Somewhere in the first few weeks of January, I had the Backdoor Shootout playing on the television. We had people over, none of whom surf, just milling around the living room chatting as the contest playing on mute. It was on solely for me. It wasn’t the best day of the event, and the lulls were long. The eight-year-old son of a friend stared at the screen for a long time as the competitors paddled aimlessly around the lineup waiting for a wave.
“So, are they racing to the beach?” the eight-year-old asked.
“No,” I answered. “They’re just waiting for a wave.”
He looked at the screen again, then back to me, with that look that only kids can give. The look that says, “adults are dumb.”
“Huh,” he said, walking back to his construction paper and plastic scissors. “That’s boring.”
And he was right. It was boring. I tried to explain that not all surf contests were like this; that sometimes surf contests can be exciting; that part of the thing that makes a good day so good is the inherent bad days leading up to the good days. He didn’t care, though, because he was eight.
All that to say that when I had the Pipe Pro on in the background yesterday, I wanted to call those friends and tell them to bring their kid over so I could prove him wrong. Because the first day of Pipe was anything but boring.
Conditions were good, to say the least. It was the first CT event of the year, and you could feel the excitement. There were huge barrels, bigger wipeouts, and Gabriel Medina played the priority game fantastically well. Callum Robson scored a beautiful 9.00 ride. Kelly Slater returned with his rebuilt hip and surfed like a man half his age. John Florence showed that Pipeline is his playground. Filipe Toledo didn’t look comfortable in the slightest, then pulled out of the event, due, according to the World Surf League, to food poisoning.
It was a banger of a start to the year, and not just because of the waves. Watch the rest of it over at Worldsurfleague.com.
