“You don’t take a blade to a gunfight. You take a gun!”
A cavalcade of world champions including the former WSL colour commentator Martin Potter, as well as Tom Carroll, Shaun Tomson, Joel Tudor, Damien Hardman and Gary Elkerton have slammed modern professional surfers for their “weak” performances at Sunset Beach yesterday.
Despite the perfect waves and the hitherto unseen extravagance shown by starlets Toledo, Colapinto, Chianca and Robinson, the champs were seething, shivering with degrading dialogue.
In a post to his thousands of fans, Gary “Kong” Elkerton, famous in the nineteen-eighties for plummeting down the cobra-like west peaks that periodically close out the channel, wrote:
“I was hoping at the event this year someone might have the balls to gear up on the right equipment and go out and get (a West peak), very boring watching whitewater take-offs on 6,2s and 6.4s, sorry for the rant but that’s not the way to surf Sunset Beach.”
Shaun Tomson, the world champion in 1977 and a pioneer of backside tuberiding at Pipeline replied,
“Keep choosing a 6 2 and you will keep getting clipped while you run out of rail and drive – no matter how good you are.”
Robbie Page, a tour standout in the eighties, spat “If anyone caught a real wave from outside I’d say it would get half the score for only surfing the inside point for those crew that surf in there. Fucken waste of Sunset. Get out the back.”
Over on 1989 world champ Martin Potter’s Instagram page an identical sentiment was expressed,
“Sunset is on at the moment, how times have changed, guys are riding 6”2 s this is a 7”6 it was my go to at Sunset and wouldn’t dream of riding a shorter board.”
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“Yeah Pottz…I don’t get it,” the world champion in 1983 and ’84, Tom Carroll, replied.
Kong swooped in here, too, telling his old arch-rival,
“Mate, it’s just blowing my mind the way 90% of these guys are trying to surf Sunset…. Taking off on the inside in the whitewater not even trying to get out to the peak hard to watch.”
As did Shaun Tomson,
“Some abominably bad board choices yesterday at Sunset. Even the hottest of the hot was taken out by riding a 6 2. You don’t take a blade to a gunfight. You take a gun.”
A lot of verbal histrionics, yes?
Where does this put you?
Did yesterday’s performances put a tongue between your legs or did you find it a mass of buffoonery, the old gag and sputter?
