I have an obscure sports team I cheer for. They are from a city I live nowhere near and have no ancestral or personal history with. It doesn't even have an ocean near it. I had never been there until I recently made my pilgrimage to watch a game. My reasoning for fandom is that I simply liked their aesthetic as an impressionable young kid — they had great uniforms and a few players who wore them really well. They were not the winningest of teams, but they looked rad losing and had a vibe. I have stuck with them ever since. No matter what. There was never a bandwagon to jump on.

I had a random somewhat obscure and somewhat random favorite surfer as a kid too. That surfer was Benji Weatherley. Benji had sick style and great video parts but was never on the leading edge of progression or accomplished competitively. It always caught people off guard when I, without any hesitation, told them he was my favorite surfer. “Really, Benji?”

I once showed up to Goldenwest street in HB to watch the trials (yes, corelord fandom) for the US Open of Surfing because I saw that Benji was in an early heat and I thought I could see him surf the same shitty wave I surfed contests at. I mostly wanted to see how he strolled up to the beach, how his boards looked, sticker placement, wardrobe, airbrush, car, vibe — these things were all important to me. I envisioned a perfectly disheveled arrival blanketed in Billabong garb before easily winning because his style was superior to everyone and in my judging criteria only style mattered. Competing was something I’d never seen him do, which is probably why I showed up that morning to watch. Anyone that knew him at the time woulda laughed at seeing his name on the heat sheet — someone at Billabong probably signed him up to trick him into going to an autograph signing or something. I just assumed everyone who was “pro” had to do comps.

That morning I waited and waited, checking the heat board, wondering when he’d get there. What his preheat regimen would be. Did he drink coffee? Bring his girlfriend(s)? Stretch? I frantically started to stress for him. Missing a heat was akin to sin at this point in my gromethood. He would never, right? Well, Benji never made it that day and I don’t think there is any evidence of him ever making it to a heat — although I did hear him say once that he was 1-0 against Kelly. Not sure the circumstances, but I’m sure they’re funny.

The best part about my favorite team and surfer is that they rarely win and neither of them are anything like me and I root for them just the same. Benji is like 6’3”, super outgoing, hilarious and charismatic. I am short, shy and anxious. I suppose we’re both regularfoots and from Southern California. But there isn’t much for me to emulate outside of sticker placements and airbrushes. My football team is credited with introducing the sports world to Hip Hop in the ‘90s, ushering in an entire new culture to a sport and city that didn’t exist before. But even that is a culture I’m not connected to or qualified to comment on outside of knowing every Wu-Tang song by heart.

Are any of these getting "approved" today?

I bring all this up because this week it was reiterated to me how important aesthetics and presentation are and how unimportant “results” and “analytics” are. We talked with the anonymous curator behind the surf nostalgia account @corelords — self described as:

Corelords™ isn’t a person, an account, or a company, it’s an homage to those who lay rail and kill barrels. A tribute to those who never gave a fuck and those who never will.

When I asked @Corelords why nostalgia is so En Vogue right now he said, “Surfing has [drastically] changed since the golden era [‘90s -2000s], specifically in boards, fashion, cancel-culture and professionalism. So when people look at the nostalgic stuff it's like, “Whoa, it was really like that?”

Martin Potter in Voluptuous.

I tried to pinpoint the source of these inspirations myself by reviewing old ads in mags. In the design, the characters [surfers] and the attitude was a bold, confidence. It was not workshopped by 40 people on emails and calls before being photoshopped into plain oatmeal that offends no one. Feedback was sparse and sometimes you bit the dust because of that. But sometimes, you lived forever. In retrospect it’s all raw and amazing and had noisy energy and it’s why we knew the difference between …Lost, MCD and SMP at any given moment. A lot of what they were doing would still shock and awe today. And does.

Now we are all spoon fed refinement culture, our surfers are given the same diet of wellness and athlete and adhere to it under all circumstances because algorithms don’t lie. Everything is clean and boring — refined into a sandpaper so smooth you could scrub your balls with it. I don't even need to scroll Instagram anymore, we all look the same.

All this just to tell you the Atlanta Falcons, my dirty birds, and coincidentally enough one of the teams that Benji’s dad played football for, walked it off in overtime last night against the Bucs wearing “throwback” uniforms, of course. Corelords.—Travis Ferré

[Above art: SMP magazine ad circa 1998]