Check this out. For those of us who watched Jordy booted unceremoniously off the Number 1 spot – at his home break nogal – it was like watching a scaffolding accident in slow motion. Now as the cliche goes, it’s really easy to win a heat or a match from the couch, but really Jords? You had half an hour big bru to get just one more wave. Jeez Dude.
Pro surfing, what a nightmare. It sounds like a jol, but the pressure involved would turn coal into diamonds. Indeed, Jordy’s heat proved something inexorable about surfing once more. Surfers rely on the ocean. If the ocean doesn’t deliver, neither can surfers.
The ocean is not Uber Eats.
You don’t place an order for 6 foot barrels and wait fifteen minutes for them to be delivered. Trident has said it before, and we’ll not stop saying it. A surf spot is not a swimming pool. And it certainly is not a Padel court, nor a football field nor a racetrack. Poseidon decides when to deliver. Sure, he throws a bone at us via surf charts. Even then the King of the Sea remains capricious. This was proven during the first weekend of the J Bay Open. All and sundry expected gangbuster waves. Sure, it was solid to start off, but gangbusters? Epic? All time? Nooit.
Let’s take another look at the still wildly popular WSL mid-season cut.
Hopefully for the last time, as the cut is cut from next year. Anyway, thanks to this kak concept, we sadly had to say goodbye to our very own Matty McG. It was close though. So ja, thankfully this axing of lower ranked CT pro’s will disappear like a bad smell. Why the mid year cut was ever considered, Eric Logan alone knows. As we all know, it was as enthusiastically embraced as a spit braai outside a vegan farmers’ market.
Anyhow, this discarded cut got us thinking about pro surfing in general. In a nutshell, why the hell would anyone want to be a pro? Surely there are less stressful ways to make a living? Such as being a bomb disposal expert or a proctologist for rhino’s?
And that’s just the stress of the job at hand. Think about social media. Prior to the online revolution in the early 2 000’s, most pro surfers wouldn’t get too much attention on their personal lives. Back then, it was only the odd comment in print mags’s or the occasional Supersport highlight when they’d show surfing every 6 months or so. You might even see some rising surfer land starring roles in Baywatch. That’s partly how the world got to know one Mr Robert Kelly Slater.
Nowadays though, thanks to the Tik Tok, the Insta and the ‘Tube, even 18th tier pro’s have their personal lives exposed to the citizens of earth. Watching their soft top clips in New Jersey slop or fighting Mexicans or whatever.
Who’d want that sort of attention on them all the time?
Maybe hip hop stars, and movie stars and online conspiracy theorists. But oh boy. The constant fishbowl criticism and negative vibes one gets dealt online is just absurd. Would pro surfers want some of that? We doubt it. Truly, Trident feels the only celebrities out there who actually enjoy being celebrities are the Kardashians, and the inexplicable popularity of that damned family alone are a clear sign we’re living in the End Times.
There’s so unwelcome focus on who Griffin Colapinto is dating, or why some pro’s are wearing weird animal print wetsuits or if Italo is potentially a part-squirrel mutant. Some attention may even just simply on who’ll win the World Title this year. Regardless, Trident feels it’s all just too much. Can’t we just let the pro’s just actually surf? Without chasing them all over the world with a magnifying glass?
Also, it’s not the early 00’s folks. Sponsors aren’t just raining from the sky anymore, when every kid who knew which foot went forward on their surfboard was deemed good enough to be sponsored. These days it’s way tougher. Surf careers have a relatively short lifespan as it is. And if you aren’t permanently hovering around the top 10 or so, you probably need a side hustle as a podcaster or vlogger (back to the online game, sigh). Or perhaps a pro can nab some made up position in a surf brand. Heck, in the long term – financially speaking, you’re probably better off selling one of your kidneys. You’d probably make more money as a drag queen, telemarketer or a hobo, without the respect afforded to those fine professions.
