We’ve all seen them. It started back in 1989 with TV’s America’s Funniest Home Videos, and has, over the decades, morphed into today’s Fail Army on YouTube: homegrown clips of hapless misfortunates caught on camera (and now smart phones) being swept out of exploding doughboy pools, getting hit in the groin with footballs, cracking their skulls while attempting to ice skate, and myriad painful, humiliating f-ck-ups. All filmed by laughing witnesses, then served up for our cruel amusement. Fail Army’s tagline says it all: “Our most cringeworthy, embarrassing, laugh-out-loud fails!”
I’ve glanced at just enough of these patently sadistic presentations to have stopped watching them; there’s not a lot of ghoul in me. But I just had to click on a particular YouTube offering the other day, provocatively titled, “Deadman’s Rising: Pure Carnage.”
Boasting plenty of “thrills and spills,” this segment is basically a modern version of those old surf movie’s popular wipeout sequences, surfers of every generation, apparently, taking great pleasure in watching their fellows “taking gas” in all sorts of cringeworthy wave-riding mishaps. But after viewing only a few minutes of “Pure Carnage,” I became aware of something that clearly distinguished “Pure Carnage” from Fail Army. In the latter, the unfortunates are failing [read: falling on their asses] in the most commonplace scenarios: sketchy rope swings, rusty backyard trampolines, company picnic hijinks and the like. But “Carnage” is a whole different story, chronicling a recent macking south swell blasting Sydney, Australia, and, yes, the carnage that took place at an aptly-named South Manly monster slab called Deadman’s.
There’s absolutely nothing commonplace about this ridiculous quarter acre of nearly dry rock reef, detonated upon by quadruple-overhead, ledging, step-faced gnarl-beasts. Certainly no place save for the hardiest, most accomplished danger-wave riders, who have sufficient skill and daring to freefall under the 100-ton lip, engage the rail and race for daylight at the end of the tunnel. And I’m sure there were at least a handful of such surfers out there during this particular disaster movie. What I found inexplicable, however, was the number of so very obviously unqualified surfers clogging the lineup, repeatedly plunging over the falls, digging rails and, in comically bad form, getting pitched onto their helmeted heads, pounded by the ferocious lip and washed up onto the waiting rock shelf. The relentless repetition of which in “Pure Carnage “ had me yelling at the screen, “What the hell are you kooks doing? You have no business being out there!”
So, what are these sorts of surfers doing out there at one of the scariest waves in the Southern Hemisphere, so unqualified, without even the slightest possibility of making a wave, but facing the high probability of injury and emotional trauma? The only answer I could come up with points to something that the clowns in “Pure Carnage” share with the goof-balls in Fail Army: all knew that they were being filmed. Except that the PBR-fueled yahoos are doing cannon-balls into the doughboy from the roof of their trailers, not off the famous cliffs of Acapulco. Yet increasing numbers of the uninitiated are mobbing many of the world’s heaviest, double-black diamond slabs, not to mention mega-wave breaks, adding significant levels of chaos to already crazy scenarios, for no other reason than to snatch video-clip glory from under the shadow of the tiny minority of surfers out there who actually merit the acclaim.
So, if you count yourself among the aforementioned substrata, let me make something perfectly clear. You know all those heavy wave vloggers, surfers like Nathan Florence, JOB, Nic von Rupp, Kai Lenny and Koa Rothman? The only reason they would ever include a wave of yours in one of their videos would just be to contrast how much better surfers they, and all of their buddies are, than you. Scant glory there.
And I know what you’re going to say: How will you ever get good enough to ride waves like Deadman’s without riding waves like Deadman’s? Well, here’s another tip, for those Australian slab-riding wannabes, at least. Try taking, I don’t know, five or ten years to become one of the top surfers at Fairy Bower, then during bigger swells graduating up the point to Winkipop and getting that gnarly ledge completely wired, before even considering to head even further up the headland and attempting a wave at Deadman’s. How about that? Sorta like getting really good at Sunset Beach, Rocky Point and Off-the-Wall, to the point to where that heavy local in the big black pickup truck occasionally shoots you a shaka, before jumping in the rip and heading into the pack at Pipeline. Because regardless of any lineup, big wave or small, anytime you find yourself paddling out and in over your head, you can call bull sh-t on the producers of “Pure Carnage” when they say, as they did in presenting their latest kook-fest, “Big respect to every surfer who went over the ledge and paid the price.”
Let me tell you something, nobody’s respecting you. Not even close. Just like all those fail fans of America’s Funniest Home Videos and Fail Army, they’re laughing at you. You can count on it.
