Rip Curl Pro 2012 The Outsider: Epilogue - Bigger Than Jesus

In: Rip Curl Pro 2012 by Steve Shearer 430 Comments Wed 11th Apr '12

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"Some will fall in love with life and drink it from a fountain,
That is pouring like an avalanche coming down a mountain."
Butthole Surfers, Pepper.

I shook hands with Carl and we exchanged Easter greetings, one dunny scrubber to the next. It's a special bond only the lowest on the rung understand. A bond of shared dignity and humiliation. The toilet cleaner can tell the boss man to go fuck himself with impunity, he cannot be replaced easily, unlike middle management.

"Whaddya reckon Carl, about the Final, was it Sport or Art?"

Carl took a drag on his Winnie Blue and exhaled slowly, the thin wisp of smoke whisked away over the Winki lineup by a ragged onshore wind. "Well, if you take old Tolstoy's word for it, Art must create a specific emotional link between artist and audience, one that affects the viewer. Any kind of human activity in which an emitter transmits by means of external signs a previously experienced feeling is Art. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Baldy and Mick do exactly just that? Wasn't that display of surfing from both of them nothing but external signs which created an emotional feeling in the audience?"

"You're fucking kidding me right. You're trying to tell me the old distinction between Art and Sport, the same one our modern hipster makes his living off, is nothing but a piece of moral and intellectual sleight of hand?"

"Not only that," he went on (don't worry, sports fans, the comp was over and the dunnies and bins were well under control, this man had time to shoot the shit), "I'd even say it's good Art, not to mention off-the-scale Sport. It was clear, it was sincere, it was singular. It fostered feelings of universal brotherhood amongst those present."

"Carl, with all due respect, you've lost your tiny little mind. This Final will split the surfing world and unleash a tsunami of online rage and dissent."

"Sorry brother," said the garbageman, " I don't hold with the computer. I'm just saying what I saw with my own eyes."

I bowed deeply.

I wanted to talk with head judge, Richie Porta. I remembered him from Tahiti as a bellicose man who took up arms willingly against a sea of critics and backstabbers. He's a man with a strong sense of honour and of being disrespected; quixotic qualities for an ASP Head Judge. I liked him immensely.

Porta began: "I'm not gunna talk about specific scores because last year we did that [during Floatergate] and the sky fell in. Apparently the whole surfing world couldn't sleep at night because of it, which is a load of shit, but..."

"OK, how prepared were the judges for the very different approaches shown to surfing Bells Beach in the Final?"

"Umm, look all those judges have judged plenty of times here before and the surfers challenge us with that stuff all the friggen' time. Everywhere we go we have so many different ways to surf well these days. Doesn't have to be an aerial, doesn't have to be power surfing, it can be a combination. The surfers challenge us as to who is surfing better week in week out. We find it refreshing that we do get challenged because guys surf the wave differently and we love it."

"This year was different at Bells," I countered, "because typically there's a very classic approach whereas this year we saw a much more progressive approach. Was it hard to score those different approaches?"

"Nope, as easy as you like. The sport's evolving but as you saw the power carving surfing still rates here well and truly. The boys that score it know whats coming, what's happening and what the surfers are capable of and score accordingly."

"Did Kelly or anyone in his camp come up and query the judging after the Final?"

"I saw Belly today and he was alright. A couple of Quiksilver guys came up, ahh, they weren't querying the result they just wanted to have a chat about criteria. No-one's queried the result."

"In what sense did they want to chat about criteria?" I asked.

"Ah, they just wanted to know how we start scoring and our rationale behind starting off a heat scoring high. I just said the answer to that is we don't work off ifs and buts we score on what we see and then we compare. All we rely on is what happens in front of us. We score the first wave and everything is better or worse than that."

"OK, thanks for your time."

Of course a fly on the wall when Belly or the Quik guys were in there might have told a different tale but such is life.

Could we discuss the run into the Final of Robert Kelly Slater, the crucial mid-heat exchanges, and the post-Final behaviour of the champ with respect to its ramifications down the line in an effort to place the comp in line with other great sporting exchanges? Great, then lets do so.

Slater's run to the Final saw some of the most extraordinary exchanges and heat tactics ever seen. His Round 4 cliff-hanger against Nic Muscroft saw several tail-high finners, mistakes attempting airs and a full rotation air after the buzzer. That heat showed the central, polar, and critical point to Slater's approach to Bells Beach. Namely that he was prepared to make mistakes, indeed sacrifice control of the heat in the pursuit of alpha performance.

To put it more bluntly: At the age of forty and with eleven world titles under his belt he was learning new things in his surfing every heat. How fucking remarkable. A mistake in this sense is not a failure to control a heat but an opportunity to learn new ways of surfing.

His average wave count per heat was 7 (1 wave ridden every four minutes!), including an astounding 12 waves ridden in the Final. Fanning averaged 5 waves through the early stages with just 3 waves being ridden in both Semis and Final.

Slater opened the Final with an equally audacious tactic. Like Ali vs. Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle he opened with the equivalent of right hand leads, a series of pushed-past-the-limit turns including a failed attempt at a full rotation. The implied insult was obvious: He meant to knock-out Fanning in the opening exchanges and figured he didn't need to build a score. His earlier comments had all been aimed at a clearly emotional Parkinson, who was spent after a close win over Jordy Smith.

No, he hadn't built a framework against the Fanning attack, which had been flawless in the classical sense of power carving the Bells Bowl. He won't make that mistake again.

Four consecutive falls and a heat score in the single figure gutter as the heat approached the midway point - then he dropped The Air. Please let no sane person dispute that Ten or imply that it will lead to single manoeuvre surfing. It can't. It won't. For the simple reason that no other surfer currently alive can master the mental stability needed to fail, fail, fail and try again under extreme pressure a manoeuvre of such difficulty and consequence.

The crucible of the Final consisted of a brace of three rides all very close to each other in time immediately following the perfect Ten. Continuing controversy will likely focus on two of these rides: The Fanning 9.7 in which he strung together three fully torqued carving top turns and fell in the shorey and Slaters 8.07, which featured a lip grind re-entry and carving 360. Judges had scored two earlier carving 360's in the 9-point range and that alone seems an inconsistency hard to reconcile. It was the earlier of his two rides in the fast paced flurry which featured some insane high speed edged-out railwork and a perfect finish which also should raise eyebrows. Both of those rides on sober reflection seem under-scored.

Shaun Tomson said Kelly had his chances but the "judges expected more from him and so did everyone else." That's a harsh reality in a subjectively judged sport where, "without a clear finish line, a white line, a par, or a stopwatch, there will always be disputes."

And why should it not be so? Haven't we already established via the brilliant reasoning of the Bells Beach garbologist that pro surfing is an aesthetic activity beyond everything; a hybrid activity that smashes the false dichotomy between Sport and Art?

Originator of kraut-rock and mad cunt, Freddy Nietzsche, described Art as the single superior counterforce against all will to negation of life. That, through a state of intoxication or rapture the artist could transform things until they mirror his power - until they are reflections of his perfection.
Is that not what MP did, sports fans, if we are honest? Is that not what Fanning and Slater did on that grey, pre-frontal Good Friday afternoon at Victoria's Bells Beach? And did they not then establish communion via those transformative acts with a worldwide audience and transcend the limits of individual existence?

I know, I know, shipmates, we are sailing in perilous waters. The heavy breakers of Bullshit Reef lie too close off the starboard bow. Even now, we can hear the gnashing of online teeth. But these things need to be said anyhow. Damn the consequences...

From our lofty perch up here on the high rigging may we have a final word about the behaviour of Robert K. Slater? Yes, he was cheeky to ring the bell - but he did it after Mick. Yes, he could not contain his anger in the minutes immediately after the Final and his board smash on the steps may have accidentally disrespected one of the tragic figures of Australian surfing - but what of it? His constant and unceasing attempt to control the narrative by introducing his own self-interested themes ("I thought Parkinson was over-scored") is merely the verbalised thought pattern of one who "transforms things until they mirror his power."

Anyway, why do we expect this man to have qualities other than the ones that have made him uniquely suited to being the greatest competitive surfer of all time. Why would we expect him to emulate Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King?

He's Robert Kelly Slater, bitches. The Greatest. You think those eleven titles got there from playing nice guy?

Now listen to the man:

"Back up sucker.
Back up!
Come get me sucker, I'm dancin!
I'm dancin, follow me chump!
No, I'm not there. I'm here.
What!
Sucker, you ain't got nothin!"

I left Victoria in my own state of rapture. Deepest thanks to the gracious Sloane family of Ocean Grove, whose abundant hospitality and deep knowledge and love of the Victorian Surf Coast was a sheer joy to be around. Thanks too, for the Hall of Fame comments. As always the real meat in the sandwich came during the conversation, not the sermon. Please excuse me now while I go pick the caterpillars off the broccoli. Like Slater, those hungry bastards are never satisfied.

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