Surf movies have been through a radical metamorphosis the last decade. I must have watched hundreds of the things over the last 20 years, and counting the rewinds and slo –mos I probably wasted a good chunk of my youth glued to the tv and trying to memorise every move for my next session. Surf videos were like gold, and even the SABC coverage of the Spur Steakranch Surfabouts and the Gunston was reason enough to stay at home and not go to the local disco clutching a bottle of Old Brown. When surf movie media moved from VCR’s to DVD’s all seemed cool. We got a few on the covers of the mags, we bought a few, and the quality was awesome. New movies were produced quicker, and were out to the public while the content was still hot.

Crouching in one of many soulful barrels.

Then two things happened.
Firstly, the Taylor Steele approach of showing hundreds of waves ripped to shreds back-to-back with a fast and punk soundtrack turned the kids onto DVD’s in a massive way. Gone was the soul of Endless Summer, the good vibes of Morning Of The Earth, the window to the world travel approach of Five Summer Stories and the surfing revelations of Free Ride. Instead, the surf movie was replaced by erratic young surfers busting into the air at crap two-foot onshore Windansea to the soundtrack of Blink at full tilt.
Secondly, the producers and the brands flooded the market with cheap or free DVD’s as marketing tools. People in South Africa who subscribed to overseas mags were getting two to three free DVD’s a month. Some were the same movies, others were hashed together contest DVD’s with a brand logo on the case and on disc.
So has the world of surf DVD’s come and gone? Have they run their course and the world is now tuned into youtube instead?

Some sick waves in The Drifter

I jammed The Drifter into my player, not sure what to expect. Another ploy to get brand placement into a ‘soul’ DVD? Another nauseating coming of age of a surfer realising that his life is hard and that we must all feel sorry for him. I watched the movie in silence, getting to grips with Machado’s sotto voice. Quite honestly I didn’t know what I was watching. Was it a surf movie? Was it a self-indulgent signature movie? Was it an Indo travelogue.
When Machado’s motorbike breaks down, and the mechanic says, “Your huge hair is caught in the rear sprocket” (translated sub-titles) it took me a few seconds before I started laughing, and just like that -I felt the movie – for whatever it was.

Sun and wave

Rob surfs some insane waves, often by himself, on a dodgy looking fishy board. He cruises around with the local village people, sleeps alone in a tent and speaks his thoughts out loud as he writes them in a journal. Sometimes he comes across a bit melancholy, other times deeply introspective, but Rob’s persona is one of coolness, and it always pervades.

The Drifter is a step backwards towards the surf movies of old, the surf movies with soul.

Rob gets interviewed on CNN about the flick…

Joels apology letter

With regards my previous blog, I have learned a few things that I want to share with you.
1. Joel Parkinson is a popular surfer, and the general feedback was that he simply made a mistake.
2. Racism is still a very sensitive word, particularly in South Africa, and needs to be treated as such.
3. We are a patriotic bunch, and the most of us are digging in here and are going to make things work in South Africa.
4. Joel is a public figure and he needs to be aware and accountable for anything he says that goes into the public domain.

Having said that, Jeol sent me an apology from the heart of Portugal where he was surfing thundering barrels in the Rip Curl Pro Search:

Jarvi bru
I have been wanting to contact you regarding your post on zigzag about my comments in Stab mag earlier this year. As you know, I am in Portugal with the comp and focusing on getting the job done. I was going to wait until this comp was over but I had a read of the comments and I need to make a statement to explain and clarify what was said.

Joel.

There you have it. An honest and contrite apology from Joel. Good enough for me. Done and dusted.

In 1999 Parko won the Billabong Pro at J-Bay as a wildcard. That was pretty cool. Since then he has come back to South Africa year after year to surf in the Billabong Pro, one of the best World Tour events held at the best right hand pointbreak in the world.

Along the way he has made numerous friends in South Africa, and picked up countless fans. Renowned for his mellow demeanour and friendly style, Parko always has a smile and a wave to anyone around the contest site.

This year he started off on a mission. Training under Big Louie, there were many people, myself included, who were saying ‘good on him,’ and ‘he deserves a world title.’ He had the fitness, the turns and the momentum. With three wins out of the first five events, it looked like it was a sure thing.

Somewhere along the line a magazine came out in Australia with an interview with Parko. Stab issue 35, July/August 2009 had some good stuff in it. Some good humour, a quirky cartoon featuring Bobby Martinez, and the afore-mentioned interview with Parko.
It was a basic question-and-answer type interview, with Stab asking questions and Parko answering them. Pretty cool line of questioning and some good answers, until this little number reared its head.

Stab: What remarkable things have you found in remarkable places?
Parko: I find the racism in South Africa remarkable. It always shits me when I leave there. It’s one of the only places in the world where white people can’t live with black people. They hate each other.

With a comment like this, where do you start?
I didn’t need to.
While Stab Magazine isn’t sold on the shelves in South Africa, there are some subscribers and travelling surfers and surf industry people who get the mag. It’s well-known and people talk about it. We get it a few months after it has been published. A few people weren’t stoked with Parko’s comments. It was said that he would have seen radical and positive changes over the last 10 years. It was asked how often he has Abbos around at his house for a barbie. It was said that there are black and white school kids who are the best of friends, and black and white couples raising families. It was asked if Parko stayed in luxury accommodation at J-Bay. It was asked how much he has done for the local underprivileged community, like Sunny, Fanning and Slater have quietly done over the last couple of years. One angry surfer said that he would like to ask him in next year’s Billabong press conference about the quote. Another pissed-off surfer said he would prefer to ask him face-to-face. People were seriously irked.

Surfers in general are completely apathetic. Let’s face it – no one is going to ask Parko at the press conference, and no one is going to ask him face to face. Apologies to my mates who said that they would but guys, you probably aren’t going to do anything.

Still, there has been a slight development. Some people who were either fans or supporters of Parko are now over him. They no longer show the support that they used to. When he loses early they sms each other, and laugh at his misfortune, and mention that he is an idiot, and their numbers are growing. In a general, karmic kind of way this might actually be far worse than confrontation.

We have been watching the surf industry gasp and whirr like a broken computer in The States, OZ and Europe, while the South African version has managed to hold steady, pretty much. There might have been a few shaky moments, but on the whole the local surf industry has been solid. A whole bunch of new brands have come into the market and despite much talk that they would never survive, they all have made it past the difficult first stages of their development and are gearing up for a Christmas season. It might be somewhat subdued this year, but it is going to be a Christmas season nonetheless, and everyone is going to go out and celebrate the birth of Jesus by buying surf-branded clothing and alcohol and get drunk in their new threads.

Still, while all of us who are dependent on the mechanisms of the surf industry to put food on the table are breathing a few short and sharp breaths of relief, a few cracks are starting to appear here and there. Brand and marketing managers world wide have taken long and hard looks at where their money is being spent and have come up with some bold, cost-cutting decisions that are going to have reverberations around the competitive side of our sport for a long time.

This is where pro surfing is going.

No longer does it seem a logical option to throw large amounts of coin onto a surfer who is going to disappear into the quagmire that is the WQS for a number of years. Surfers competing hard on the WQS do not do much for a sponsor. Quite simply, unless they are winning 6 star events, and doing so by punting some outrageous air turns, they are below the radar for much forms of media. Surfers getting quarters and semis in WQS events, including 6-stars, are in the media doldrums

(doldrums definition – a place where the wind doesn’t blow)

So why should they be paid large amounts of cash to disappear. The theory is that the good ones will reappear at some stage and make name on the World Tour and this takes a long-term commitment from surfer and sponsor, but in the current dejected economy, brand and marketing managers are being forced to think differently.

Similarly, the brands have realised that there is very little return on staging multi-million rand 6-star WQS events. They have realised that putting on such events doesn’t do that much for them in the way of selling more tees and shorts in inland urban centres. There are way better ways to leverage such money, to entertain the public.

Our surfing world is set to change in many ways and there will be many different avenues and outlets for good surfing to be viewed and enjoyed. From free surfing to speciality events, to made-for-tv surfing shows and many other interesting forms of surfing as entertainment. Even the World Tour, surfing slop in Sopelana and rubbish in Brazil, is verging on being seen as painfully boring now, and is seemingly becoming more listless per event. So World Tour calibre surfers have to look beyond the coloured vests as well. Jordy’s Mentawais flip was the most viewed wave of 2009 so far, and as the world went into a frenzy about it no one really cared about who was doing what on the World Tour at the time.

While it is incredible for Adriano to win a World Tour event, he is in an elite crew. © Scholtz/ASP/Getty

What about all the WQS surfers who have their dreams set on the World Tour? Well, here is the analogy.

A few short years ago, as the Internet grew at an incredible pace, so the way that news was consumed quickly changed. Many people stopped buying newspapers, as they could get all the news for free online. Media owners, publishers and newspaper editors could all see it, could all watch the graphs as online reader stats went up and hardcopy sales went down, and no one did a thing about this. Now there is a massive worldwide shift onto free online news, and newspapers and all the jobs surrounding the publishing of newspapers, are set to close down, to become redundant. Yet when it was obvious that change was imminent, no one did a thing about it.

So now the world of the Pro Surfer, the WQS hopeful, is set for dramatic and utter change. These surfers need to re-invent themselves, need to find a different dream, and need to do something to stand metres above all their thousands of counterparts. They need to dance a different dance to attract the money of sponsors and to secure a job. Or else they are simply going to become unimportant.

While the whole world jumps onto the media juggernaut that surrounds the earthquakes and

tsunamis, while travel companies around the world use words and phrases like, “Book now! It WILL

help the Padang people if you give us your money BEFORE Christmas” on barely disguised advertising

ploys, and use dead human beings as ways to employ pitiful ambush marketing projects, we decided

to head straight for the heart of darkness.

As the Big Guy upstairs vents his wrath on an evil world and destroys cities as he did back in the days

of Sodom and Gomorrah, we decided to see what is really going on with the title race, the rebel tour,

and Julian Wilson’s open letter to World Tour head judge Perry Hatchet on how the ASP

judges are getting it all wrong.

First up, the Dream Tour. The Quiksilver Pro France was a wham bam thank you ma’am sort of affair.

With dire swell forecasts forcing the contest organisers hands into running it off as fast as possible in

small and poor conditions. Parko folded quicker than Superman on laundry day, Slater stumbled en

route against fast-becoming nemesis Tiago Pires (remember he smashed Slater in Indo last year), and

Fanning was on fire. Bede got a second in the event, which brings him up to third behind Fanning in

second and Parko who now has a Weight Watcher’s lead (slim). Jordy is at number 13. Greg Emslie is

at 33, while Davey is at 41st and has some work cut out for him in the last few events.

The forecast for the Billabong Pro Mundaka looks beyond dire at the moment. While last year’s event

copped a lot of discontent from the surfers, this year looks decidedly worse at this stage, with very little

on the horizon. Possibly a ‘Dream Tour’ event being run off in tiny Sopelana… what a bummer.

The inside scoop on the swell predictions is quite simply, nothing. There is nothing predicted. Ever seen

Sopelana flat? I have, for weeks on end. There has been talk in the past of scuppering this event,

perhaps too much talk. This song is not a rebel song, this is ….. etc etc.

The Rip Curl Search event is still a bit of a dark horse at the moment. The event venue is completely

awesome from all accounts, but then again so is Mundaka and Pipe. An awesome venue without swell is

as good as a skateboard park for a surfing event. Let’s hope something comes to life to give some

energy into a very dismal European leg so far.

The rebel tour is still a mystery and a non-entity right now. They say that the announcement is

imminent, but they have been saying that for a while, and the dictionary definition of imminent is ‘about

to happen or threatening to happen’ so they can, in theory, continue threatening for as long as they want.

While Tiago beat Slater fairly, there were rumours floating of how Slater was going to be punished for

this rebel tour malarkey by the judges, these guys of whom some can barely surf themselves and who

decide the fate and careers of the best surfers in the world

Jordy's Superman in the Quik Pro © Chauce

Speaking of judges, Julian Wilson and a few friends think that the judges are scoring the really progressive surfing erroneously. He mentions who he thinks is getting skunked by the judges, and also mentions that Jordy’s Superman was the most over-scored move of the event. For the full run down of this letter find it on the Stab Magazine website www.stabmag.com it makes for interesting reading.