Where did you surf today ?

[Davros]

Unfulfilled fathers living vicariously through their children. Yuk.

[Drailed]

One of my neighbours is always fcckn coaching his kid,,, in the surf whistling at him and screaming him onto waves, even at a backyard bbq pool party shouting directions on how to swim competitively. What a fccckn nob. He just looks so dumb.. what a basic human being. He would never appreciate the complexities of a deep Shiraz I can guarantee that.

[Davros]

I 'ate cntz like that. Especially the wine bit.

[buddy]

The most memorable wins in my junior tennis career were all against the kids of pushy parents. In hindsight, I now feel for the kids.

[Drailed]

The kid just wants to enjoy himself and he has his dumb mongy 1 dimensional dad shouting and whistling at him all surf.

[crabmeat thompson]

I'm always gobsmacked when surfers come on to the CT, the championship Tour, so obviously undercooked and ill-prepared.
What do they think will happen? The tour will slow down or stop while they figure out their chops?

There's no excuse. The CT has had a moreorless static location roster for years. You need more than basic skills , you need elite skills and expert mental representations at every location or gtfo and stop wasting everyones time.

I don't think Ewing is getting accurate feedback either via self reflection or from his support team about his performances, in the way that say Leo Fioravanti is getting from Steven Bell. Therefore he isn't making the necessary improvements.

To me he still looks like a boy competing against men. Case in point. When he surfed against Fanning in clean 3-4ft Winkipop. Fanning just crushed him under heel like a bug. Judges want man turns. Ewing looked physically incapable of that.
He couldn't figure the lineup out at Cloudbreak and provided zero resistance against a highly vulnerable Kelly Slater.

Surfing like a boy can win heats and win comps......as Toledo showed against Julian Wilson at Snapper.....but you need to be prepared to throw all conservatism and all caution to the wind. You need to be boosting, flaring, making people's jaws drop. Ewing is surfing like a QS warrior who got lucky.

I'm sure he's a lovely kid and all but this is supposed to be an elite sport....he needs to get his shitt together or he'll be fetching cartons of xxxx-gold for fishermen at the Point Lookout bottle-o.

see, to me ... it's just further evidence there are not 34 surfers in the world worth watching. the tour is too big.

the best 18 surfers, 17 + 1 wildcard per event, please.

one non elimination round, the first round. Where surfers are seeded 1 to 18 based on their heat scores. from that point, it's game on bitches. lose and you go home.

[Davros]

It's always the fathers who didn't have ability and secretly worshipped the guys who played top grade, where the naturally best surfers etc...

[buddy]

see, to me ... it's just further evidence there are not 34 surfers in the world worth watching. the tour is too big.

the best 18 surfers, 17 + 1 wildcard per event, please.

one non elimination round, the first round. Where surfers are seeded 1 to 18 based on their heat scores. from that point, it's game on bitches. lose and you go home.

Wouldn't be bad. Could get Rd 1 over in 3.5 hours.
Too many times Rd 1 spread over multiple days.

[Nick Carroll]

Yeah I think you could cut away or inflate the tour numbers and you'd still end up with the same percentages of triple A, really fcuken good, dangerous on their day, lucky to make a quarter, and dragging the chain type surfers.

Some years are a bit better than others, some a bit worse re those percentages. But the only way to get all-killer-no-filler events is to have some kind of elite grand slam within the overall CT. Like three events with the top eight. One day each, at epic waves.

To get to that you'd still need the overall CT though.

btw 18 surfers is a shit number. 16 is eight one-on-one heats eliminating down to a final. 18 is, what, six three man heats? Three man heats are dreadful.

It'd be cool to force some systemic change on the tour right now though, there's too many dull heats because everyone's got the program down. Former change would make them think, it'd really fcuk some people up.

[Nick Carroll]

Oh! a way to make three man heats good: eliminate two of the three. My God that would cause some ructions.

[steve shearer]

I think Nick holds the CT and the surfers on it in a lot higher regard than I do.......I always come away surprised at the level of mediocrity at every level that they are prepared to tolerate.

Some of the post heat pressers I hear from surfers who have presented very sub-standard performances are almost breath-taking in their lack of awareness of what constitutes an acceptable performance in professional sport and why that matters. They are just in some kind of lala land......

As a scum of the earth surf writer I lay awake at night thinking about how to do it better....when Carroll spams my comments thread claiming Doherty out-wrote me it puts me in a homicidal rage.
There has to be something at stake, some passion involved, some pride in your own performance for any kind of sport/entertainment to make sense....to make it worth someone's while to tune in, or read what you have to say. Otherwise you are just wasting people's precious time.

[Davros]

Lol. *Funniest thing I've read in ages re: NC sending you homicidal over Sean Dougherty.


* bar the endorsement of Ben Hunt into O3, of course.

[tootr]

Dont bite the hand that feeds you they say

[crabmeat thompson]

I think Nick holds the CT and the surfers on it in a lot higher regard than I do.......I always come away surprised at the level of mediocrity at every level that they are prepared to tolerate.

Some of the post heat pressers I hear from surfers who have presented very sub-standard performances are almost breath-taking in their lack of awareness of what constitutes an acceptable performance in professional sport and why that matters. They are just in some kind of lala land......

As a scum of the earth surf writer I lay awake at night thinking about how to do it better....when Carroll spams my comments thread claiming Doherty out-wrote me it puts me in a homicidal rage.
There has to be something at stake, some passion involved, some pride in your own performance for any kind of sport/entertainment to make sense....to make it worth someone's while to tune in, or read what you have to say. Otherwise you are just wasting people's precious time.

I feel you brother!

[Nick Carroll]

Dont bite the hand that feeds you they say

ha ha I would just love to know how many Realsurfers go around regularly biting their employers' hands, just to, you know, show everyone how much they care

but shearer's right - an angry, or jubilant, or despairing, or fcuken ANYTHING pro surfer is better than a Bernard Tomic mode pro surfer. It's not like passion is gonna endanger the fcuken sport is it.

Thing is, you will not see much of the passion on the broadcast ... and so shearer (and this following phrase should be delivered in a South African accent) I'll give you this advice for free!

Don't lie awake at night worrying about how to write better contest reports. Just go to the god damn contest. You will definitely write better from the gutter at one of these fcuking frankly bizarro world CTs -- with their strange air of artificiality shoving up against the fibrous reality of wins and losses, people trying and failing, or maybe succeeding then posing for the Show, before wandering off swearing under their breaths at their coaches -- then you'll ever manage off the screen. Besides, you can go surfing with all these cnuts and watch them wigging out in warmup sessions. Rielly can afford it, don't let him tell you otherwise.

[steve shearer]

unless you know something I don't, that's not the reality I am being presented with.

[Nick Carroll]

god damn it don't make us all crowd fund this again. I don't have any money left.

[ctd]

Was watching a video the other day of the first Duke Kahanamoku 'comp' (1965). It was a bit hard to tell but looked like they put the surfers into 3 groups of about 8-10 for an hour or so, and scored the 5 highest waves

So instead of this two man tactical match racing stuff, lets go full on fleet racing - have 4 heats of 8, each heat for an hour or so and score multiple waves (judges can decide on the number of waves depending on conditions - might be 2, might be 5). Top 2 or 3 go through, thats day 1. Ebbs and flows like a test match. Have two surfers team up and block a third... priority might be an issue I guess. But turns the comp into the same as normal surfing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uv0TaMskT3Q

It's always the fathers who didn't have ability and secretly worshipped the guys who played top grade, where the naturally best surfers etc...

I used a secret trick - I had a son who has absolutely no interest in any sports. Well, 'e sports' I guess, he keeps trying to argue are sports.