Soccer Surf Road Trip Complete

9,000 Km's in three weeks, a country traversed to the dance and beat of an African World cup. It's all there to view at http://www.soccersurfroadtrip.com/?m=1. Check it out, may be something more from this in the future.

Surfing needs Hooligans

If Pro-surfing has a colour, then it’s colour is beige.

I’ve never been a fan of surf contests. Surfing for me has always been a form of escape and so surf contests, with the crowds, groupies, P.A systems and branded grandstands, have always sat at the opposite end of the surfing spectrum to where I find my stoke. But this was the ‘CT, being hosted at ‘J-Bay’, the 25^th anniversary and the ‘Greenest’ event on tour, and I was at a loose end after a highly entertaining but surf starved month on the road following the football World Cup, so I thought why not. I made the ten-hour drive from Cape Town, checked into my hostel, got drunk at the Mexican and took up my perch on the boardwalk.

Supers was beautiful. 6 ft and sky blue with only two guys out, just like in the grainy photos from the 60’s that decked the walls of all those new restaurants about town. But by the time I’d watched the tenth pro surfer jack hammer his way down the point in identical fashion to the last, I’d already grown weary; privately disappointed at myself for being so easily duped and growing ever more resentful for every bottom turn - top turn combo that bludgeoned home the obvious point to us, the passive, bovine spectators that:

‘This was simply not entertainment’.

Where was the passion? Where was the drama? Andy Vs Kelly, Jordy Vs Mick, had I missed something? This was pro-surfing. Surfing’s heavily branded, heavily endorsed showpiece with carrots in the shape of cash prizes and diamond encrusted watches. If there is such a thing as the brotherhood of surfing then its place was not here. We, the spectators, had no loyalty. This was a place for high entertainment, where the spectator is king. And if they are not entertained, so they should say so. Did 90,000 English fans stand idly by as their team bored their way to a 0-0-draw Vs. Algeria? Did 90,000 Bafana fans shrug their shoulders when their keeper was wrongly sent from the field? No, they inhaled deeply and exhaled a string of profanities that screamed,

‘ We are not entertained!’

So as I listened to the muted applause as yet another pro limped to a disappointing 5.5 at pumping supers, and the sighs as Slater exited early, I bit my tongue and listened instead to the voice in a dark and suppressed corner of my sub-conscious.  

’Surfing,’ it said, ‘needs hooligans’.

If this was the ‘circus’ then where was the flair? Where were the airs, sushi rolls and rodeo flips of all those industry movies? I wanted to see Pro’s surfing so far beyond themselves that surfing no longer felt tangible to me, the average Joe spectator, and crossed into another dimension entirely. That, to me, is entertainment. And if that isn’t possible, if it’s too much to ask, then I want to see pro’s lined up at heaving Shipsterns and handed identical little twigs for boards, where the last man standing collects the million dollars whilst his would be competitors are airlifted to hospital. That would be entertainment.

I want to see Slater Vs Irons at Teahupoo against the sort of maelstrom of partisan abuse that I heard as a kid at the Manor ground in Oxford. I want to see Irons taking off under the lip as a thousand screaming Slater fans bay for his blood from the shoulder, where every blowout is cheered drunkenly like a six by the Barmy Army. I want to see Parkinson pull into a barrel at Pipe in front of a beach load of Fanning fans, arm in arm singing terrace songs.

But no, pro surfing felt bland. The women donned their bikinis to stalk the pro’s up the beach whilst the men sucked in their guts and talked shit now that they couldn’t out muscle each other in the line-up. The sponsors dashed down to the waters edge to greet the lonely pro, to slap him on the back and dish out a branded cap for a T.V interview. At least Jordy pulled it out of the bag for the hometown crowd and stirred up a little life.

Yes this is surfing, yes we are laid back and competition isn’t in our blood. And that is a good thing, but do we always need to conform to stereotype?  Maybe we know deep down that the idea of Pro surfing is in itself crass, but by suppressing it we do the sport no favours. If people want pro surfing to succeed then they should embrace it, flaunt it and push it to excess, and they then deal with the consequences. If 20/20 could revitalise cricket, imagine what could be done with surfing with a little passion and creativity. But if we’re unsure, if it’s pushing the sport to areas we’re not willing to cross, should we not rather question its legitimacy all together?