John John Florence crushes competition at Pipe, but does the sport have a fighting chance? Photo: Phil LeRoy
Between the bikini bottoms, advertisements, and shirtless shakas, I watched John John Florence win the Volcom Pipe Pro on February 2nd. The victory capped a thrilling sporting event that emphasized the incredible athleticism, skill, and competitive strategy necessary to win a major surfing competition.
It also highlighted the reasons why competitive surfing will never be more than a low-tier sport unless it undergoes serious changes.
The problem, essentially, is this: the prevalent attitude demonstrated by both the competitors and the event sponsors is incompatible with the very nature of competition.
I brought up the shaka in my first sentence because it is emblematic of the hypocrisy that ails competitive surfing. The Hawaiian-born symbol of freedom or hanging loose expresses the antithesis of any sort of competitive philosophy. Yet it’s tough to watch a webcast for an hour without the camera panning over to show our gladiators together in the competitors’ tent wiggling their wrist at the camera, pinky and thumb each outstretched.
This is not a tirade against the shaka; for most surfers in this world, surfing is not a sport. The ideals promoted by the shaka are positive and worth aspiring to. The shaka has a place in surfing.
It just doesn’t have a place in competitive surfing.
Surfing events featuring the same drama, athleticism, risk, and sex appeal that NBA and NFL games exhibit regularly to an audience hundreds of times larger go largely unwatched by non-surfers. There are other roadblocks—good waves can’t be scheduled, and events must run during daylight, to name two—but every successful sport depends on an audience made up of both those who have played and those who haven’t. It’s just a matter of knowing how to appeal to those who don’t participate in the sport themselves.
To non-surfers, though, surfing is still an esoteric activity. It’s not competition. For proof, they can listen in to one of the webcasts, whose own ills are finally being highlighted by people like Dexter Hough-Snee. Yep, the masses conclude, surfing is still the sport of dumb jock rejects immortalized by Micah Peasley in the video that made us all cringe.
Why? A subdued, but nevertheless present, strain of Peasley-ism lives on in surf competitions today.
We’re still being convinced that surfing competitions are about getting stoked, not defeating an opponent. As Tetsuhiko Endo says, “surfing has this strange cult of, ‘shut up and smile, and it will be all right’ that is completely at odds with the paradigm of competitive sports.”
“Yeah, but I surfed Pipeline with only three other guys” can no longer serve as reconciliation for a heat loss. We can no longer applaud when someone trades the world title for a high-five.
Such sentiments and actions kill the competitive drive that ultimately makes the World Tour thrilling. If the surfers in a heat are high-fiving each other, then there is nothing at stake. If there’s nothing at stake, what are we watching?
I am not trying to suggest that there was nothing at stake for Joel Parkinson this December or for John John Florence this past Saturday. Obviously, there’s serious competition going on already. But it’s restrained by both its presentation and an apparent need to subscribe to the values of a surf culture where winning is less important than being chill.
We have a bevy of freesurf videos to allow us to watch ridiculously talented surfers doing what we can’t. The laid-back, alternative lifestyle imagined by the masses isn’t a myth; it’s alive and well all over the world along with a host of other attitudes and beliefs unique to each and every surfing region on the planet. The pure act of surfing is, for many, what keeps us sane.
But our sessions aren’t webcast to the whole world.
Competitive surfing features incredibly complex strategizing, thrilling action, entertaining stars, and some of the most talented athletes in the world. But in order for it to reach its potential, those managing the top tiers of professional surfing must cease to present it as the sideshow passion of beach bros and allow it to become what it can be: a legitimate sport.
