A short and fairly meaningless piece of criticism........

[oldman]

In the context of magazines generally, I'm pretty sure that they are all declining rather rapidly. Women's day, women's weekly etc, although still viable are looking down the gun barrel long term. Even newspapers glory days are long behind them.

There is a certain old-fashioned quality to them that seems a bit quaint these days.

Does 'quaint' sell?

First person to write 'niche market' loses the argument.

[Clif]

As far as I know enthusiast magazine circulation hasn't dropped off too bad in some titles, actually. Depends how established they are I assume.

[Nappy]

To much thinking going on in here, how about just smoking a joint and not worring about it.

[mustkillmulloway]

souths needd another halfback


just backin u up nappy

[oldman]

As far as I know enthusiast magazine circulation hasn't dropped off too bad in some titles, actually. Depends how established they are I assume.

Kurungabaa rocks, Clif!

They are a much better side and play much better football than last year or any year under whats his name, old piss in a cup Taylor.

Totally. They were directionless with Taylor.

I reckon Langy is doing alright, and I expect Souths will be there for the finals and may even give top four a shake.

Have to learn how to win the close ones though, or at least not throw them away.

[oldman]

I suspect that Gould has got it too good with his current gigs to go back to coaching.

On the telecasts he often says something like 'who'd be a coach these days' after someone has just dropped the ball or thrown a stupid pass.

I wonder if he is still asking himself that question though. He probably would like to, deep down, and rubbing up with Russ and assorted hollywood types occasionally could feed that huge ego.

[Lucky Al]

this is a pretty interesting article by reggae elliss about editing and publishing surfing world over the past decade. the title is 'for the love': http://coastalwatch.com/news/article.as ... &display=0

fong will love this bit:

In early 2002 Tim [Baker] and I had a number of email exchanges about the magazine's future, which was precarious, and Tim sent through his rescue plan for Surfing World to the four partners. It was basically a call to arms, to relaunch the mag in a new format, drop the crap and unapologetically aim it at keen, hardcore surfers. The closing words of Tim's email said it all:

"To be successful in anything, you have to fundamentally believe in what you are doing."

[Lucky Al]

what is the meaning for rugby league fans of the south sydney rabbitohs, by the way?

[Clif]

oh no. I don't believe in anything ... FAIL

[Lucky Al]

would you like some cookies clif?

[Nick Carroll]

oh come on al what good would that do.

clif would become bewildered -- the cookies would ruin his ability to deal with Life as a university lecturer

then you would have him as well as oldman on your conscience. think, man!

[oldman]

I can't blame Lucky Al for my condition NC.

My demise is all my own doing.

[lessormore]

Gus played for Souths in 1986

[Yuke Hunt]

A short and fairly meaningless piece of criticism ...

Lang is a coach ...

Taylor was a minibus

[oldman]

Souths are the glorious past of Rugby League and the bright future. Basically every thing a team like Manly isn't.

Funny you should say that, because I was just thinking how Souths in the early 70's were the forerunner of the model Manly took up later.

Souths took players from everywhere to put together their famous teams in that era, and basically had more than half the Australian team including just about the entire Australian pack. O'Neill, Sattler, Walters, Coote, Bobby McCarthy. The pack alone would break today's salary cap.

I remember, through a child's eyes, going to a semi-final game Souths against Saints. It was back in the days when Saints were woefully short of forward size, at one stage Barry Beath was our biggest forward, weighing in at around 14 stone, which is equivalent to or smaller than most of the game's current five-eightths.

Sattler's legs were bigger than our forward pack.

[Davros]

Send them both to the Central Coast

[Davros]

Bunnies have great support

http://users.tpg.com.au/msivis/ssrccsc/ ... _index.htm

[Beanpole]

A rather cynical essay from late 07.

MODERN TIMES
How the surf culture is changing faster than you think. And how it may be heading for a fall … of a kind. By Nick Carroll.


We all know surfing’s wonderful … the best thing you can do on the planet’s surface and very possibly beyond … but I gotta say, lately, I’ve begun to wonder if it’s just gone weird on us.

These modern times in which we find ourselves! Think of it! Imagine you’d slept through the first few years of the century. Waking today, you’d find over a thousand surf schools at work around the globe, churning out hundreds of thousands of graduates every year, from San Clemente to the Canary Islands. Half a million – in other words, almost half – of the world’s annual supply of surfboards are being made in Thailand, Taiwan, and mainland China, and the old standard surfboard is now referred to almost offhand as “PU”. Laws have been passed and people prosecuted in several nations over violent actions at surf spots. Mainstream movies and TV shows based on surfing are almost ho-hum, large branded surf shops can be found in Manhattan and Paris, and with a few clicks and an appropriate credit card, you can book a week at Lance’s Right, Mentawais, Sumatra, in air conditioned luxury.

If you’d tried that before you’d gone to sleep back in, say, 1999, you’d have ended up with malaria.

Amazing!

But there’s another face to these shiny surfing times, one I crashed into on a recent visit to Australia’s original home of surf culture, Bondi Beach. Bondi’s kind of a Huntington gig – a semi-legendary urban beachbreak zone – and I hadn’t been there in years…but what I saw was like a scene out of a surfing morality play. Once a classic, filthy haunt of some of Australia’s best surfers, where old school heroes like Cheyne Horan, Richard Cram and Joe Engel ruined everything in sight and the local boardrider’s club was called In The Nude, Bondi is now a backpacker DMZ, littered with endless surf shop board racks full of popped-out “funboards” and Rent-A-Slugs being grafted off the owners by cheeseclothed dreadlocked wannabes from Holland. Surf schools run 24/7, churning out streams of eager beginners who leave the schools only to run each other over first time out, or almost instantly be sucked out in a rip and rescued by the long suffering lifeguard crew.

Meanwhile, up the street a ways, at a “retro” surfboard store, yuppie half-men pay $800 for reconditioned ‘70s single fins so as to hang ‘em in their apartments and convince themselves they’re Core.

Who isn’t a surfer these days, one asks? And along with it, you gotta ask the opposite: WHO IS? Has surfing finally done what the old hippies used to warn us it’d do, and died a whimpering death from Overpopularity?


A couple weeks ago, a guy called Mark e-mailed me. Mark is a 41-year-old British immigrant, newly arrived in Australia with wife and two pre-teen kids, and just moved into a house on the northern beaches of Sydney, not far from mine. “We’re taking up surfing as a family,” he informed me, “and I’d like you to write a really good guide to all the local beaches – just for people like us. Tell us all about the best surf spots, which ones are best to surf at what times of year.... Ideally this information would be available on the Internet, but I can only find this” (attached was a wannasurf.com map of the northern beaches, featuring a bunch of mis-named local spots). “I think you seem like the right person to write this.”

I thought hard for a while about Mark’s request, and eventually decided to take it seriously. Drawing down on all I’d learned about these beaches in half a lifetime’s surfing, I wrote him back. I explained the local swells, winds and tides, and how knowledge about surf conditions is best gained through long-term personal observation. How one of the great joys of surfing is how it gives you permission just to stand there and gaze at the ocean for hours, trying to figure out every mood of a spot. That there were spots just right for learning, and other spots I’d suggest he and his family avoid, unless they wanted to drown or be savagely ridiculed by packs of 20-year-old crazies, and that it would be largely up to him to navigate between the two. That the beaches he’d decided to live on have a century-long surfing history, how that history has built up through generations of great surfers both famous and unknown, and how it exists on every good day of surf right there in the lineups of these beaches, where you can see skills and behaviour patterns developed over all those 100 years...

In short, that this was not something to rush, but to take time with and deal with on its own terms....

…and he e’ed back saying in effect, thanks for my time, but he still wanted it all via instant access on a website somewhere.


I kind of enjoyed the exchange, because it’s a reminder of how swiftly the surfing “culture” is changing. A culture once governed from the top through superstition, tribalism, localism, and awe of the ocean and the magical godlike powers of the best surfers and boardmakers, is shifting to a culture governed from the beginner to intermediate layers, through the democratic yet somewhat unmagical power of Money.

This phenomenon has a fantastic name, and I damn well wish I’d coined it, but the glory belongs to Dave Parmenter, who stuck a pin clean through it in a recent Surfer’s Journal article on the rise of epoxy molded surfboards. He called it the “Kookocracy”.

The Kookocracy is a direct result of the explosion in surfing numbers in the past decade, the Beginner Boom, and how it’s redefined the culture and business of surfing – re-made it, in fact, to fit the needs of this entirely new type of surfer.

Being part of this Beginner Boom meant starting a surfing life in a way never before experienced by any generation of surfers. Most of all, through the surf schools, it meant a soft introduction, an easy way through the first excruciating paddle-out that’d have baffled surfers of other times – surfers of the 1970s perhaps, or the early ‘90s, whose surfing began in ignorance, excitement and wide-eyed terror, immersed in a quasi-magical world of watery glory and torment.

No! Beginner Boomers approached it with something else, something bred into them by years of living in the world’s most privileged societies: a sense of entitlement. Savvy, alive to their own needs, they wanted better value from this thing they’d taken on, just as they expected better value from their computers, or their 401k plans. Hell, they’d paid money to learn this thing! Boards that dented? Locals-only mythology? No, they wanted surfing to behave, to look, as they’d begun to imagine it: cool, slick, kinda hippie, retro-ironic, soulful, yet most of all accessible … as accessible as everything else in their unimaginably privileged lives.

Thus, in the past decade, has formed a great divergence in the surf community, a divergence we all feel to some extent – a kind of fault line, between the old school surfer and his big ideas about Respect, Local Power, Hand Shaped Boards from the Guy Down the Street, and Climbing the Ladder at your Local Spot, and pretty much everyone else. And so far, there’s no doubt who’s been calling the tune. After all, what we call surfing culture these days is largely about business…and the Beginner Boomers are the best business in the sport. They’ve driven the rise of SurfTech, surf coaching, surf resort travel, widescreen surf documentaries, surf websites, surf-imaged SUVs, Retro surf art, surf collector’s items, super-glossy photo books, ‘70s Renaissance board designs, and waterproof iPod cases. Multi-multi-millions of dollars are being spent right now on developing stuff designed to satisfy their tastes and needs.

The opinions and choices of a Mark now matter as much or more than those of, say, me. Probably more; after all, with my three-plus decades of surfing, my boardmaker buddies, and my occasional buff-job pack of trunks, I’m hardly a gold-mine target market. I’ll spend way more time in the water, but any day of the surfing week, Mark’s gonna spend more money than me.

And so the world is turned. As Parmenter might say, the Kookocracy reigns.


Meanwhile the surf industry machine has rolled along through a huge era of prosperity, at least partly on the Beginner Boomer’s bank ....

Yet the apparent prosperity of modern surfing conceals something very interesting: There’s a bigger gulf today than ever before between the imagery of surfing, the way it APPEARS – the multi-million-dollar pro scene, the big wave hellmen, the flawless tropical pits – and the average surfer’s experience, the way surfing actually IS.

The pro scene is just one example. About the only consistent thing in the past decade is the fact that Kelly Slater is still world champion. To a recent Beginner, it might even feel as if Kelly’s a longtime friend ... a familiar, fixed point in a changing world. Yet even that belies the gap between the Boomers and the pros. You go to a big WCT event these days and the surfers are like racehorses on glue – twitchy, high-strung, rearing at the slightest disturbance; they’re almost not human. This is largely because of the increased pressure on them to respond to an audience – one that, despite all the webcasting commentary, still largely has no clue what the pros are up to. A top professional surfer exists at a level of skill so fine-tuned it allows him to ride Bells Beach one week and Teahupo’o the next, and score 10s at both. He burns through dozens of boards a month, snapping some and discarding most, and cosseting the remainder like they were gold – which they might as well be, given the prizemoney potential lurking in their super-stylized curves. He signs autographs by the hundreds, and shields himself behind managers, homeboy bros, girlfriends and business class air tickets. Surfing earns him millions more than his parents ever made, and it’s changed him utterly.

This stuff is as alien to the Boomer as redwood is to Styrofoam. It’s surfing, Jim, but not as we know it.

The same goes for the big wave thing, and the surf travel dream. Charging Maverick’s? Tropical reef barrels? They look good, but in every other way, they might as well be on the moon. Go to Lance’s Rights! Catch a set wave off the bombie! Give our regards to the reef.



But guess what? There’s something else happening here. The Beginner Boom is running down. The explosive worldwide growth of surf schools has stalled; there’s been no significant change in school numbers since Surfing magazine’s last survey of the phenomena, back in 2003. While surfboard sales patterns have altered dramatically in the period, there’s no evidence to suggest an increase in overall sales – indeed, in the big surf nations, numbers may well have dropped back.

And surfing? Well, underneath the pretenses of the surf schools and the marketeers, underneath its generic wonderfulness, it’s still really the same deal it’s always been. It’s still almost impossibly hard to do well, or to gain any real skill whatsoever. It still brings you into contact with rocks, buries you under lines of white water, and snaps your board, epoxy or not. It’s still full of guys who’ll humiliate you without even saying a word, just by the way they paddle past after your last wipeout. Unlike almost everything else in the Boomer’s world, it’s not something you can do lightly and get away with for long.

You know what I reckon will happen in the next five years? In the face of crowds, in the face of flat spells and cold water and sheer difficulty, in the face of that gulf between how surfing APPEARS and how it really truly IS, a lot of Boom-era surfers are gonna crystallize something in their heads – that the things they first thought about surfing just aren’t true. And a lot of ‘em are going to quit.


The time of the Great Quitting! It’s not such a radical idea.

It’s happened before, like everything. There’s some odd parallels between today’s festival of kookery and the last great Beginner Boom, in the early ‘60s. Back then the Boom was triggered by a flood of extracultural flipsiness – Gidget, Beach Boys, etc – and the sudden availability of easy to handle, easy to ride surfboards. It was followed in the late 1960s by a wave of mass quitting. By the early 1970s, the surfboard market had all but collapsed, Gidget had gone to Rome, the Beach Boys were totally spun, and there were less active surfers than there’d been a decade earlier.

Then there was the surf business Boom of the late 1980s, when surfing went blowdried neon. In 1991, surfing was suddenly not cool at all, and it was like a door slammed on the surf industry’s fingers. If you didn’t really believe in the sport, you walked away … or were pushed.

The thing to pay attention to in each case is what occurred next. The Quitting of the late ‘60s was followed by perhaps the most spectacular creative period in surfing since its Duke-led resurrection. In the ‘70s, Pipeline was mastered, the shortboard revolution was completed, the surf industry grew its roots, a true world championship was founded, and surfing genius arose on coasts from Durban to Ala Moana. And the ’91 crash landing was followed by everything we now think of as surfing’s modern golden era: Kelly and the New School, airshows, Laird’s tow-surfing experiments, the unveiling of Maverick’s, the widescreen surf movies, the surf school explosion, and eventually, the Beginner Boom itself…the very thing I suspect we’re about to see begin to crumble.

Surfing never dies from Overpopularity. It just sheds a skin or two and renews itself. Today, right now, it’s getting ready to shed another. The Boom will pass, a new wave will arise from the heart of the sport, and whatever we thought was cool or necessary will be overthrown.


What will take its place? If I could answer that, I’d really be clairvoyant. Maybe that answer can be found in unexpected places – in the sudden growth of surfing skill among grommet girls worldwide, for example. Maybe surfing will renew itself from the perimeters, from the new surf cultures now a couple of generations advanced, in places like France, Spain, Réunion Island, Bali, Japan … places where history doesn’t hang too heavily, and styles aren’t too fixed. Where kids can relax and invent.

More poignantly, I suspect we’ll also see the departure of quite a few old-schoolers, surfers who’ve found the changes initiated by the Boom – the arrival of mass produced surfboards, the outlandish crowding of classic waves, the boost to surf tourism, the legal challenges to localism, and the Beginner’s sense of entitlement that’s such a general feature of the Kookocracy – simply too much to cope with. So many of these changes have disrupted, denigrated or outright disproved the great myths upon which old school surfing rested. “No respect!” they’ll sigh, and walk off into the sunset, feeling the sport drained of its meaning.

I think this will be a shame, because they’ll have missed a chance to teach a lot. Not every Beginner’s lesson has to come from a surf school, or from a tough guy local’s fist.

And…what of my British buddy, Mark? The guy who wanted to be an Instant Local? Man! I feel like he’s throwing himself to the wolves! I have this awful image of him taking his family out to my local hardcore spot, and the boys going all Deliverance on his ass...

But then again...maybe not. Maybe he’ll get himself into a group of like minded people: Beginners, with plenty of money, and a healthy sense of adult entitlement. They’ll all get together to surf once a week at one of the safer and shittier beachbreaks around here. They’ll buy Retro Fish boards for the wall, and Morning of the Earth T-shirts, and Surfer’s Journal photo books, and pretend to a knowledge and crustiness they’ll never attain and have no real idea exists...

And it won’t make a darn bit of difference! As far as anyone will know, they’ll be as Core as they come.

Here we go.
Last bit sounds like he is clairvoyant. He knew Loofs was coming.