I believe Ace Buchan is one of the most underrated pros on the tour, and one of the last of the great surfers, along with Joel Parkinson, to confine himself almost exclusively to the face of the wave. Photo: ASP
The pro surfing world sits poised at an interesting precipice. The Momentum Generation has been reduced to one, the Coolie kids are getting older, the Modern Collective generation is struggling to truly realize its potential – all the while a Hawaiian albino and a Brazilian infant terrible are chomping at their bits. Between these hot new prospects, however, sits a guy called Ace.
Adrian “Ace” Buchan has made somewhat of a (non)name for himself during the course of six years on tour. He’s one of those peculiar journeymen whose pragmatic and yeomanly approach to professional wave riding has garnered him accolades in older, more conservative circles as well as accusations of being a “boring” surfer from others. The US has produced its share of blue collar type competitors, but the surf clubs and junior competitive circuit in Australia are fertile training grounds for those 20- to 30-minute heats warriors who might never release profile videos.
Buchan’s surfing is becoming a bit of an anachronism on tour, and his name, when mentioned at all, is often employed pejoratively in online forums. I think this trend is egregiously misguided, and I hereby present an argument that has been sloshing around in the depths of my skull for over a year: an argument in favor of “boring” surfing.
As a matter of full disclosure, I have interviewed Buchan twice and surfed with him a few times in Australia. He is not a friend of mine and I don’t really know him well enough to care what the wider surfing world thinks of him in particular. In other words, this is not a personal favor to him or anyone else; it is an argument in favor of a certain surfing aesthetic that I think is becoming dangerously overlooked.
My background for this argument is a childhood spent in the cutthroat ranks of junior tennis – a sport that pays an obsessive amount of attention to form. The form that each tennis player uses in his strokes dictates his broader style of play, and in this sense, despite what Bobby Martinez might claim, surfing shares a lot with tennis. It’s common to talk about the style of a surfer, but less common to discuss how the form of these different movements combine to constitute style. From this vantage, I believe Buchan is one of the most underrated pros on the tour, and one of the last of the great surfers, along with Joel Parkinson, to confine himself almost exclusively to the face of the wave.
Pouring over the rather modest number of videos that showcase Buchan’s surfing on the Internet, the most glaring shortcoming of them is that they don’t allow you to appreciate the precision with which he rides the wave. When I was 16 or 17, precision was not a word I would have used to describe good surfing. There is nothing particularly sexy about “precision.” It is the mark of a good craftsman, not necessarily the mark of a good artist. However as I’ve gotten older I’ve begun to appreciate how rare a quality it is in surfers, both generally and at very high levels. Mick Fanning, for instance, is a very precise surfer; Dane Reynolds is not. Jeremy Flores is a precise surfer; Sunny Garcia is not. This is not a slight against either Reynolds or Garcia, they certainly have other strengths that are, in the modern media context, much sexier.
With precision comes elegance – another word that is rarely used to describe surfing, but the only one that seems to fit Buchan. Buchan revels in carving and slicing across, and he seems uninterested in the brutal displays of devastation upon which classic power surfers ground their style. He’s not a particularly thick guy, and he isn’t interested in throwing his weight around, either. Instead there is a tight control in his movement that borders on the stingy: as if he is consciously trying to strip any and all unnecessary movements from his form. It is pure economy of movement and to witnesss it in person is startlingly beautiful. The best comparison to it is the way Roger Federer covers (or covered in his heyday) a tennis court. It appears deceptively nonchalant until you realize how much space he devours with seemingly very little effort.
One of the most memorable waves I have ever witnessed was at Buchan’s home break of Avoca beach – North Avoca to be exact. Buchan was deeper than I was on a crumbly right. As I pulled off the shoulder I watched the back of the wave, as we all tend to do when pros are in the water. His first hit knocked the edge of his back fin out of the lip of the wave. His second revealed the entire fin and the edges of his side fins. On the third, the entire tail of his board came out of the wave. A fully fins-free turn is not rocket science, but what stuck in my mind was the minute adjustments he made to ensure that each turn was that much better than the last. On some level he was processing feedback and adjusting accordingly with a speed and responsiveness that most humans will never even approximate. If he had simply cracked three perfect, fins-free turns, it would not have been as impressive. Most people can memorize a song or two on a guitar but very few can improvise. And what is surfing but the only sport of competitive improvisation?
