I want to talk to you about the webcasts. When you get in there it’s like you play the alpha male – cold at the start, warming up only after the other commentators struggle a little…
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Hmmm. That’s with any situation in life. You move into it, figure it out, get a little more comfortable and open up to it. It’s not like a game or something. If I get in there with Kliney (Todd Kilne) or Shmoo (John Shimooka), right away I feel really comfortable… With Pottz (Martin potter) I feel a little differently. I mean, he was my hero growing up so I might be a little more reserved. It’s funny, the fucken webcast is so weird because sometimes people don’t hear everything. Like you’re in there for an hour and someone listens to the second half of the show and they don’t know the inside joke you’re talking about in the context of how you’re speaking. I actually had a situation like that the other day that really bummed me out. You get a million messages coming through and you’re trying to respond to those and at the same time talk about what’s happening at the moment. When Mick won the final somebody wrote in saying, “so I guess that means Mick is gonna win the title this year.” Me and Pottz were talking about it and I don’t think we said the question to the public and then I said something like, “Well, Mick’s got a long way to go.” People heard that and a friend of mine was in a surf shop and heard it and she said. “How was what you said!?” And I said, “What?” And she’s like, “you said Mick’s got a long way to go.” They took it like I was trying to put him down when he’d just won the contest. And then I was like, “oh my god, I can totally see how that sounded. I was being like a total asshole. That sucks.” Now you’ve really got to think how it’s gonna be heard and how it’s gonna be taken. The audience is gonna finish that sentence off rather than me saying, “eight different guys are gonna win a contest this year, he’s got a long way to go to win the title this year but he’s started out as good as he possibly can.”
You also said that you were going to talk to Quiksilver about sponsoring Bede Durbidge. Were you serious or was it lip service?
Yeah, I’ve actually followed it up a little bit but I think the problem is with timing a little bit and companies make their budgets on a calendar so it would have to be kinda a call from above. I think Bede’s a true blue Aussie guy and he’s such a nice guy and a good surfer.
Do you think that’s enough? If it were coming outta your pockets for your own label, would you invest the green?
You really have to know how you’re going to utilise a person and what they’re going to mean to your company. It’s not my call at the end of the day but if it were my company I’d be looking at it from a different perspective. I think it was a shame what happened to him. From all accounts, he was promised he would get an extension of his contract if he made a final or something and then he won trestles. That’s the word on the street. Actually I shouldn’t have said that because I don’t want to bad mouth anyone.
What about the theory that all the cabbage is earned by the very top guys because they’re the only ones who actually move product? In golf, in tennis, the main players are paid handsomely while the rest earn very little – purely because it’s only the very best who have a profile that sells. In surfing, the accepted wisdom is, if you qualify, you deserve a minimum of 100k. But what if your surfing doesn’t excite or you don’t have a media profile? Do you still deserve a salary?
Hmmmm. I’m sure also riding for Billabong is a tough deal because they have such an amazing team. They’ve had the best team in surfing for the last 15 years. From Luke (Egan) and Occy to Shane-o (Dorian) and Taj, Parko, Andy, I mean, the list goes on and on. Not to mention the freesurf guys like Rasta and Margo. When Shane Dorian was top 10 in the world he said to me it didn’t feel like he’d found his place so he naturally went for it (the big-wave/freesurf thing) and found it. And that’s put him in a better situation with the team and the place where he belongs in as far as finding what he loves and being able to make a living out of it.
With Dane and Julian, your little young gun team is strong…
I think what we’ve done there is that we’ve really focussed on the future. When you look at it, Ry (Craike), Julian (Wilson), Clay (Marzo), Dane (Reynolds), Jeremy (Flores). I mean, the young team’s pretty awesome.
Is Ry in the same league as Dane or Julian? Does he have enough dimension to his surfing?
He’s never gonna be in with a shot at a title but what he does, he does as good as anyone. I mean, I know what you’re saying. It would take him some work. If all of his aspects of his surfing were as good as his frontside surfing, he’d be frightening. If you could get his backside surfing like Occy coupled with the forehand turns that he does, that’d be pretty crazy. A lot of people would be playing catch-up. The good thing about that group of guys, they’re all dynamic. Jeremy’s a contest guy, Dane and Ry are freesurf guys and Julian’s somewhere in-between. It sorta seems like he doesn’t care but he’s actually really good in contests and he does care.
It seems like you’ve been searching for the meaning of life. Are you any closer to approaching the key to happiness?
My first love and everything growing up became surfing. Although I wanted to have relationships and stuff like that, I wanted to accomplish career stuff ahead of everything. It was always a safe place for me. After attaining things that I was going after and those goals, I can finally open my mind to keep growing. Now, it’s about being closer with my family and being more open with people. I encounter so many people it’s really hard to stay open and attentive, fully present with people at times.
Even dragging people’s names out of the grey folds upstairs…
I know so many people. I get a little frustrated. So many times I’ll meet people, and they say “do you know so and so. They said they were hanging out with you.” I’m like, dammit, I’m sure I know that person but I feel stupid because I don’t know their last name, or their name in the first place but I know em by their face.
Do you feel like you’ve got a responsibility?
I’m a lot easier on myself now but when I was first discovering the world and meeting lots of people it was hard. It’s weird because I’ll just feel myself shut down at the end of the day. I’ll get to the end of today and I was in a lot of situations and I met a bunch of different people, and I don’t know whether I even remember the whole day, so many things happen, y’know. That happened last week when I was doing that celeb race in Melbourne, I met so many different people in the race and it took me like quite a few days to start getting everyone’s names. Luckily, we all had our suits on and we had names on em it was so good
A celeb’s deal where everyone’s caught up in emselves, maybe they had to look at your name tag, too…
ha-ha, I hope they did. Yesterday I met these girls from Germany who had no idea who I was but these guys they were with wanted to take a picture with me. And after the picture, the girls asked, “Who are you?” And I said, “that’s the best question I’ve been asked all day.” And they were like, “no, no, no… really, who are you?” I was like, “it doesn’t matter, I don’t know you either, this is perfect.” And then they started freestyle rapping to me in German and that was cool.
They rap themselves into your hotel room later in the night?
(seriously) no, that didn’t happen.
What’s making you most happy at the moment?
Let’s see. The same thing that makes me happy kinda frustrates me. I have all this freedom between events to do whatever I want but I flew over here to WA and the swell we’ve just gotten is hitting up in Bali and I guess it hit Bali yesterday and it’s supposed to be good up there. And I just wanted to fly up there and I thought, fuck, if I do that I’m just gonna kill myself. I’d just get too battered around. One of the coolest things is that my daughter’s step-dad is the coolest guy in the world. He calls me all the time, checking in, let’s me know what’s going on, We’re like brothers, he’s a great guy. He calls me and tells me what’s going on and keeps that part of my life really open.
So, you’re gonna hang out in the west for a while?
I heard the Goldie’s good. Three to four feet at snapper or something.
Yeah, good if you could just reduce the number of surfers by 50%.
That’s actually the only argument to bringing Kirra back. Do you guys deal with that situation at all with your mag?
Not really, because how do you bring Kirra back without losing Coolangatta.
Exactly. That’s the problem. If they bring Kirra back everyone’s gonna be bitching about how great snapper was and how they fucked up. I know the solution. You buy a dredge that can shape the sandbar, drive it right along where you want that sandbar to be and you angle it in where old Kirra used to be. All that sand outside in the bay that blocks all the swell, you just dump that and then you’re constantly using the same sand you’re not taking it off the Fingal back beach or wherever. It’s not economically feasible but it might satisfy the current situation. When kirra was good, it broke in so close next to the road, next to the street and stuff and that’s what everyone is missing, just how beautiful it was. A lot times big Groyne’s good but not connecting the inside and little Groyne was it’s own sand altogether, it was really rare to connect through to small groyne.
So, a boat grabs it and drops it back out in the bay and stops the longshore movement of sand?
Some big vaccum that can suck all the water out of the bay. There’s probably some whole ecosystem happening with that bottom, different fish and all sorts of things.
Yeah, it’d be quite the legacy. Eight world titles and the man responsible for the extinction of a peculiar breed of north Kirra sand crab…
Yeah, you do kinda start fucking with nature. We’ve already done that but at least the sand’s able to flow into its place. It falls into the place of least resistance and most of the time it makes a nice straight sandbar. The amount of good waves ridden every single day from snapper through to Coolangatta beach, and then when it’s big there’s still good waves at Kirra. It’s a tough issue.
As you’ve gotten older, and developed an intimate knowledge of the way a wave breaks and what your board and body does, do you still surprise yourself with manoeuvres?
In my mid and upper teens and early 20s, surfing was changing so much. It advanced so much more quickly than it is today. Literally, in about a year’s time it went from no-one doing air reverses to us doing them, like, a lot. There were a lot of transitions happening in manoeuvres. At that age, there are so many approaches to a wave that you haven’t tried, and you’re getting to a place where you have to not only open your mind to it, but also you’re getting your strength to be able to do that. That’s the prime time for surprising yourself. The biggest thing is with airs. Sometimes you just go for some big hail Mary and sometimes you just stick it. No matter, I don’t care if you’re 10 or 50, you’re gonna surprise yourself when you do that.
What about your rodeo at pipe? It seemed like it came from nowhere. At that point no one went up a wave in that direction.
It was just a transition. Even when I was 10 years old I would do these big kickouts, just trying to get as high as I could. I didn’t really think about making it, I was just thinking about cool, I’m going the air and I’m diving and to me, I feel like superman. Then that one year, in 1999, I started trying to do flips but the rotation wasn’t working properly and so that one at pipe was totally in the moment. I just went up and went, well I’m not gonna make it going upside down so I may as well try make it more of a sideways rotation than a straight up over the top. So it ended up putting me in just the right spot and that became like a really functional rotation at that time. It did surprise me actually because I think I stuck it but fell because I was so surprised. I was also on a 6’10”. That one definitely surprised me because I didn’t really know what was going on. I mean, I knew it was there somewhere but I didn’t know I was gonna do it in a heat.
When everyone’s watching and the focus is all you, is it easier to reach these heightened performance levels?
It does end up pulling it out of you probably more often. When you’re a competitor, you get passionate about those situations and that’s a time when above all other times in your career that’s where it matters, that’s where you have to be able to step it up another notch. For me, it’s probably happened more in those situations because especially during the years on tour I focus my surfing to try and peak during events. I don’t work too intently to peak in my freesurfs unless I’m filming or something. So you can leave those amazing performances simmering for just when you need em? I find I can distance myself a little bit from my best surfing if I’m trying to win a title. Obviously, there’s a time and place. If the waves are amazing and my boards feel right then there’s no holding back. To stay focused competitively you want to peak at the right moment, you want to peak during the event or at the end of an event.
What would be the downside if you were always trying to peak?
You’d probably be hurt a lot. And you’d be frustrated too because sometimes the best surfing doesn’t happen when you’re trying too hard. You’re going 100% with your strength but maybe not trying to overdo it. You can only do what a wave allows you to do. You gotta just surf to what the wave allows you to do based on what you see happening. The difference in people’s surfing is their approach and how open your mind is to the curves and angles on waves.
On the media, the story of us shooting from KS And TB from Bird was the third lead story that night on the channel nine news.
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Reply #14213 on : Wed November 26, 2008, 17:19:51