There’s nothing easy about Sunday morning in Coolangatta.
I sit as two good ol’ Cooly boys decompress after a relaxing morning surf at Snapper. “Anyway, I could see this knucklehead coming down the line. He’d just burned someone to get the wave and it was a good one. I see this guy out there a bit and he’s a total f*cking clown. Anyway, I see him coming, and the wave’s pretty good, and I’m just thinking, Okay mate, I f*cking got ya here. And then just as I go to drop in on him…You drop in on him! F*cked me plans totally! Haaaaaa!” Uproarious laughter followed, and is still going now.
It’s another day in paradise. The usual carpet of lost souls spread evenly from Snapper to Kirra, nothing being unridden, not a crumb wasted. A wave comes through and it’s like bush turkeys fighting over a chip. There’s extra muscle in the swell, although it’s been busted up by overnight easterly winds, but down in Rainbow Bay it’s clean and worth squabbling over. Man, this bank has really made people question who they are over the past month, forced people to peer down deep into their souls – those who possess them anyway – and look at who they really are and what they’d do for just one of these waves.
I spoke to a mate of mine this morning who was doing just this after facing a moral conundrum yesterday. He tells me the story of being out there and seeing blind Brazilian surfer Derek Rabelo coming down the line on a perfect little Greenmount spinner. My mate hadn’t had a wave in an hour, and at that point the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other started arguing.
“Ben, not only is the guy blind, this might also be the wave of his life.”
“Don’t listen to that f*ckwit with the halo! Do it! He’s not even going to know you’re there!”
In the end my mate pulled back and Derek continued on down the line, but I’m betting he was the only guy who’s pulled back out there in a month.
And so, yeah, Kelly’s board.
You saw the board this morning – a Greg Webber-shaped, high-hipped, flipped-out carbon fiber quad – that Kelly, to his credit, surfed legit during his Round One heat. But there was one point where he had to tack it across a long, weak, 30-yard blob of water and right there you saw why the board wasn’t working. He was surfing through molasses. In dead water this board was a dead duck. The fact it was sprayed black just made it even slower.
In most cases, Kelly could surf a refrigerator and win a Round Two heat, but Stu Kennedy surfed fast, real fast, and the judges didn’t miss the contrast. Only surfing at Snapper because of the litany of injuries on Tour, nothing was really expected of Stu, certainly not the electric three-turn combo he dropped to finish the champ. Watching on, almost in tears, was The Angry Inch, Trent Munro, Kennedy’s spirit animal and mentor. Stuey surfed fast and got angry at the lip.
In the end it wasn’t even close, the great irony, of course, being Kennedy rides for Slater Designs.
I spoke with Greg Webber last year when he and Kelly first hatched plans for rebirthing the banana boards Webber had popularized over 20 years ago under the feet of Shane Herring. Their initial discussion had been around a banana board to match the curved face of a big Teahupoo drop. I’m not sure fat three-foot snapper was what they had in mind. Kelly had a flatter, faster-looking thruster on hand as back-up, but never swapped it in. The board has drawn a conga line of naysayers, some from even within Kelly’s circle, and it’s hard to determine whether the board is a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes, where it’s only Kelly who can’t see it doesn’t work, or whether he sees the board as an awkward step toward something great that will reveal itself down the track.
Kelly lost on the incoming tide, and they put the contest on hold straight after his heat. In 20 years of watching him do this, I’ve never seen him surf the last heat before a hold; I’ve only ever seen him surf the first heat when the contest resumes in mint surf. The fact he even paddled out this morning said more than what he paddled out on. As a surf fan, if this was to be Kelly’s last year on Tour, I want to see him go out surfing at the peak of his powers. I don’t want to see him go out like today.
With Kelly’s departure seemingly imminent (within a ten-year window), with Mick walking away for the year, and with seven tour rookies all standing tall here at Snapper not content to simply lie down under the truck, guys like Jordy and Julian must both be feeling the burn.
It’s hard to determine whether the board is a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes, where it’s only Kelly who can’t see it doesn’t work, or whether he sees the board as an awkward step toward something great that will reveal itself down the track.
Both of them lost today – Julian to Seabass, Jordy to Ryan Callinan – and it was a sad aria for both. Both losses were in slow motion. While the pair surfed with the hustle you’d expect in a sudden-death heat in the first event of the season, they were well short of their best. These guys should be toying with this wave, this should be a drive-thru result, but they both got hamburgered. I worry a little as they’ve suffered career neuroses in the past, and they are both here at Snapper with new coaches – Jake Paterson for Julian and Chris Gallagher for Jordy – the latest in a line to have filled those jobs. They just don’t seem to be in a groove after a bunch of years on tour, and their problem now is that they are running into young guys who seem to have found a groove after two heats.
I had lunch with Ryan Callinan today as the rain fell and he waited for the contest to be called back on. He sat there with his girlfriend, Nina, silently chewing on a hamburger, finished it, then pushed some lettuce around his plate in silence. Ryan’s got this hyena laugh that doesn’t need much encouragement, but we haven’t heard a lot of it lately, for obvious reasons.
I was in Newcastle two Fridays ago, just as the surf town of Merewether was preparing to say a final goodbye to Ryan’s old boy, Gary, who’d lost his battle with leukemia. There was a heavy energy swirling around the place, unsure of where to go: To mourn Gary or celebrate Ryan, the first Merewether surfer on tour since Luke Egan. For Ryan, he’s had to bottle it up, because he’s known there’s a day coming real soon when he’d have to surf a tour heat against one of the big dogs on Tour, a Joel, maybe a Kelly, even a Jordy.
That day was today. He beat Jordy, surfed like he’d been on tour since Luke Egan, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the surfer’s area when he walked back up.