"What if my true destiny is to sit in front of a computer chattering away with a bunch of dudes I’ve never met in real life about a surf contest none of us are attending?"
It started as a great idea, or so I told myself.
Attend the last ever (knock on wood) Final Five at Trestles and give BG readers a “man of the people” perspective, a sort of “what happens when a middle-aged kook shows up and mingles with the two percenters” thing.
It would be different than the shit I usually dump on this site, i.e., musings on stuff from the 80s and 90s that only live deep in a hazy past, occasionally tinged with a touch of regret.
“Look to the future” they said below the line of those prior memory dumps.
“Quit name dropping old Florida surf dudes and live your life, for fuck’s sake.”
“Points taken,” I thought. “Let’s live the future.”
I floated the whole idea to Mrs. Rocks a month or so ago.
“So there’s this surf contest in San Clemente,” I said.
“It’s where they crown the world title winner, which I’m philosophically opposed to seeing as the surf spot where they hold the contest is pretty soft, but after this year it’s going to Fiji and attending it there would be a whole thing, yadda, yadda, so what say we do a quick strike mission to SoCal and catch it this year?”
“When is it?” asked Mrs. Rocks.
A reasonable question.
After all, in addition to being a sapphire-eyed smoke show, Mrs. Rocks is an accomplished business person with a real schedule.
The kind of professional who snaps her fingers and tilts her head a certain way and causes dozens of minions to trip over themselves to bring her coffee and spare laptop cords.
The kind of person for whom the Wozzle’s scheduling peculiarities and randomness are a fucked-up nightmare.
“Uuhhh, well,” I mumbled. “So there’s a week or maybe 10-day window in September, and it could be any day in the window, and I’m not sure when they’ll hold it, we might not know until a day or two before.”
Mrs. Rocks looked at me funny and tilted her head. I scrambled to make her coffee.
She sipped the java thoughtfully, her brow furrowed in that way important people’s brows furrow when they’re thinking deeply about stuff.
“I’m not saying no,” she said after a few moments, “but it would help if you could tell me when it is.”
For the next couple of weeks I scoured the world wide web.
I scanned buoys, read Swellnet’s prediction, refreshed Surfline every few hours, perused whatever (scant) details I could find published on the WSL website, and watched the Wozzle’s pathetic and utterly useless (in terms of actionable info) “informational” video on the Final Five — I even played voyeur in the Florence clan’s respective IGs for hints of their travel schedules.
I may as well have been shoveling smoke with a pitchfork, to borrow a phrase from some backwoods plow farmers. Intel was practically nonexistent.
But slowly, like an incoming tide on a quarter moon in the Gulf of Mexico, data began to creep forth.
Signs increasingly pointed to the beginning of the window. Maybe day one of that window. The forecast sucked, but kind of seemed to perhaps suck slightly less on day one, which is to say Friday, September 6.
Clearly an over promise/under deliver situation, contestable surf wise — but whatever, at least there was a semblance of something to communicate to Mrs. Rocks.
Meanwhile, though, there were rumblings on my side of the capitalist pursuits table. I don’t have any minions serving me, but I do have an actual job.
And for several months, different powers that be in my line of work had been murmuring about the dire need to hold an in-person meeting to get “same paged” on certain high-priority projects, to make sure there would be “alignment” and “direction” moving forward.
Then, at roughly the same time the surf forecast started to come into focus, an email arrived from the grand poobahs who decide these kinds of things.
“In-person meetings, New York City, September 4 and 5. Be there and don’t plan to skip out early, or we will remember such things and one day pounds of flesh will be extracted.”
I was bitter. Crestfallen even.
Given the NYC meeting schedules, combined with cross-country commercial flight patterns, and, even with a red eye, commuting from LAX down to San Clemente, the chances of me being on the trail to Lower Trestles at first light on September 6 were basically nil.
The reality of the meetings didn’t help. This wasn’t my first NYC rodeo and unfortunately wouldn’t be my last.
For those of you in other hemispheres (or Cali) who have only seen New York City in movies, here’s the reality of a business meeting in Manhattan — it can be a pain in the ass.
The upside is direct flights are easy to find. It goes downhill from there.
My meetings were scheduled in SoHo (roughly in the vicinity of the intersection of Hudson and Houston Streets, for the geo-trackers among us), which sounds cool when they say it on reruns of Sex and the City but is way less cool when you’re navigating a sidewalk there at 8:30 on a post-Labor Day Wednesday morning with a hustling throng of brand new acquaintances, all of whom seem as relentlessly focused on getting to a position ahead of you as a Portuguese-speaking surfer in a Bali lineup.
When you make it to your destination, the buildings inevitably look retro chic from the outside, like the hippest person you know re-imagined a suburban office park using street pictures from the 1940s as inspiration.
But you may as well be living in the 1940s when you walk inside. The elevator dimensions are apparently planned with a half-dozen moderately-sized whippets in mind, the wifi works about as you might expect in a structure with walls of four-foot-thick concrete, and finding accessible electric outlets for high-falutin contraptions like MacBooks is akin to digging for T-Rex bones in Otto’s Montana backyard.
And don’t get me started on Manhattan hotels. You know you’re in NYC if you can pee in the toilet and simultaneously open the door to your hotel room without leaving your bed.
It was inevitable though. Seemingly no way around it.
But in the spirit of a long line of reckless American adventurers who defy the odds and shoot for the stars — think Amelia Earhart or Ben Gravy — I held on tight to the dream.
Maybe, just maybe, after day one of the New York meetings someone would realize how utterly useless I was and tell me my input was no longer needed.
Then I could hop on an early flight, sweep the intoxicating Mrs. Rocks off her feet, drop the kids at a babysitter yet to be found, and arrive in SoCal just in time for Heat 1.
Preposterous?
Yes!
But so was the idea of a moon landing before old JFK put it on the USA’s bucket list.
I hopped a Delta flight nonstop to LaGuardia in the late evening of September 3. On the multi-hour flight east, I listened to Chas and DLS yammer on about New Jersey beach cops and ChatGPT podcast name outputs.
I drank a Miller Lite straight from the can because it was the first beer the flight attendant pulled out of her ice drawer, and I scarfed a full bag of airplane chips. I topped it all off with some Biscoff cookies, a delicacy that tastes 26% better at over 30,000 feet.
A yellow cab dropped me at my hotel front door close to midnight. Upon checking in my room, I was delighted to discover that I could take two full steps between the toilet and bed.
Day one in New York dawned clear and sparkling, one of those early fall days where even thickets of skyscrapers can’t keep the sunshine from dancing on sidewalks like a chipper first grader on her birthday morning.
The local pedestrians were in an unusually good mood, the normal sidewalk paddle battles replaced by what can only be described as a party wave vibe.
I was truly worried. I needed disgruntled grand poobahs, not happy ones. I needed them cynical and jaded, ticked off and tired, ready to bust chops and kick weak links to the curb, or at least out of the meetings after day one.
I walked in the conference room. There were pots of fresh-brewed coffee against one wall, danishes and fruit against another. I poured myself a cup of hot black brew and took a seat at the very end of the lengthy conference table, as far from the top guns gathered at the head of the table as I could get.
But the meeting didn’t start. I waited. Fifteen minutes passed. There was no sense of urgency.
Everyone mingled by the danish table, chuckling and chewing. They all seemed as giddy as the sidewalk pedestrians, the party wave vibe extending to these typically stodgy environs.
This was too much.
After 20 minutes, I couldn’t take it any longer.
I stood up and cleared my throat, loudly. The chewing and chuckling continued.
So then I clambered up on the conference table. I stuck my fingers in my mouth and did my best coaches’ whistle, the one I’d perfected over the years that could be heard across several city blocks.
People turned and stared, half-eaten cherry danishes dangling from their shocked fingers — I swear I saw coffee drop down the chin of a regional manager from West Virginia.
“Listen,” I bellowed, louder than intended. “There is a mother-fucking-world-title-deciding surf contest happening Friday morning in Southern California. I intend to be standing on the beach when that thing kicks off shortly after dawn.”
“So if you motherfuckers don’t put your butts in your seats and get this little shindig rolling, I’m going to cold cock every last one of you and leave you on the mean streets of Manhattan for the concrete shoe types to find.”
Just then the grandest Poobah of all snapped me out of my daydream, back from my imaginary throat-clearing and whistling and speech-making and straight into cold hard reality, the one where instead of yelling hard truths at the danish and coffee crowd I instead slumped by myself in an unpadded chair in the back of a drab conference room, morose and mute, staring at my now lukewarm coffee.
“Let’s get rolling people,” he snapped.
“Rocks, we’re going to have to punt your piece to day two, more important shit happening today.”
“I am so fucked,” I thought.
I wished I had actually in real life climbed the table and screamed at them. Maybe then they would have concluded I was cuckoo and let me out early.
The day droned on, mercifully ending eventually, but not before I consumed a few gallons of coffee and a half-dozen or so stale danishes, leaving me bloated and even more bitter.
September 5 was no better.
I yammered on about some stuff in my presentation and then fielded more questions in one day of meeting than I had in the prior two years of work with this crew.
At 12:14 p.m. EST, as if to intentionally pour salt in an open wound, my phone buzzed.
It was breaking news from the WSL, announcing that they were on “yellow alert,” with a “probable start in next 24 hours.”
I sighed and screenshot the alert for posterity. I looked out the conference room windows at the sea of skyscrapers and yellow cabs.
The windows were sealed tight, there was no escape.
Fast forward many long hours to the late evening of Thursday, September 5.
I sat in a chair at LaGuardia, staring out the window at airport construction and malingering baggage handlers. My flight was, predictably, delayed.
My Final Five dream lay in shattered pieces on the industrial carpet all around me.
I made it home, eventually. Once airborne, the long flight was uneventful and mercifully uncrowded, like the universe was finally throwing me a tiny bone.
September 6 awoke crisp and clear back at the homestead, temps in the 50s, birds twittering, and the sky so vast and blue I almost believed in god again.
I crawled out of from under the sheets, still groggy from the late night flight, reluctantly leaving the steaming hot company of Mrs. Rocks.
I clicked on the Final Five stream, a few minutes into the first women’s heat. I opened the BG live chat.
I was still bitter. Divided. Planning just to peek at the show for a second and bail.
If I couldn’t be there live, why be there at all?
But the chat was alive. Comments flew thick, fast and unexpectedly funny.
Warshaw and Jen See were mixing it up with the mortals, and, judging by the rapid-fire pace of the commentary, the regulars appeared to be keeping up with Italo’s Red Bull consumption.
Like a bonefish hitting fresh shrimp, I was hooked.
I kept trying to tear myself away in an attempt to do some real work but couldn’t help getting reeled back in.
At one point, Hippy said something about the chat making all things Final Five adjacent just a little better.
I wondered if my original dream of live action was really just the wrong dream all along.
What if my true destiny was to sit in front of a computer instead of out under the sunshine, chattering away with a bunch of dudes I’ve never met in real life about a surf contest none of us (or very few of us) are actually attending?
What if being summoned to New York was a blessing, not a curse?
Right then, JJF torqued a massive snap, nose fully picked and spray flying to the horizon.
The sight of his board buried in the clear Pacific water, the sun shining and cobblestones glistening, snapped me back to reality, horrified at what I had almost become, shuddering at the sight of the dark virtual abyss into which I had nearly toppled.
“Hey babe, have you ever wanted to go to Fiji?” I yelled to the other room.
