Who's in charge of scheduling?
I’m a little restless. In the other room my wife is nine months pregnant with our first child and while most of the 4HL (4 Hour Life)workers are starting to feel the pull of the weekend, we’re nesting. Settled in and waiting for our daughter to make her debut…any minute now. Mom is a stickler for being on time too…so, baby is already causing trouble — her due date was yesterday, so fashionably late it is!
Now this time of year used to be an exciting time for those nesting. While most organized sports are in a lull — football is over, the basketball stakes are low for another few weeks, March Madness hasn’t started, no one really watches regular season hockey and baseball has barely started spring training — this is supposed to be a time for professional surfing, dammit!
Each year, the world tour kicked off in glorious sunshine at Snapper Rocks on the Gold Coast of Australia. All the big names would pack into the high rises overlooking Rainbow Bay after three months of recharging at home and doing surf trips and they would tote fresh quivers of JS’s, Merricks, DHDs underarm and walk the runway down to the contest area before paddling out at the long, blue walls of Snapper wearing trunks and ripping all day before attending just enough debaucherous parties to still make heats. Remember how exciting it was to see what Andy would be up to? What was Dane gonna ride? What beer would he drink? Did he stretch? Who did their own spray? Was Taj on a FireWire? You’d have Wilko rollerskating down to the beach in a top hat before doing rodeo flips from behind the rocks and getting 7s, but the crowd would roar, and for the moment, surfing felt like it probably should always feel: sexy, fun and exciting.
High performance surfing kicked off the year. Fans lined the shore down the whole point sipping Coronas in the sun, up close and personal to the surfers, cheering as everyone flared in the blue water. I remember Andy put it simply and the best: “I’m bringing a whole new vibe this year to the Gold Coast,” he said in Hawaii the year before heading into his third world title year. The bravado was real! The hype was real! The fun was real! And the parties, sunshine and enthusiasm for the start of the competitive year was actually a thing. But they scratched all that. They fixed the bits that were never broken. The one solid thing we had: start in Australia, end in Hawaii.
After watching the tour start in Hawaii in January twice now, kicking off at Pipe and Sunset…I have to say— and I really have been trying to be positive about this — it sucks. Everything feels backward. Like, why are they going to Portugal now? Call me Old World, but surfers should be in Europe in the fall. It’s a right of passage. We kick off the year in Australia, summer in the South Pacific and South America (Tahiti, Fiji, Brazil, etc.) and we all land in Europe to drink wine and rip beachies: France and Portugal with a couple dips in and out of California before and after and then on to end the year in Hawaii. Like it should be.
I don't have the energy to advance my full diatribe about why this should be — baby on the way and all — but thinking about everyone arriving in Australia next week to kick off the year sounds 50 times better than what’s going on right now, which already sees half the tour already about to fall off, a contest at a stupid wave pool upcoming, and freezing springtime Portugal before heading all the way back to the freezing parts of Australia. We never surf the Gold Coast or France? I’m lost. Who’s in charge of scheduling?—Travis Ferré
Watch a little highlight reel of the vibe from the kickoff event of the 2007 season. Oh, but turn off the volume and put on something more palatable than the garbage dubbed in:
