RealSurf Surfers' Forum

Braithy wrote:

Nick Carroll wrote:I feel like I am allowed to wig out in here every now and then.

It was quite possibly the most articulate, passion-embracing wigout I've read here. As I was scrolling down your post I was half expecting an upside down photo of your cock.

I almost feel guilty for winding you up.

I'm surprised at how much I love surfing and all it contains.

steve shearer wrote:mangled metaphors are my favourite thing about Pro Surfing.

In fact, If I was naming the Tour I would call it the the ASP Mangled Metaphor World Championship Tour.

It was my favourite thing too until Joey and Co started getting into that future present thing: "He'll do a cut and pull up and out of the doggy door."

The ASP: Seeing the Future As it Happens.

godsavethequeen wrote:Pro surfing is boring. But it's boring in the way that Test match cricket is s

Thats it for me... it is what it is. Its not some theme park serving up endless roller coaster rides...

godsavethequeen wrote:Pro surfing is boring. But it's boring in the way that Test match cricket is and as long as the ASP embraces this, everything will fine.

Yeah true, and i enjoy the ASP events, but they also created one day cricket for a reason

steve shearer wrote:mangled metaphors are my favourite thing about Pro Surfing.

In fact, If I was naming the Tour I would call it the the ASP Mangled Metaphor World Championship Tour.

i think you're onto something...the inverse square law of sports commentary.
when was the high point of league? when rex mossop sprayed the microphone with tautology and metahpor more mangled than a train wreck in quebec.

bobjs wrote:

godsavethequeen wrote:Pro surfing is boring. But it's boring in the way that Test match cricket is and as long as the ASP embraces this, everything will fine.

Yeah true, and i enjoy the ASP events, but they also created one day cricket for a reason

Test cricket is a good analogy.

Test cricket isnt boring for me, but particularly when you have great commentators ie the guys on the radio. However its certainly not continually 'exciting' - tense maybe, moments of excitement, but not start to finish. Surfing seems to want to sell itself as (or pretend to be) 20/20 when its test cricket. That said, cricket has 22 players and multiple countries to talk about at any one time, surfing has a much more limited scope within the pro sphere, so the commentators have less to discuss.

Its odd, in a way, that pro surfing is sold as non stop excitement since most surfers accept a session which is say 2 hours long and comprises catching 10 waves or 15 waves; no one expects anything else.

...

Legion, Joe is considered the pride of the fleet. They've built the whole commentary team around him.

Now, as to this passionate argument from Carroll about surfing as Sport: it makes sense to me intellectually but not in any way, shape or form to my lived emotional experience of it. And I suspect for many others the idea of Surfing is Sport is anathema.

For me Surfing is closer to what Walden Pond was for Thoreau: a subject of passionate enquiry, activity, experiment and result conducted over an extended period of time. The joy is in the process; every little part of it. A great ride is icing on the cake. Vocationless vocation, well, apart from semi-pro dabbling in surf writing.
The thought of rules, thirty minute heats, beating someone, being scored : all the normal definition of what constitutes a sport, just leaves me completely cold .

Every year I give a passing thought to joining the local boardriders....but then I think....well what if the surf is shitt that day and the fishing is hall of fame or it's better somewhere else.....and it just stops making any sense to what my sense of surfing and being around the ocean entails. I'm sure it's great fun for those involved.

...

Yeah I suppose with me this is a bit semantic steve

I think there is a big gulf between a sport and a "game" - i.e. a thing you do solely to achieve a competitive outcome

Cricket's a game, so is football, tennis, chess, all the things people have constructed in order to allow competition without people killing each other.

Sport arises from a great old word, "disport" which basically means to be carried away by something, some activity or other that you're doing just for the hell of it.

A lot of things you'd call sport have a competitive element but it's not all there is to the sport, or even the main point of it. Surfing in that context is perhaps like mountain climbing or hunting or Alpine ski-ing or even fishing. It does have a competitive element but you don't have to engage all the way with that side of it, though for many of us it's really helped develop the other sides as well. You make lifelong friends through it, I have quite a few who I might never have met if it wasn't for some competition we both went to once upon a time.

I feel this is the spirit in which surfing developed along the Polynesians and it's carried through all the way to today, however we choose to dress it up really. If it seems today like an old man's thing to fonggs I wonder what he thinks he's doing wandering around the Pacific in his mid 40s, trying to connect up with an important part of himself in the process. The best part of surfing to me is that it connects me up to a sense of freedom and youthful stupidity which is very hard for me to find anywhere else, that and I kinda revel in the skills and feelings. I'm pretty old but in the water I often still feel like a kid.

[quote="Nick Carroll" I'm pretty old but in the water I often still feel like a kid.[/quote]

That's it. Right there.

Nick Carroll wrote:
Sport arises from a great old word, "disport" which basically means to be carried away by something, some activity or other that you're doing just for the hell of it.

I feel this is the spirit in which surfing developed along the Polynesians and it's carried through all the way to today, however we choose to dress it up really. If it seems today like an old man's thing to fonggs I wonder what he thinks he's doing wandering around the Pacific in his mid 40s, trying to connect up with an important part of himself in the process. The best part of surfing to me is that it connects me up to a sense of freedom and youthful stupidity which is very hard for me to find anywhere else, that and I kinda revel in the skills and feelings. I'm pretty old but in the water I often still feel like a kid.

To me, you're describing surfing as more of a spiritual experience, than a sporting one.

It's why i say surfing is much more than a hobby, but it's not a sport. Sport awakens feelings of competitiveness and winning (something?) and advertising and dollars and a hierarchy system which must be obeyed in order to 'achieve' ...

to me surfing is a way of connectedness to the universe. without it, I feel aimless and dull. That's spiritual, not sport, huh?

Braithy wrote:To me, you're describing surfing as more of a spiritual experience, than a sporting one.

It's why i say surfing is much more than a hobby, but it's not a sport. Sport awakens feelings of competitiveness and winning (something?) and advertising and dollars and a hierarchy system which must be obeyed in order to 'achieve' ...

to me surfing is a way of connectedness to the universe. without it, I feel aimless and dull. That's spiritual, not sport, huh?

But you can say the same thing about most individual athletic activities. Running, for example, can be just running, competing against yourself or competing against others. Golf, swimming, cycling , skiing etc etc. None of them require a competition to enjoy, but that doesnt mean they arent sports; it just means that they can be performed without external competition (someone you need to play against). I mean, how many skiiers compete or have ever competed or feel like they are competing, other than against themselves or the mountain, but I doubt many will say that skiing isnt a sport.

Whether or not golf connects you to the universe may be another question. But runners certainly say they get a high.

Whatever it is, it f&ckn works.

Hang gliding is a sport.

so is rock fishing

rockfishing is Freuds deathwish personified: it's a psychological deficit.