What’s in it for surfing? WSL gets a cut. Slater,
too. The pros have a new CT contest – except nobody wanted it
It took years, nearly a decade in
fact, but I finally cycled through all the stages
of grief regarding Kelly Slater’s Westworld-lite
wavepool—only to end up, surprisingly, more
or less back where I started.
Nonplussed. Cool. Maybe a bit arch.
I could ignore Surf Ranch or laugh at it, whichever suited. Not
laugh hahaha, like Raglan Surf Report, but I can eye-roll Surf
Ranch and judge it dismissively, as my social media feeds serve up
clips of soft-top-riding billionaire-celeb rookie surfers being
gently inserted by Raimana Van Bastolaer into those long boring
8-bit Atari tubes, at $500 per wave—or a half-week’s wages for your
average nonprofit surf history website Executive Director.
Like I say, no problem. Carry on.
I will fly economy to the southwest corner of Costa Rica next
spring, and if Ivanka Trump, Lewis Hamilton, and Prince Harry are going
three-up in the barrel that week at Surf Ranch with Raimana
riding alongside like a big friendly Polynesian
manatee, screaming high-pitched encouragement while crying
inside, I will feel that much better for my non-remunerative life
choices
But hold on now.
Here comes Slater’s new Middle East pool (Surf Abu Dhabi)
on Al Hudayriyat in the United Arab Emirates, an
artificial wave next to an artificial mountain range on a huge
25-mile-perimeter artificial island, everything 100%
master-planned, dedicated to lux-living and entertainment; the
whole gleaming terraformed megaproject built
by a government-mandated group called Modon Properties.
And sure as mushrooms spring from cow flop, we quickly get the
WSL-backed Abu Dhabi Longboard Classic (held last month), and the
upcoming Surf Abu Dhabi Pro,
second event on the 2025 WCT schedule—sponsored by Modon
Properties.
I tried to remain nonplussed but confess that this video plussed me a
bit—Surf Abu Dhabi, and our chipper onscreen tour
guide, both look like they belong in a director’s cut of The Truman
Show. Then Ben Mondy’s latest “Surf Bugle”
newsletter—subject-line: “Why the Fuck is the WSL in the UAE?
And Why is No One Talking About it?” —hit my
inbox on Thursday and that knocked me right back to the anger and
depression stages of wavepool grief.
I retired my Bernie Sanders Signature Model EOS political
soapbox some years ago, but have dusted it off. Don’t worry. This
will be quick—my righteous-cause stamina, like this faltering
iPhone 12 Mini I’m still using, no longer holds much of a
charge.
We start with the Emirates human rights scorecard, which is
less-bad than it was five years ago, but still
dismal. Don’t be gay or female in the
UAE, for starters. Check your democracy at the
door.
Leading us to sportswashing, which is the emirs and sheiks
extending a friendly hand, saying, tell you what, let’s just do
sports, everybody, all of us, East and West, Muslim, Christian,
Jew—you guys have the teams and the players, we have the money,
let’s put our heads together and make it work for everybody.
Saudi Arabia remains the undefeated
champion of Middle East sportswashing, but other Arab
petrostate powers are closing the gap, with the UAE washing harder
than anybody these past few years. Football, Formula 1, tennis, and
of course golf—Arab investment in these and other sports is huge
and still skyrocketing. (I no longer bleed Laker blue like I
did in my NBA-loving youth, but was relieved nonetheless to find
out that the dreaded Celtics are the ones
scheduling preseason games in Abu Dhabi.)
The Surf Abu Dhabi Pro may seem like the smallest of small fry
in the sportswashing game, and on paper it is. But the point is to
get our eyes on the field, on the players, on the highlight reels
and the standings, and away from the torture and detention and
state-sponsored killings and whatnot. You don’t get all the
goodwill when you buy a team – not right away.
But stick around long enough and the fans will forget that the
team owners know the guys who gave money to the 9/11 terrorists,
and later ordered the vivisection suitcase-stuffing hit on Saudi
critic Jamal Khashoggi.
Like I say, surfing, by the numbers, is nothing compared to
soccer or the NBA or Formula 1.
But surfing still looks cooler, more Western, more mysterious,
than anything else out there. My take is we lost our hipness cred
back when Fonzie was jump-starting the jukebox with his
fist, but the rest of the world doesn’t know that, and
if I was sitting on the fourth-largest economy in the Middle East
and trying to throw an invisibility blanket over various and sundry
civil rights abuses, sure, absolutely, build a pool and take a
million from the petty-cash drawer for prize money for a CT event
and Bashar’s your uncle, when’s the first heat?
That’s a good deal from the Emir’s side, in other words.
But what about us? What’s in it for surfing? WSL gets a cut, I
suppose. Slater, too. The pros have a new CT contest – except
nobody wanted it; the Surf Ranch Pro was everybody’s least-favorite
tour event by a mile, and moving it from Lemoore to the UAE is not
going to bump up its popularity.
There are probably some young blue-blood UAE scions who will get
stoked enough by the new pool to break out to chase real waves, so
count that as a small win, I guess. The sport
meanwhile chisels off another piece of what’s left of its
briny soul, and some tiny few among us take a seat, like Succession
extras, on the world’s most elite lounges and verandahs.
But we’re not actually in the club. We are and always will be
decorative. When the emir gets up, Slater follows along holding the
umbrella.
Nothing will change or alter the direction we’re on. Wavepools
are here to stay, the sport has not self-funded for
decades, and surfing’s marquee names will continue to conform,
emulate, obey. I’m writing this to make myself feel a little
better, is all; some of you, maybe most of you, are with me on most
of this, but you all know that we’re basically standing on the
jetty, flipping off the cruise ship as it leaves the
harbor.
Ben Mondy shamed me into this Joint, just by speaking out first,
and I’m grateful. In fact, here is the exact bit in Ben’s piece
that got me writing this morning, it comes right at the
beginning:
“Isn’t it time we talked about the ethics of surfing in Abu
Dhabi, cause no one else is?”
That was a pitch to a number of the major surf publications
I did a month ago.
“I’m there right now, so let’s leave it alone, ha, ha!” was
one Editor’s response.
No prize for guessing the name of “major surf publication”
(hint: it’s a website, not a
publication). I was going to do a longer bit on what
it means to no longer have an independent non-satirical surf media,
but we’re out of space.
So there is my bitter little report
on the state of play here in 2024, in terms of our our place in the
culture at large. We get bigger and duller at the same time.
On the bright side, I suppose none of this means much in the
end. We surf to escape all kinds of things. We can therefore surf
to escape from surfing.
(You like this? Matt Warshaw delivers a surf essay every Sunday,
PST. Maybe time to subscribe to Warshaw’s Encyclopedia of
Surfing, yeah? Fifty bucks a year.)
