To boogie or to body? That's the question.
Australia’s Dave Winchester, one of bodyboarding’s most recognizable figures, took out the 2012 IBA Stealth Arica Chilean Challenge late last month in heaving six-foot tubes at El Gringo. He trounced the world’s best, including big-name Australian pros Ryan Hardy, Mitch Rawlins and Ben Player, to take the win along with a commanding lead in the IBA World Tour rankings. But while the contest was being held, an even bigger story was doing the rounds in Australia’s mainstream media featuring arguably the country’s most famous bodyboarder, who was thousands of kilometers away from the comp site in dreamy Indo.
That’s right folks, Schapelle Corby graced the front page again, and the grainy photographic evidence of the convicted drug smuggler’s bodyboard and bag – taken around the time she was arrested at Ngurah Rai airport with 4.2kg of cannabis in 2005 –have flooded our screens once more.
If I were a cynical person (and I repeat if’, I’m sitting comfortably on the fence here), I might deduce further proof she’s guilty from the stills of her bright yellow crescent-tailed board.
The board looks brand new, unused? Where are your classic wetsuit smudges and wax which usually plaster a boog’s deck, particularly a light-coloured one? She was only using that board bag for one thing…
I jest. I’m not here to debate the poor girl’s guilt, but rather draw your attention to the other, more telling thing I was reminded of regarding the media’s coverage of Corby’s infamous case. Its endemic use of the term “boogie board” to describe us lying-down folk’s craft of choice.
If you’ve consumed any news pieces in the past few weeks on the latest Corby development – that the President of Indonesia has just granted a five-year reduction of Schapelle’s 20-year sentence – I’ll wager you would’ve heard the term uttered by a heavily made-up newsreader or seen it written in print.
The term “boogie board” is derived from the original name of the foam biscuit – the ‘Morey Boogie’, coined by its American inventor Tom Morey in the early 1970s. And while in later years it was somewhat of a derogatory term, calling it a “boogie board” nowadays isn’t really going to piss anyone off. In fact, it’s not uncommon today to hear bodyboarders refer to themselves as “boogers” or “spongers.”
What is interesting about the media’s continued use of the term “boogie board,” however, is that it’s been seven years since Corby hit the front page, yet it seems the majority of newsrooms around the country still haven’t gotten the memo that the sport has been primarily known as bodyboarding for decades.
Having worked at two News Limited newspapers, I know that writing style is always gone over with a fine-toothed comb by finicky editors when they’re looking over stories before press time. Reporters for the news giants are given thick books called Style Guides, which aim to promote accuracy and consistency throughout their newspapers. But despite measures such as these, clearly there has been no uniformity when it comes to the outdated “boogie board.”
2011 was a breakout year for the International Bodyboarding Association. Audience numbers across the events’ live webcasts exceeded the organizers’ expectations, and the revamped tour – which now includes some of the heaviest waves on the planet (Pipe, The Box, El Gringo, Mex Pipe, and El Fronton) – attracted some national and global media attention (event images ran in the online editions of the New York Post, LA Times, BBC, UK Telegraph, India Times and The Montreal Gazette to name just a few).
Things are happening. Change is in the air. The IBA’s coverage of events and highlights packages have become super slick. They’ve picked up a new media partner this year, and it’s planning to reintroduce a Chopes competition to the tour roster in 2013 after several years of absence.
But perhaps much of the Australian media (and therefore the public) still see our humble piece of foam as just that – a play thing you can buy at any beachside tourist gift shop for toddlers to use in piddly shorebreaks – rather than a craft to help push the limits of what can be ridden by humans in our oceans.
Media bungling or simply a minor linguistic misunderstanding?
Is the term ‘boogie boarding” obsolete or should we use it to describe what little kids (and convicted drug smugglers) do in shallow waters on calm beaches, leaving the “bodyboarding” moniker to the more serious stuff?
Either way, I don’t think the majority of bodyboarders out there truly care; I’d say they’re be more concerned with what the wind and swell are going to be like come the weekend. I know I am.
But for a sport to be taken seriously, shouldn’t people at least get its name right?
In a perfect world, bodyboarding would receive the same attention, dollars and respect as its standing brethren, and Schapelle Corby would be sitting in a Bingin pit right now rather than her Kerobokan prison cell. Clearly, there are still some searching years to come – for both.
