“Should we just send the CT to Texas to surf against a bunch of 13-year-old girls and see what happens?”
The WSL is on its knees tonight suffering if not mortal, then substantial damage, following a wild fusillade launched at the upcoming Surf Ranch Pro by the world’s most beloved surf broadcasters.
In between swizzling the fruit in their Old-Fashioneds and speaking through gusts of rank whisky breath, Jed Smith and Vaughan Blakey, performers on the podcast Ain’t That Swell, delivered a fatal choreography of blows to the unloved wavepool event, which runs May 27 through 28.
After the 2021 event, BeachGrit’s tour reporter Steve “Longtom” Shearer, jerked awake long enough to pull his head out of his pretzel bowl and write,
We’re five years into this thing now.
Five long years.
The gap between the rhetoric, that tubs were going to loose a tsunami of radical innovative surfing, and the reality, conservative surfing, is becoming clearer every day. It’s become what Orwell termed the “inadmissible fact.” It’s put us in upside down world, where Chris Cote, when he hears the train says, “ This never gets old” means “there’s something deeply wrong here but I can’t dare acknowledge it”.
Five years.
Can someone on the pro wavepool side of the argument explain to me why, given the basic repeatability of the wave, some new trick is not conceived, mastered and then executed to a stunned judging panel ala vert skating or snowboard half-pipe?
Wasn’t that the whole point?
Smith and Blakey sent a similarly cunty zephyr up the nostrils of the WSL.
“The GOAT pool, basically,” says Vaughan, “is challenging the world’s best surfers, with all their might and imagination to do one interesting thing on it.”
“We’re asking the best surfers in the world to, essentially, rip off a couple of turns and thread a three-foot pit,” says Smith. “Is that really the ratings bonanza that ELO and Ziff are craving so much at this point?”
Vaughan,
“This is the weird thing, Erin Brooks has done a better turn in the three foot rampy fucking Texas wave pool that the entire 44 CT in five years of surfing the Goat Pool…Should we just fucking send the CT to the fucking Texas wave pool against a bunch of thirteen-year-old girls and see what happens? If you think about it, like, Erin’s frontside barrel roll is a more dynamic and interesting turn than anything Filipe or Gabriel have done at the wave pool.”
Vaughan did open the door a little to the possibility of the event being salvaged.
“The only thing that can save the GOAT pool is if they’ve got some new element to it that we don’t know about it. Have they dropped something into this pool that is going to blow our minds?”
Unlikely?
Or are you thrilled, nevertheless, by sixteen hours of heats on identical waves, over two days, with static Stay Turned messages every ten or so minutes?
