"You random fanboy Barneys keep kooking up our
culture. If you ran your mouth in person like you do now you’d be
sleeping on your knees!"
The high-stepping trad longboarder Joel Tudor, who is famous
for being able to hang ten for fifteen consecutive seconds, has
put his boot into recalcitrant surf fans who responded poorly to
his claim that the WSL contest in Abu Dhabi is being run in
“beginner waves.”
“Watching the WSL wave pool comp in Abu Dhabi and realising they
have the wave set at beginner level!” writes Tudor, nicknamed
Tinkerbell for his pretty good looks and small square hips. “Slides
two and three are from when they let em use the regular setting…no
bump rides, actual hollow sections that didn’t shut down on you and
wave height a foot or two bigger! Super bummed y’all didn’t have
the balls to speak up and get it done correctly!”
This was sucked straight into the nostrils of one surf fan who
ran up on Tudor wrapped in a fighting cape.
“You come across as someone who is always on their high horse.
An ageing opinionated man isn’t a good look lol.”
Tudor responded, “I can say what I want because I’m still better
than all of them hahahahahaha and I’m almost fifty.”
Surf fan, “That’s an ego assertion. Can’t justify it that way
although you’re not totally wrong. hahaha.”
Tudor, “Not ego at all. Pure factual statement! From Pipeline to
Malibu gramps is still holding court!”
All good humour until Barney man arrives!
He writes, “Yes, you’re good at surf, and apparently decent at
jiujitsu but you really think apart (from) a small number of
persons that practice these activities you’re worth something? Like
to humanity? Calm down and stop speaking like a kid.”
Tudor, “You random fanboy Barneys keep kooking up our culture as
you please. If you ran your mouth in person like you do now you’d
be sleeping on your knees! Suck a Richard kook!
And, “Decent at jiujitsu? I’m a two-time IBJJF world no Gi
champion and an ADCC 2009 invite. I will tie you in a human
knot!”
Joel got a point? Barneys kooking up surf culture? Is there a
culture left to kook up?
Thoughts BTL.
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San Clemente wins Rookie of the Year.
San Clemente slaps surf world upside head
after sweeping WSL Rookie of the Year honors!
"It’s insane and such a big accomplishment because
there are so many incredible surfers on the list of Rookie of the
Year..."
The surf world was rocked to its very core,
overnight, after a sleepy Southern California beach town
made famous by Richard Nixon swept Rookie of the Year honors for
the 2024 World Surf League Championship Tour season. Griffin
Colapinto’s brother Crosby and Sawyer Lindblad each won in their
respective, though maybe antiquated, gender category in what should
be the teeth of a Brazilian Storm.
In its The World Surf League declared it proudly “recognizes
Sawyer Lindblad (USA) and Crosby Colapinto (USA) as the 2024
Rookies of the Year following an outstanding season on the
Championship Tour (CT). The San Clemente, California, duo,
Colapinto and Lindblad, finished the season as the highest ranked
among the 2024 CT Rookie class. At 19-years-old Lindblad capped her
year ranked No. 8 in the world. Colapinto at 23-years-old made the
Mid-season Cut and finished ranked No. 10. Both join an elite group
of Rookie of the Year recipients, including WSL Champions Caitlin
Simmers (USA), Stephanie Gilmore (AUS), Carissa Moore (HAW), and
Italo Ferreira (BRA).”
Lindblad, ever gracious, stated, “It’s super cool to be Rookie
of the Year and join surfers including Carissa and Steph on that
list. I had a goal of being Rookie of the Year this year, and I’m
so happy I was able to accomplish it. Some challenges I faced this
year was having to surf waves like Pipe and Teahupo’o. I’ve never
surfed waves like that in my life and it was a really fun challenge
and also really intimidating at times. But, I was happy to get past
those fears and get some of the best waves of my life.”
Colapinto added, “It’s insane and such a big accomplishment
because there are so many incredible surfers on the list of Rookie
of the Year and to join that is really special. Being in a rookie
class this year that was strong with Cole, Kade, Eli, and Jacob
Willcox and getting to be on top is really cool. I think one of the
biggest highlights was Portugal, just because the Mid-season Cut
was coming up, the pressure was on, and I made it to the
Semifinals. Griffin was in the other Semifinal and he made it to
the Final. It got really close to us having a man-on-man Final. It
didn’t happen, but just the idea of being so close, getting a big
result and Griffin winning was really special.”
All very cool but, again, no Brazilians even close to the
honors, San Clemente thoroughly whipping the Land of Order and
Progress. Do you think there will be a national reckoning, there,
in preparation for the upcoming 2024 World Surf League Championship
Tour season or do you imagine the surf-mad nation will cross that
proverbial bridge when it comes, knowing that both Gabriel Medina
and the aforementioned Ferreira are considered title favorites what
with Finals Day moving to Cloudbreak.
Filipe Toledo’s journey, unfortunately, finished.
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Westerly Windina shortly before transitioning
back to OG surf hunk Petey Drouyn.
Controversial documentary explores trans
surf icon Peter Drouyn’s decision to de-transition
“People definitely felt the film was too hot to
handle. They were scared of it.”
Over the course of the next few months, the beautifully
crafted documentary The Life and Death of Westerly Windina
will be showing at a handful of film festivals while its
producers work out a way to get the film in front of a larger
audience.
The rough back story you know.
In the late sixties and through the seventies Queensland surfer
Peter Drouyn was one of the hottest in the biz. And when he wasn’t
giving hell in the water he was busy putting his wildly creative
brain to work. He invented man-on-man surfing, which continues to
this day, introduced surfing to China, became a lawyer, owned a
fleet of surf stores, ran a drama school, and, at age fifty four,
slipped out of his masculine shell to reappear as head-turning
show-girl Westerly Windina.
First, you gotta congratulate the director, who is sixty-four
but looks oh so many moons younger, like a haggard
thirty-nine-year-old nightclub habitué maybe, on what he calls “an
epic journey” but you gotta also, say, a dozen years, brother, what
took you so long?
Ol Al laughs and says,
“If you’d gone back to 2011 when Jamie and I are about to jump
on the plane to come over and interview Peter for the first time,
we thought the project would be complete within eighteen months,
two years tops. It was a super interesting story and one worth
telling. There’s really only one Peter Drouyn and only one Westerly
Windina. And it was right at the beginning of the Caitlin Jenner
transgender sports movement and the Peter Drouyn story needed to be
out there. His transition was such a unique journey that we
strongly felt we needed to chase it. We’ve really ridden the
rollercoaster of the whole transgender zeitgeist for good or
bad.”
Alan points out that two of the executive producers were
transgender, which was real important for one pivotal part of the
film, like, the ending, which we’ll hit a little later.
“We got a surprising pushback to the film, people definitely
thought it was too hot to handle, they were scared of it. It was
really surprising. We thought, is this another one of Peter
Drouyn’s stories that is hobbled or lost or doesn’t get the
attention it truly deserves? Because Peter’s a visionary thinker.
He’s such an unusual human being, the way his creative mind works.
He’s written multiple screenplays. The guy doesn’t stop trying to
find ways to express himself.”
It’s right now in the interview, and at this point I haven’t
seen it although I will shortly after, that I note that Alan only
talks about Peter Drouyn and not Westerly Windina.
That’s one hell of a plot spoiler, I say.
Surf hunk to showgirl and back again.
“It is and…look…I prefer people to see the film and to
see where Peter and Westerly are now. Peter was never put to bed
and Westerly was never put to bed. They’ve coexisted as an idea
over that period of time and the film supplies the answers to that.
You have to see it to contextualise the movie.”
And, yeah, the ending. Westerly transitions back into Peter.
But, says Alan, there was pressure to end the film at the Hall
of Fame awards sequence where Drouyn accepts his award as Westerly
and where he’s all dolled up to look like Marilyn Monroe.
Detransitioning, for the progressives, has got a stigma around
it, y’see. A bit of a whiff of the right-wing crowd. Only fairy
tales allowed in the happy world of rainbows.
But the exec producers, by virtue of being trans, and aware that
what makes a good story is truth telling, got it through.
“A lot of people originally said that this was a desperate cry
for attention,” says Alan. “But there is absolutely no way on earth
you’d ever go through what Peter went through. That transgender
transition is like psychic upheaval on a major scale. It takes
courage and commitment.”
Peter Drouyn, who is seventy-five now, still lives in a crummy
lil joint in Labrador, a down-at-heel adjunct to the northern end
of the Gold Coast with his thirty-something son Zachary, the fruit
of his one marriage
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Greatest surf character actor ever, Keanu Reeves, on
stage at Ohana Fest.
Surf fans pitched into frenzy as Keanu
Reeves’ Dogstar takes stage at Eddie Vedder’s Ohana Fest!
It is flat in Southern California, still, with
a strange mucky gloom hanging in the sky. It has been this way for
months, now, driving surf fans to the brink of madness though,
today, none of that matters. For a mania has begun to take hold
that has nothing to do with no waves nor sun.
A hysteria.
For but yesterday, Keanu Reeves’ band Dogstar took the stage at
Eddie Vedder’s Ohana Festival in Dana Point, California.
Johnny Utah himself plucking his bass strings while surf fans,
crazed, rubbed their eyes in the audience. Dogstar, of course, was
formed in Los Angeles, California in 1991 when Reeves saw a man
wearing a hockey sweater in the supermarket. The two got to
talking, then jamming, then, as Reeves tells it, “You know, we
started in a garage, and then you end up starting to write songs,
and then you’re like ‘Let’s go out and play them!’, and then you’re
like ‘Let’s go on tour!’, and then…you’re playing.”
There is not word, yet, on how the show was as surf fans are
still in a cloud of disbelief but take a gander here.
Makua Rothman also opened the day.
Vedder and his Pearl Jam closed it.
But were you there, live, in the audience? How was it? I heard
that Pearl Jam played a never-before-performed tune off a 1999
release called “The Whale Song.” Vedder said, from stage, “It’s a
song written by one of our great drummers named Jack Irons. We
asked Jack but he could not be here. But we didn’t just get the
next best thing, we got something equally as good as his dad, it’s
Mr. Zach Irons who’s gonna join us on this next song. He’s gonna
play guitar, left-handed, and we’re gonna sing and we hope it
connects and sends vibrations to our friends under the water.”
If you missed yesterday and have fallen into the deepest of
depressions, don’t worry. The festival kicks on today with Sting
headlining. Tomorrow it’s back to Pearl Jam and Alanis Morissette
at the top of the bill.
No more Dogstar but one hand in pocket, the other giving a high
five ain’t bad.
"Westerly has been living in public housing on
Australia’s Gold Coast. She is alone, poor, and often taunted by
her neighbours.”
Fifty-five years ago, Peter Drouyn was the best surfer
in Australia, better even, than the icon Nat Young. But
how do you want to say it? Drouyn was, by nearly all accounts, an
asshole swollen by ego and torn apart inside an infinite sense of
injustice.
But then,
“In 2002, Peter suffered a traumatic surfing accident that
nearly drowned him. Not long after, Peter’s feminine side fully
emerged. ‘It was a supernova,’ said Westerly. ‘It just kicked
in one night, and suddenly Peter went, Westerly was there.’
Six years later,
“Peter Drouyn announced on Australian national television that
he was living as a woman. His new name, she said, was Westerly
Windina. Since then, Westerly has been living in public housing on
Australia’s Gold Coast. Her life is not easy. She is alone, poor,
and often taunted by her neighbours.”
Now, and after so much ado I’d forgotten about it, almost a
dozen “epic” years, the documentary of Westerly’s journey,
including her flight to south-east Asia for gender reassignment
surgery, is just about to light up screens.
The Life and Death of Westerly Windina premieres on
October 19 at the Palace Theatre in Byron Bay as part of the Byron
Bay International Film Festival.
As an addendum to all this, I interviewed Drouyn a couple of
times and found a delightful egoist preparing, it seemed at the
time, for his greatest performance. At one point, he confided in me
when I asked him about the time he posed nude for a women’s mag
that his balls were so big, like basketballs he said, that he could
sit on them.
Little did I know!
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Jon Pyzel and Matt Biolos by
@theneedforshutterspeed/Step Bros
