The Time I Beat Kelly Slater...

Trying to Get The Hang of this Blogging Thing...

I’ve been trying to come up with ideas for random surf musings for my Shark Bait blog. I’ve been digging in my crusty brain for ideas that don’t involve being alarmist. Or whinging. Which is hard to do, because every time I think about a new blog, I only come up with things to complain about. Crowds. Pollution. Etc.

Eish.

But I digress.

It’s also time to inject some badly needed humour into this humble here beelog.

Then I remembered, the time I beat Kelly Slater: kicked his ass royally.

So here it is...

The Time I Beat Kelly Slater...

Like many stories, it started in a bar. It was actually old Baron Stander’s Surf Museum in Durban (RIP). I’d been doing some mission or other for a blunt magazine deadline when I was editor (RIP) and arrived late to an industry function, for one of the big brands. It was something like an annual barbeque spit roast or whatever, during what was then still the Gunston 500 (I think it was the last one before it became the Mistah Praace Pro).

Apparently Kelly Doesn't Do Endorsements but my snowboarder friend Chris Cab ambushed him at J-bay and I got the shot...

I was stoked because it was the first function like that I had been to and I was frazzled and hungry and keen on a free drink or two and a fat nosh. (I will digresh here again, but it has bearing, so stick with me). As I walked in I saw couple of surf industry heavies, and walked over with a big magazine editor suck up smile to say hello.

Everyone, greeted me back.

Bar one guy who completely dissed me (his name we can leave out). Stared straight at me for a second and then through me with such a look of disgust on his face I might as well have crapped on his bare foot and mashed it in between his toes. Then he turned his back on me, so I was staring straight at the sweaty spot between his podgy shoulders, inches from my big old Irish nose.

It seems, I later found out, he was miffed for some reason. Ironically, it later turned out to be a misunderstanding that had nothing to with me my magazine.

So, anyway, I thought, screw him and ........... Walked up the bar and ordered a triple brandy and Coke, a beer and tequila with my colleague Short Short and proceeded to get ripped on this oke’s dime.

Full of Dutch courage we then plopped a two bob on the pool table and hailed another round... or was it two?

Only then did we realise whom we might be playing doubles against. Kelly Slater. THE KING. So flummoxed and bummed was I with the whole diss scenario that I hadn’t noticed HIS PRESENCE and that he was shooting pool with new Pier local Shane Thorne.

They beat the other guys.

So we were up, and Short and I were well on our way by then. CLACK. I broke and sunk four bigs (well, it might have been only two, I was seeing double by then). They then played (I can’t remember if it was Shane or Kelly) and missed. Short stepped up, CLACK CLACK. Sunk two more bigs.

Game on.

Time for a durrie.

As Shane (or Kelly) missed again, and Short stepped up to pot a couple more, I fumbled with a lighter as some spunk wandered toward me. One of them skinny well bred, white bread, white-hot little brunette Durban surf groupies with a cleft chin, perfect white teeth and a flat chest. But she made up for it with a trail of glitter from her face down her neck.

and I looked up into her big green eyes, smiled and, to my surprise, got a smile back. Maybe it was because I was beating her boys at pool, I don’t know, it sure wasn’t my good looks. I said something mildly lecherous and to my surprise she smiled again, all coy, like...

Then Kelly Slater appeared in my blurred vision, looked at me sternly, half grinned and said, “hey, you tryna chat up my chick?” I was so taken aback at the absurdity of the entire situation all I could do was make like I was an Inca worshipping the sun deity, sarcastically scraping and bowing like the lowly scum I really felt like I was.

I might have even said “Sorry, God.”

I can’t remember.

Obviously though Kelly didn’t take kindly to this sweaty, red-eyed ciggie smoking kook beating him at pool and trying to woo his groupie and mocking him. But by then I was the proverbial 10 foot 4 and more bulletproof than a Pope-mobile. Jeez, I thought, feeling just the right combination of horse’s ass and belligerent drunk, screw this Slater ou, this chick and this whole scene.

And potted the remaining three bigs and the 8 ball.

I think we all shook hands after we won, again I don’t really remember (Short will probably say he sank the black). In fact most of this could be complete BS but I’m sure it kinda happened like that. I think Kelly shook Short’s hand but not mine, but I could be making that up too, or it might be because I was on the other side of the table or back at the bar. I dunno. Shane was gracious in defeat, that I do remember.

I do also remember that Kelly passed me on the way out a few hours later, and though I tried to catch his attention in a no hard feelings, see you later kind of way, he dissed me too, book ending the evening for me nicely with another embarrassing cold shoulder (though I don’t really blame him and probably would have done the same thing if I were him, which I am, of course, patently not).

What I do know is that Kelly got knocked out of the contest the next day, and I heard later that he always gets freaked out if he loses at pool the night before his heat, messes his mojo up or something.

And that’s why, some said, he also lost that day.

Kelly won this heat so maybe he won at pool the night before. I didn't play him ever again, of course.

So this is my stupid little story. I beat Kelly Slater. Not in a surfing comp, where he could whip my butt by surfing on a pool cue, but in a humble game of bigs and smalls.

And I’m probably only one of a handful of surfers that could say that, even if it was at sticks and not on a shred stick.

Whatever. At least I’m not whinging about crowds or pollution.

Yet.

Screw Surfing...

Screw Surfing. Yes, I said it. Screw surfing.

Why? Because it has become so popular; because what once was the pastime, nay waste time of rejects and degenerates and fringes of society, is now a mom and pop and snotty kids trend, lets-bail-into-the-van-on-the-weekend-and-saturate-the coast-with-our-oh-so-goddamn- fashionable-FUN. Surfing is no longer for artists and freaks, and whilst its commoditisation was perhaps inevitable, even preordained (and who is anyone to stop people sharing in its joy?), I sometimes wonder, what if?

What if one of the purest sports on earth has been completely smothered in logo-infected wrapper, sold to the masses like a cheeseburger late on a Friday night binge? What if the fabric of surfing has really been torn apart, like a Saturday whore’s dress in a sleazy brothel; its soul evaporated, like palm oil on the curve of an Asian hooker’s ass on a steamy tropical Sunday afternoon?

What if it is gone, baby, gone?

Camaraderie, giving and taking a wave, used to mean something. A gift from God or whatever deity or devil you believed in, that you thought created the unique aqueous pulses that we are privileged to ride. Stoke. It was once a rare thing. Golden. Special. Now it’s been diluted by every man and his log, SUP or bodyboard. Even in the most remote stretches of Indonesia, surf camp whorehouses ply their trade to hordes of eager Johns with urethane erections. Self-serving, self-entitled ego encrusted wannabe ferals with scant regard for once sacred unwritten rules of sharing, flaunt their Western wave-lust. Snakes and liars, delusional pricks and ignorant clowns, they stream up on your inside like ever-spawning parasites, to gorge at the depleting core of the once Sport of Kings.


Thanks to these charlatans, I feel as if the soul of surfing has left the world, my children, gone to better Nirvanas, where damned humans cannot reach.

Why? Oh Why? Because we screw everything. Relentlessly. Each other, the earth; we impregnate with impunity, spreading selfishness, breeding generations of spoilt surfing brats who in turn will screw each other and the world, until all that is left is a stinking pile of human excrement, only good for fertilising yet more dishevelled surf breaks.

Places where the most perfect swell lines - shaped to be caressed by the true faithful, the creative, reverent and respectful - now sag like the swollen tits of a matron, to the delight of her baying ingrate brood. As if slowly decaying plastic bottles on the jungle floor; incongruous, unwanted, these interlopers clog Mother Nature’s being, obtuse and wrong.

There are clearly too many of us now, and I feel that surfing is royally stuffed. It eats at my soul, you can tell. Makes me toss and turn, scrunch up my sweaty sheets and swear and hate and cry.


At times like these I question why I even bother, as magical surfing moments, once attainable, albeit through decades of dedication and discipline, become more fleeting as the gluttonous moths swarm into the light, ignorant of the ocean, of its pleas. Wasteful Johnny-come-latelys, self-inclined to take take-take-take and never give back. We roam the earth with our toxic equipment and stamp our massive carbon imprint, our petrochemical plunder, paying lip service to but oblivious or incapable of truly comprehending that surfing is a cracked mirror held up to the plight of the planet. Infected with capitalist consumption we want MORE and if you can’t beat them you have to join them in the gluttonous frenzy on the shoreline, at the edge of the great creator’s table.

If you can’t, won’t, give into the greed and are compelled by the gentlemanly decency - that, it seems like long-lost ages ago, once defined our sport - to wait your turn, you will be relegated to the back of the queue and slim pickings or nothing, you weak pussy, no matter your ability. No caves of blue light for you. No wondrous green walls of blissful serotonin. Just angst, frustration and desire unfulfilled. Ever the restless bastards, as places closer to home become more bloated with these idiot zombies, we look to new plains to decimate and become disillusioned when we find the hordes are already there, and we can no longer experience in full the true rapture that riding cosmic wavelengths once brought.

Surfing. It’s over my friends, as we know it and as I announce it... and if you don’t realise it, then you probably should. And although whilst I feel for you that you don’t, I also envy your blissful ignorance.

Yes, perhaps best thing a true surfer can do these days is give it up, turn one’s back on it all, because the ghost is gone.

Left the world until the next apocalypse.

Gone, baby, gone.

Scrawled in the black night of deep Sumatra after hours of reading Jack Kerouac under a weak light bulb, too many Bintangs, flu medication and a day of manifestly crowded surf. I don’t always feel like this about surfing, but sometimes, in my darkest moments, like this, I do. And though I won’t ever really give up, when I succumb to the provocation, to me it, right then, it is true. Screw Surfing. Just screw it. Because, at one point or another, almost everybody else does.