Ace Buchan unloads at Bells. Photo: ASP
Of course, many will argue that anyone in the top ranks of the world tour can improvise and can do it with more panache than Buchan. I don’t think that’s true, especially considering that airs are maneuvers requiring a certain homogenization of style, eg: the widened stance, and standardization of wave section, timing, and even rotation (yes, I can do airs). Face-surfing is a much more improvisational project even if it is not necessarily aesthetically “better,” or more entertaining to watch. There is a subtlety to it that, if not always easy to appreciate, is certainly just as, if not more elegant.
With the exception of Tom Curren, the surfing world has, at least since the eighties, been somewhat uncomfortable with elegance. Even the word seems a bit prissy to use when it comes to the serious and manly pursuit of riding waves, so I’d like to turn to tennis again to clarify. Tennis, the gentleman’s game, is the opposite of surfing in the sense that it often looks more kindly on the elegant players than the ones who rely on brute force, bravado, or anything that is deemed overly flashy or gauche.
Two of the Great Australians of the late ‘90s and early 2000s were Leyton Hewitt and Patrick Rafter. Hewitt was famous for leaving it all on the court. He was fast, loud, had the endurance of a camel, and often ground down his opponents with consistency and strong, if not incredibly pretty groundstrokes. Rafter was more reserved and, despite not having a cannon for a serve, spent most of his time rushing the net. Hewitt ended his career far more decorated, but it was Rafter who played a beautiful game. It was beautiful in the sense that you had to know about tennis to appreciate it, to know how hard it was to do what he did.
For instance, while Hewitt was a master of the long war of attrition that it often takes to win points with endless groundstrokes, Rafter based his wins on reducing the time it took to play a point by closing the space between himself and his opponent. The only way to win with this type of strategy is to make infinitesimally small adjustments of the racket head when volleying into order to place the ball into equally minute spaces that will wrong-foot your opponent. It is high risk, high reward tennis, and made even more difficult at the time by the fact that the game was evolving into one played primarily through groundstrokes. This is not to say that serving and volleying is a more skillful way to win, just that it makes the very difficult look easy, whereas a game like Hewitt’s makes the very difficult look very difficult.
In the same way, Buchan, or any “boring” surfer essentially rides the wave in a way that only connoisseurs can appreciate. A very good turn or carve is not more difficult than a great air, but can often be more subtle, containing a certain understatement that no amount of spinning or grabbing can equal. Their minute adjustments, incredible processing and reaction times, and seeming nonchalance, offer the epitome of beautiful surfing. Of course, the best of the new school are as strong on the face as they are above the lip, but there is something to be said for the purist who plays the game he loves, even it isn’t as “radical.” If we place too much value on radicalism over elegance we risk stunting the aesthetic of our sport and confining it to a ghetto in which our definitions of “good surfing” are the same when we are 15 as they are when we are 50.
