Bells winner Jack Robinson a “man distilled to male pre-history: strength, aggression, sexual motivation”

JP Currie's post-Bells Championship Tour Power Rankings… 

There’s been significant slippage on my part lately. For that, I apologise.

This weekend I was ripping out my kitchen. Appropriately symbolic for my domestic situation of late. Rip it out and start again.

I caught some of Bells, but it was sporadic, and often through a violet fog of tiredness or soft drugs. The earliest start is 2200 in Highland time, but often it wasn’t til after midnight. A tough shift, no doubt.

Tougher still when it was such a strange comp.

The waves were there, and then they weren’t. We’re at the Bowl, then Winki, then back to the Bowl again. The judges want progression and commitment, but they still swoon over traditional style. Days ended with only one heat completed or rounds half-finished. Commentary was annoyingly competent, but never shaded beyond mauve.

Such is my usual methodology in covering these comps, when I don’t manage to watch in real time, sometimes I need to go a little off-piste. So, let’s borrow some Lewis Samuels/Post Surf nostalgia and do some Power Rankings of the final eight men at Bells…

Ethan Ewing

Once again, Ewing looked like a shoe-in throughout this comp. The shoe being a fine moccasin. Hand-stitched, obscenely priced, supple like Chas Smith’s pale thigh as a lanky teenager.

There is little many of us can really understand about Ethan Ewing’s surfing. We are left to glimpse the throes of joy only, as one might happen upon a stooping falcon. There’s only so much we can know.

He rides waves with an ecstatic grace. The talon of rail and fin hidden in a shining cloud of speed. He draws the wave around him, until there is nothing more. There can be nothing more.

He is the bird and we are the birders. Yet still, we will pursue him. We will exalt in these glimpses of wildness that catch our hearts off guard and blow them open.

Jordy Smith

No current competitor has sucked from pro surfing’s flaccid hanging dugs for longer than Jordy. His career character arc has traced a wide parabola from Mr Potato Head to Superman.

Before his El Savador win he’d been at pains to justify his continued existence on Tour by stating how much of a “frother” he was. It was a savvy political move. The Frother is an endearing surf archetype, and generally agnostic to niche surf cultures.

And so Jordy has melted the ice round our cold hearts with solid surfing, daddy-vibes, a touch of self-awareness, and an occasional smattering of self-deprecation.

But significantly, becoming less of a cunt.

Sammy Pupo

I’ve always had a little kink for Miggy, so it was easy to get onboard with lil bro. But the brothers are markedly different.

Growing up, Miggy liked Lego and Hot Wheels. Whereas Sammy was more interested in sketching full-page g-bangers in his school jotters. He’d even turn the pages to landscape mode so he could make them real phat pics.

In an unfortunate twist of fate, his teenage horniness might come back to haunt him if his latest WSL mugshot is anything to go by. It’s the face of a Netflix documentary. One featuring a grizzly sex crime, perhaps. Or something with cultish influence.

Strong murder vibes.

Jake Marshall

The Aldi Ethan Ewing.

The Temu John Florence.

Call him what you like, Jake Marshall has knocked off some style tips and body mechanics from the best, wrapped them in less pretty packaging, and served them up to us in a palatable form.

If Ronnie and Richie are correct in their assertion that the two events most desirable to win in surfing’s calendar are Pipe and Bells, then Marshall’s season looks even better.

Unfortunately, none of that can change the fact he has a face like a melted welly, and an accent that would scare mice from your attic.

Morgan Cibilic

“Wouldn’t look that odd to see Jordy carrying Morgan around in a Baby Bjorn,” said Ronnie, during the quarter final match-up between the two men on Tour with faces most like baby’s arses.

Cibilic went X-rated early in the comp with a layback turn that gave many strictly heterosexual men a semi. Morgan should just double down on that one turn.

Kind of like the time Jadson Andre started doing air reverses and the surf world was losing its collective shit for PROGRESSION! Then Jaddy got a ten or won a comp or something and it became like some kind of tic. He literally couldn’t take off on a wave without doing an air reverse, which varied in quality on a scale of mildly competent to wildy spasmodic.

Dark times.

But Morgan’s is way cooler. Just focus on doing that one turn every time, mate. If all you ever achieve is grown men jumping up and shouting PHHHOOOaaaaarrrrr at their wall-mounted TVs, before sitting down quickly and a bit sheepishly, that should probably be enough.

Griffin Colapinto

I’ve come to admire the beautiful, serene emptiness of Griffin Colapinto’s mind tank. It reminds me of an art installation I went to under the arches of a railway bridge in Glasgow. I say “went to”, but actually we’d just chanced upon it on a wide eyed meander home from some rave or other.

People sat on the dirt and concrete in front of this arch, on a damp October night or morning in filthy Glasgow, their eyes directed towards a white sheet, strung between the pillars. There was a projection on the sheet: it showed a livestream of an empty beer bottle, rolling around the back of a ply-lined and windowless Transit van.

Some people looked knowingly impressed, most others were terrified. Those who thought they knew granted secret little nods and tilted eyes to each other over the throng of seshheads and weirdos that had happened to occur under this bridge. Cigarettes were pensively smoked. Baggies were ferreted from coat pockets to stave off the fear.

My mate, let’s call him K, was utterly terrified. Out of his wits, poor thing.

But, and I am not shitting you, I’ve literally just realised now, god knows how many years later, what the fuck it was supposed to be.

An empty vessel in an empty vessel!

Griffin Colapinto.

Genius.

Kanoa Igarashi

The way in which George Owell predicted the future in Nineteen Eighty-Four remains uncanny. Telescreens, surveillance culture, technology as control, manipulation of thought through groupthink and alteration of media…

But what’s less well acknowledged is his WSL fandom. Writing his novel in 1948, a full thirty-five years before the formation of the ASP, Orwell had, somehow, distilled exactly how it feels to watch a Kanoa Igarashi heat in 2025:

And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality which Goldstein’s Turpel’s specious claptrap covered, behind his head on the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army — row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers’ boots formed the background to Goldstein’s Joe Turpel’s bleating voice.

Jack Robinson

We’re all spunk-junkies for Jackie Robinson. That rattishly handsome pimp of waves both whorish and beautiful. He’ll control them all.

“He sucked the marrow out of that one,” drawled Flick at one point, with such heady vibes that no-one listening imagined she was still talking about surfing.

Jack Robinson is a man of action, not words. “The best pimps keep a steel lid on their emotions,” writes Iceberg Slim in the autobiographical Pimp, “and I was one of the iciest.”

So too with Jackie. His post-victory interviews were dire in the extreme. His conversation with Kaipo was like two alpacas trying to tie each other’s shoe laces.

He is a man distilled to the core pillars of male pre-history: physical strength, aggression, sexual motivation. But he’s also a twitchy motherfucker. The sputtering cliches are either a mark of extremely low wit, or a clawing and suppressed darkness within. For narrative’s sake, I prefer the latter.

However, if we look at it objectively, in the UK if you had a kid called Zen, you’d likely live on a council scheme and subsist on Twiglets, online bingo, pints of Stella, and domestic-cleaner-grade cocaine.

Hooray for surfing. It saved his life.