Words fail me
Within minutes of waking up on my first morning in South Africa, I had myself a new lifelong enemy. Tim Baker. Nursing an unexpectedly bad hangover, not helped by a radically perverted body clock, I had been walking toward the alluring aroma of frying bacon and coffee at the Billabong Pro, J-Bay. As I reached a grass patch overlooking a pan-flat Jeffreys bay, a man with thinning brown hair and a jeans/sweater ensemble approached me.
“Are you Jed Smith?”
I am, I replied.
“I’m Tim,” he said.
In March, I had audaciously rung Mr Baker to interview him about his floundering career as a literary lecturer. Baker, you see, had been booked by the Sydney Writers Festival to contribute to a panel discussion (with Sean Doherty and Nick Carroll) about surf writing, then conduct his own masterclass on surf writing for aspiring students of the art. When I found out that, after weeks of tickets to the masterclass being on sale, only three of 30 had been picked up, I decided to ring him and find out what he was going to do next.This is the kind of larrikin idea that Baker virtually invented during his time at Tracks and ASL in the late 1980s and 90s. I honestly thought he'd take it in good spirit. I was wrong. You can read the ensuing story here.
Another man approached us, a veteran cameraman on tour, with whom I'm on nodding terms. We acknowledged each other. Tim said to him, “I’m surprised you talk to people like this.” Then he launched into an interrogation of why I wrote the article. Things deteriorated.
I said I thought it would be a harmless ribbing. His lecture had tanked, no biggie, and I thought he would be happy to concede that the idea was misguided. I had no idea he would react so violently. After all, I was only espousing the very style that had once made him one of the luminaries of the surf writing firmament. Baker asked, “Don’t you have more interesting things to write about?” Then, in what may have been a compliment, he told me an intelligent person would be able to find any number of interesting stories in surfing to write about. I disagreed. I told Baker that I worked on the Stab website, where daily deadlines sometimes forced me to be a bit innovative with story ideas.
This led Baker to divulge his credentials as the former editor of two of surfing’s biggest magazines (ASL and Tracks), and tell me that I didn’t know what I was talking about. I steered the conversation back to why I’d written the article. The Sydney Writers Festival was a prestigious event bringing together some of the world’s great thinkers (Germaine Greer, Alain De Botton and David Suzuki have all appeared there), I said. I didn’t believe surf writing had earned its place, yet, amongst such esteemed personalities. This angered Baker. He said, “What the fuck would you know? I don’t discuss the merits of journalism with people like you. You’ve done nothing.”
"You approached me," I replied.
Baker was agitated. He kept removing his glasses, running his hand through his hair and placing them back on top of his head. I told him another of my problems with the panel discussion, was that it lacked a diversity of viewpoints. All the writers on the panel were former Tracks editors, and were all from a similar mould of writer. Perhaps the panel would have been better served to include someone like Fred Pawle. After all he is the only surf writer ever to receive a Walkley nomination for “outstanding investigative reporting.”
“I can’t fucking believe this,” guffawed Tim. “Fred Pawle? What the fuck has Fred Pawle done? Fucken Fred Pawle.” I asked Tim whether he had a Walkley nomination. His shoulders spread, his stance widened. He was entering attack mode, old-school style.
“Who are you to question me? I don’t take this off cunts like you,” and with this he began to walk forward. I reacted quick and jammed my face in his. With my mouth in licking distance, my teeth still red and harbouring the pungent odour of the previous night’s Beyerkloff Shiraz (a robust, fruity drop that disappeared hastily from the palette), I said, “Do something, you old cunt. Go on, fuckwit.” Tim stood his ground. We stood face to face for a few seconds, then sidestepped. I threw my finished can of orange juice in the recycling bin. As I walked away, Tim said he would never fight at a surfing contest, in front of all these people. I reiterated that “he came up to me” and left him to bake in his juice. – Jed Smith
Posts: 69
Reply #69 on : Sun July 19, 2009, 11:19:15