The king is sooo not dead
There is a whole school of surfing in which grace is developed until it is the one essential and big, rail digging, water throwing hacks are eliminated as far as possible, which is very much the art and venue of Adriano de Souza. Adriano is too great and sensitive an artist to be a complete surfer, so he gradually avoided, as much as possible, those parts of surfing which had to do with or were capable of bringing on a critically dug rail.
In this way he developed a way of working with the wave in which grace, picturesqueness, and the true beauty of an inappropriate claim replaced and avoided the brusque classicism of power surfing.
And then there is a whole school in which power, or rather bigness, is the goal and dainty minuets and speed checks are almost entirely removed which is the art and venue of Jordy Smith.
Jordy has too much physicality to be small on a wave. He must overpower in every facet. By nature, he must destroy the wave and there is nothing subtle about any aspect of it. On a day when the physical characteristics of the waves at a beach named Johanna resembled a clogged sink being churned by a broken garbage disposal both Adriano and Jordy failed in their heats. Jordy very much less than Adriano. Adriano very badly. The nearest you come to a perfect combination of power and grace is Taj Burrow and his only fault is that everything in surfing is so easy for him to do that it is difficult for him to give it the emotion that is always supplied by, say, Adriano’s evident physical inferiority, not only to the wave he is riding but to every one who is working with him and most of those who are watching him. Watching Taj is like seeing a James Bond film when you were a boy. You did not worry about him finally because he had too much ability. He was too good, too talented. It is why Taj has never won the title. Because the essence of the greatest emotional appeal of surfing is the feeling of immorality that the surfer feels in the middle of a great section and that he gives to the spectators. He is performing a work of art and he is playing with the laws of nature, banishing gravity and the human’s evolutionarily dictated land-dwelling existence. He gives you the feeling of his immortality, and, as you watch it, it becomes yours.
When you have a surfer to whom surfing is as easy as it is to Taj he cannot give the feeling or rather share it because he is too good. And when he wins it is more like a victory of the gods. The present-day surfer who dominates the waves most completely with his body and board, who masters the waves quickest whether they are giant or weak and then executes most often all the classic and progressive moves, on both left and right hand, cutbacks and top turns which are the base of all sincere surfing, and yet is excellent in the picturesque and graceful aerials above the lip is Kelly Slater. At the start of his career his style was faulty, he twisted and corkscrewed with the board and his naturals were not at all natural but forced, made very much on the bias of youth, and affected looking. He has, over his career and even until today, steadily improved his style until it is now almost competitively perfect. He has become much more robust in health, even with a broken foot, and with his great knowledge of waves, and his very great intelligence, he can an give adequate and interesting performance with any wave that comes into the competitive site. Even at Johanna.
A smattering of other surfers who made it into the last day of the competition contest fell somewhere competitively adequate on the grace/power continuum. Mick, Joel, Bobby and Bede. They are all serviceable. They all show coolness and an ability to move the surfboard well, driving it though turns also airs. Some of their personalities are more attractive than others. None are new phenomenons in the sport.
Near the end, Mick defeated Taj and Kelly defeated Bobby Tom Curren defeated Occy and then Kelly defeated Mick by completing an unnatural and very immortal air on a busted foot. His board came unstuck from his busted foot as he went straight into the sky. His board pointed back down at the zenith of the aerial and he crashed into certain wipeout. He twisted and turned in the whitewash eventually popping straight up and looking toward the heavens. Rain poured forth from them on to us both. This gratified me and I will tell you of an odd occurrence. The surfer is polygamous as a human animal, but occasionally an individual is found that is monogamous. Sometimes a surfer on tour will come to so care for one of the thousands of women scattered around that he will make no case for all the others and will only have to do with her and she will refuse to leave his side in Torquay or Brazil or South Africa or France. When this occurs the surfer’s friends try to remove the woman from their group and if the surfer does not return to polygamy he is sent with the other married surfers toward early bedtimes and not drinking alcohol and social death. If you find that a sad story know this, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true story teller who would keep that from you. - Charlie Smith
Posts: 48
Reply #47 on : Sun May 23, 2010, 13:51:59