It wasn’t truly a sport until now. Image: WSL
Did you watch? Are you watching? I’m talking about the Founders’ Cup at Lemoore, of course. A surfing contest with a team format held in a wave pool in the middle of California. A surfing contest sponsored by weak beer. A surfing contest that doesn’t smell of salty sea breeze, but chlorinated cow shit. How strange! I watched. I am watching. Here’s what I’m thinking.
At some point, Kelly Slater must have thought, “dear God, what have I created!?” Image: WSL
1. Kelly Slater really is Willy Wonka.
I know there are people who hate the wave pool. They hate it on principle: the ocean is life, surfing is more than sliding on a wave, something about the soul of surfing, etcetera, etcetera. But holy shit, did you see that thing!? Slater has created a fucking wave in the fucking dust bowl. It’s ironic that the Joads left the Oklahoma dust bowl and ended up in Bakersfield, just an hour south of Lemoore, a place where, according to the signs on the side of the road, CONGRESS CREATED THE DUST BOWL. And yet there’s Kelly’s wave, hundreds of thousands of gallons of water slopping around in the arid, heat-shimmering air. A wave that barrels. A wave that is longer than most waves in real life. Let that really sink in, if you haven’t already.
At the Surf Ranch, it is obvious he is king. He is master and commander. He waves at his adoring fans, running past them on the wet cement as they scream and reach for him like it’s Beatle-mania. His smile before the first wave was one that sat on top of years of planning. It was the supremely satisfied smile of a man who is living out a fantasy he dreamed of a long time ago. Kelly Slater made magic, whether you like it or not. Like Willy Wonka, he created a paradise. But like the Chocolate Factory, a paradise can be dangerous when the wrong people get it. I would not be surprised if he had a throne built somewhere high up above the Surf Ranch. “One day, son,” he’d say to no one in particular while surveying the brown fields surrounding the Surf Ranch, “all this will be yours.”
2. Why is Strider still in the “channel”?
This is an exercise in futility. Sure, at an event with an ocean involved, it was kind of nice to have Strider bobbing around out there while wearing his collared shirt, shouting over the wind and occasionally being pelted by rain. Interviews were funny because you could sometimes get a glimpse of Strider hanging on to the interviewee’s surfboard underwater, trying desperately to keep them from drifting away mid-sentence. One would imagine that they often locked legs, although I never actually saw that. At the Founder’s Cup, however, it’s just Strider bobbing around in knee-deep water, his voice echoing around the Ranch, slipping away on the cow-shit breeze. There are no currents to wax on about. There is nothing he sees from the water that we do not see from land.
Despite not knowing anything about surfing, Jamie Erdahl killed it. Image: Jamie Erdahl/Instagram
3. Jamie Erdahl makes surf commentators look like rank amateurs.
I like the commentators. The ones I’ve met are incredibly nice people, especially considering the fact that they’re universally shit on by grownups online who actually spend their time conversing with each other on surfing comment boards. But that Jamie Erdahl! The face of professionalism! Despite the fact that she admittedly did not know what she was talking about when it comes to surfing, the NFL’s sideline reporter reminded me that in terms of the outward facing product of pro surfing, there’s still a long ways to go. I think it’s got something to do with commentators talking like, well, surfers. If the WSL wants this thing to go big, the people explaining it need to sound less like Spicoli and more like Erdahl.
Spiff up the production a little.
4. That echo!
Good lord, at times it sounded like the Surf Ranch was at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. It is not a difficult thing to have a separate line for a commentator’s mic: one for the crowd and one for the online stream. Like they say in Ghostbusters, don’t cross the streams.
Perfection ain’t perfection when it’s constant.
5. Something has to change.
Oh, it’s magic alright, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Despite a few slight changes—including a barrel timer straight out of a video game—the same wave over and over and over ad nauseum eventually becomes nothing more than a platform for the surfer. Sure, there are slight differences in each wave at the Surf Ranch, but overall they’re more similar than any ocean wave. Where in regular ol’ ocean surfing the wave is a huge part of the experience, at the pool, it quickly fades into obscurity. It’s perfect as a one-off… but anything perfect that is repeated until you’re bored quickly loses its shine. And then, of course, it’s not perfect. This is not to say that I can’t appreciate the majesty of the wave. It’s not to say that I wouldn’t like to surf it. I would, in fact. I’d rather go to Mexico and surf there, but I wouldn’t pass up an opportunity.
Commentators can no longer express surprise at how a surfer stalled for the barrel because everyone knew it was coming. They can’t be surprised at anything a surfer does that relates to reacting to a shifting medium. In order for an event to truly work for spectators at a wave pool, the focus has to shift from the wave and the surfers’ performance on it to solely the surfers’ performance—because that perfect wave isn’t so perfect when there’s an exact replica of it coming in three minutes.
