Friday, Aug 29, 2008
There is a dumb but enjoyable surf movie called "North Shore," where a dopily sincere blond boy from an Arizona wave pool comes to the North Shore as a hick-weed nobody and soul-surfs his way to Pipeline domination. This was very nearly the case with cuddly Aussie newcomer Zane Harrison, a DiCaprio-cute, blond beach-bunny boy -- a total unknown until he conquered the Sunset Beach Jewel of the Triple Crown and the Pipeline trials.
Overnight, he became a surf-porn centerfold, competing against the biggest faces of the spitterati ("spit" is the name given to the white stuff a tube hurls at you after you ride through it) and giving bashful autographs to big gushing blond surf-groupie, free-love hippie chicks with hardly any clothes on.
There were several thousand people on the beach, listening to a Brazilian announcer provide a weird, non sequitur rambling narration for each surf heat, particularly when fellow Brazilian Victor Ribas pulled into a tube and didn't come out: "Look at heem stand up. Proud he is. Victor, he jut do the job. He jut pull it in and die inside. Also, you must remember to buy Vans fine footwear, appropriate for all situation and occasion, Vans, yes, they keep you looking great."
There was some early drama when Trevor Knox popped an eardrum, and Brock Little towed him into shore on a Jet Ski. He stumbled onto the beach holding his head with two people supporting him under the arms; later, everyone learned he hadn't lost his equilibrium.
Andy Irons, a Hawaiian-born bruiser who underperformed at the beginning of the year because he was totally drunk, had the perfect-10 scoring wave of the day. He's better now, his blood has been laundered, he's clean, bathed, focused and no longer sporting those tragic 3 a.m. self-haircuts that made him look like he'd been taken to the vet for stitches.
He began on a big second-reef wave, way offshore, looking like a tiny speck, then zigzagged up and down the wave and got closer and closer to the beach. Finally the wave obliged him and made a little, wobbly barrel-tube (crucial for point accumulation), and he slid inside and vanished and everyone on the beach thought it would close out and eat him -- we were all beginning to feel disappointed.
Suddenly, Andy shot happily out the other side with his arms up and it was wholly magical. Everyone started screaming. It was as if he'd just turned the island upside down like a snow globe and shook the ocean until it did what he needed it to do.
Old surf hero Gerry Lopez, the Godfather of Pipeline and the man for whom Mountain Dew named the Pipe Masters contest, was casually slouching and shuffling around like beloved beach royalty; egoless, beatnik-suave, in faded surf shorts and an old T-shirt. He was lovingly flanked by wrinkled, long-in-the-tooth white hula ladies in bright bikinis and hand-clasped by starry-eyed young men, and he made funny, humble comments over the loudspeaker. He might as well have been in a bathrobe in his living room, he was so ultracasual, despite the fact that the surf cognoscenti were weepy and trembling in his presence.
Watching Kelly Slater in the water was kind of ridiculous -- he does things that look physically wrong. Nature has a crush on him and is obeying him. Waves that don't come for anybody else come for Slater, and he bats them around gleefully, with a scalpel-clean precision that nobody else has.
Later, I had the extreme pleasure of meeting and eating with the Surfers, a musical trio composed of Kelly Slater, perennial ASP top 16er Rob Machado and big-mouth, fun-boy surf monkey Peter King. In Japan, the Surfers are huge. In the States, their label fucked them over and nothing happened, just like any other band, the usual dismal reaming by the iron-fanged dildo of the music industry.
Kelly Slater was nothing like I thought he'd be. Much as I loathe blowing gold up anyone's ass and digressing into hapless fan-girl twaddle, I have to say Kelly Slater is superhumanly cool. My previous impression of him, from magazines and videos, was that he was incredibly distracted by his Otherworldly Communication with the Ocean, which I figured took up at least 75 percent of his total brainpower, and made him kind of a weird, shapeless personality, glazy-eyed and only about 12 percent present.
Socially, I had expected him to be a thick, simple genius type: I sit here with a placid smile beautified and incoherent behind my sapphire wall of athletic godhood, thinking things only dolphins would comprehend, and am therefore totally boring.
I theorized that Pamela Anderson Lee, his last girlfriend, dumped him because he was this sanctified type of boring. This is not the case; he's fascinating, funny as hell, scarily bright, totally there, ready with the relaxed one-liners and spot-on impersonations.
He and Gerry Lopez both reminded me of the Zen idea that Zen masters are like great stand-up comics -- they are so preternaturally relaxed and flowingly in tune with the cosmos, they always have an ironic, sublime zinger in their pocket ready to ignite the dinner table. Some surfers have it too; I reckon a constant awareness of death will make you a funny guy.
Since comparatively few people know what a Thing it is to be alive in the time of Kelly Slater (Babe Ruth, Muhammad Ali, etc., the Great Sports Personality, the Realized Man), he has no toxic star aura; you can sit at a dinner table with him and feel at ease and interrupt him and you never feel like you couldn't steal a parking place from him, or sock him in the thigh as punctuation.
I was appalled to find that there are really no grubby, humanizing aspects of Kelly Slater. I always look for the flaw in the Wall of Wonder, the dirty little thing that makes the star more like me. OK, Pamela Anderson Lee ditched him to get pimp-slapped by Tommy some more. OK, he's got a goofy, irony-free music project, and he played himself on TV on "Baywatch" for a while, ha ha ha, snicker snicker. But Slater is so open about all this stuff that there is no use trying to tie it on him as some kind of bib of shame. It's just more evidence of his superior well-roundedness, his not taking himself too seriously.
Even Kelly Slater's glaring deficiencies are fucking cool, revoltingly enough. It is wholly disconcerting to see that much unflawedness coagulated in one human being. Disgusting, really.
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