Surf punters battle for seven thousand dollars and a fleet of three PANDA surfboards in Surfival League…
It has been six years since a Berlin-based cycling enthusiast Shane Starling aka Zmonde won the WSL’s Fantasy Surf league, an event that went unremarked and unacknowledged by the owners of the game.
Shane, who picked ten of the eleven event winners that year, describesd lying on his bed, going into a meditative state, “putting on some Captain Beefheart”, and being there on the day of the finals and watching Joe Turpel present the medals on the podium.
He was relatively sanguine about the lack of a prize telling me, “I don’t understand the Wozzle half the time.”
Across the Pacific in San Francisco, a young surfer, Taylor Lobdell, read the story and, as he describes it, a light bulb went off in his head and with a thousand bucks of his own money, he developed a fantasy surf game, called Surfival, based on a NFL fantasy league, and kicked it live.
“I figured, even if I lose a thousand dollars I’m totally ok with it. Me and a couple of buddies will have some fun,” says Taylor, who now lives in San Luis Obispo, surfing that lightly crowded stretch of coast between Morro Bay and Cayucos on either his Shane Stoneman twinny or his Timmy Patterson Al Cleland Jr model.
That year, 300 surf punters signed up and each year the number grows as a pretty dang hard-core group of surfers each kick in twenty-five shekels for a chance at the seven gees and three PANDA surfboards.
Rules are simple.
You pick one surfer to survive past what used to be the round of 32 but is now round 2 of each event.
Just one surfer. If they advance, you stay alive. If they don’t, you’re out.
You only get one shot with each surfer. Pick Jackie Robinson for Bells and you don’t get him for Margs or Teahupoo.
More than the seven gees, maybe, is the ability of the Surfvival League to bring interest to those dull early rounds.
“My WSL interest has really waned over the past ten years,” says Taylor. “But the Surfival League kept me into it and kept me engaged.
“I get people hanging on every heat and emailing or DMing me after the round of 32 with their heartbreak stories. It’s so funny. And the end of a heat there’s a flood of messages…no, no, no, no…so getting that drama and feedback as well as thank you’s for guys who’ve lost early is really nice. It’s a great time.”
If you’re into a little tension, maybe some cash and a fleet of Californian-made surfboards, well, you just click here and join us.
And we’ll see you April 1.