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.
