“Finals Day belongs in Indonesia or the South Pacific or maybe Hawaii if you really need to baby out and stay close to home.”
It’s been five years since surfing’s great Flim-Flam man, Erik Logan, long disappeared now for crimes unknown, announced the world title would be decided in a thrilling one-day play-off called, simply, Finals Day.
It would be held at Lower Trestles, a playful wave suitable for beginners and experts, near San Clemente, a solid little town with a storied surf culture. If memory serves, and in front of some of the WSL’s biggest online audiences, Gabriel Medina beat Filipe Toledo and Carissa Moore racing her Cadillac Mayhems along the smooth walls with the frenetic energy of a man whose nostril hairs are frosted with coke sank the dreams of Tatiana Weston-Webb.
Filipe Toledo won the next two, John John got it last year and Steph, Caroline Marks and Caity Simmers wrapped up the gals.
The choice of location was a sore point with surf fans, and those surfers who felt a little neutered to be chasing their ultimate goal in soft three-foot waves built, ideally, for timid children.
Trestles for the first year? Okay, why not, make it easy on everybody I guess. Trestles three years in a row? That’s basically an insult, a fuck-you to the pros, to the fans, to the game. Finals Day belongs in Indonesia or the South Pacific or maybe Hawaii if you really need to baby out and stay close to home. It does not belong anywhere near Lower Trestles, and keeping it there year after year turns this thing into a low-stakes hostage situation. As fans, we’ve been frog-marched to Lowers. The pros, I’m guessing—apart from Toledo who lives in nearby San Clemente, is scared of big tropical reef waves, and knows Lowers better than you know the opening lines of your favorite Taylor Swift song—hate Lowers Finals Day even more than we do.
Because the WSL never, ever does not step on its own dick, and holding Finals Day at Lower Trestles three years running is so aggressively and spectacularly wrong-headed that I would at this point vote to go back to the old format, with Pipeline as the last event of the year and the champ picked by aggregate points over the season.
And so the tour moved Finals Day to the impossible-to-argue-with-location Cloudbreak which, if swell predictions are correct and the jigsaw pieces assemble correctly, will be six-to-eight-foot tomoz morn.
Yago, Jordy, Griff, Jack and Italo swinging for the men; Molly, Gaby, Caity, Caz and Betty-Lou for the gals.
Next year, back to a title that may be decided long before surfers take to the water at Pipeline.
A move forwards, stilling the choked murmurs of a couple of sad pro surfers, or a wasted opportunity to inject drama and consequence into a fading sports league?
