it out from there.
Kelly Slater cartoon from 2005 Stab
magazine.
But for all that, my take on Stab has always been
that, in print form, it was by and large without precedent, almost
sui generis, an essential protein or two away from being a new
surf-media lifeform.
It was focused and manic at the same time. The pockets felt
very, very deep (I’ll bet my two-thirds-paid-for house that Stab
was page for page not just the most expensive surf magazine ever
made but among the most expensive news-rack-available magazines of
any kind), yet each issue looked and felt like something made,
front to back, on a three-day speed binge.
I don’t mean that as a slight.
I read something once, it was either about Stax or Muscle Shoals
or maybe the early Beatles records, that talked about how if a
group of creative people are exceptionally talented and on the same
page and on a mission, then amazing work can be accomplished with
equally-amazing speed. Stab wasn’t the Beatles. Chas Smith, Fred Pawle, Matt
George, Lewis Samuels and a few other contributing writers put some ballast in there, but
the magazine almost comes off as a throwaway. Which for me is part
of the thrill.
Stab was high-end and dispensible (The Surfer’s Journal version
of high-end, by contrast, begs to be collected and preserved and
archived), except if you tossed it you would never fully understand
and appreciate how much Rielly and team put into every page, no
detail too small to not mess with, the hundreds of color choices,
the wordy captions and sub-heads, the confetti-drop of fonts,
bolds, italics, underscores.
For two years straight, the Stab magazine logo changed every
issue. The magazine’s trim size wasn’t quite that flexible, but
close—I count six sizes between 2004 and 2009, including a 2008
hardbound Special Millennium Issue (“We know, we know, eight years
late. Them deadlines are killer!”) that measured 16.5″ x 12″
weighed over three pounds. Starting with issue #11, you got halfway
through the magazine and had to flip it over and upside down, and
there’s a second cover and sort of but not really a second
magazine, Stab Style, which I’m 98% sure was a grab for more
surfwear ad contracts but never mind, the fun continued. Stab was
extra, 15 years before that word came into (and fell out of)
fashion.
Stab magazine was too good or maybe too strange to last, but it
lasted way longer than it probably should have. Rielly and
cofounder Sam McIntosh had a major and never-mended falling out; in
2014, Derek went on to cofound BeachGrit, which has all of the
humor of Stab but none of the flash or fine detail; McIntosh wisely
and deftly steered Stab out of print into the handsome but mainstream
finger-on-pulse website you see here.
I don’t miss Stab, exactly. It was very much a creation of, and
a force behind, the period in which it lived.
Like a lot of great things—Led Zeppelin, Happy Days, Elgin Baylor—the print version of Stab hung on a
little too long, or at least didn’t quite go out on its own fizzy
terms. I do find myself wishing that something else would come
along, another bolt from the surf-media blue. Not a replacement for
Stab, but something with Stab-like ambition and layers and
confidence and verve. But I suspect the sport has outgrown or
evolved or devolved to a point where a project like that could take
root and flourish. I hope I’m wrong.
Stab is not the “Last Surf Magazine,” as my original and
overwrought title for today’s Joint stated before I erased and
started over. It is not even the last surf magazine I’ve enjoyed or
learned from or otherwise valued.
