Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2016 i Tracks

WHERE'S JACK? Just finished reading the Hawaii issue and enjoyed the photos & the stories from the season just past. I had to re-read it after I realised I could not find one mention of young Jack Robinson’s amazing results there. You seem keen to talk up the Brazilians efforts but not any comment on the young Aussie charger’s efforts. KA from WA KA, Jack's efforts were most certainly noticed. The kid is on a tear. That's why we decided to wait and drop a whole feature on him – see pg 38 . - Ed FIRE UP! Good to see Mick taking a well-earned break this year. What he went through lasy year was enough to sideline anyone for 12 months. Lets just hope he can come back…

On the North Shore even the casual observer can review surfing performances like a Bloomberg reporter spits out a stock report. When a friend recently returned from a maiden trip to Hawaii, where he'd watched the Volcom Pro and tuned in to the coconut wireless, he made it loud and clear which surfer had the North Shore under a spell. "Nobody was talking about Slater, nobody was talking about John John, they were all talking about Jack Robbo'," he exclaimed with wide-eyed excitement. On paper it had definitely been an impressive Hawaiian season for the West Australian with the shock of blonde hair and eyes which gleam brightly behind trademark iridescent Oakleys – he'd made the semi-finals at Sunset in The World Cup of Surfing, won the Billabong Pipeline Trials…

What makes a great competitor? The audacity to catch the best waves. What makes the best waves? The biggest waves, but also the waves that stand up, that carry momentum down the beach, allowing for a series of manoeuvres. The best waves are their own spotlight. They command attention. To catch them requires patience and resoluteness. I was overanxious in the water. I'd want to get on something quick, if only to shake off nerves. Do this at the start of a heat and you can throw your entire rhythm off. The ocean knows that you will take its scraps and delivers accordingly. This did not serve me well in competition. But I felt good on a wave. At 6'1" and 165 lbs., I was one of the bigger surfers…

The First Flirtation with a Twin I first rode twin fins back in the early to mid 70s when Geoff McCoy was actually making them. In those days Mark Warren and Grant Oliver and Col Smith and Tony Hardwick all rode them – pretty much all the great Aussie surfers and Narrabeen surfers were all riding them. They were the real wide, rounded square-tail ones – quite stubby with an s-deck – and a little fin on each corner. They went great when it was small but when the surf was bigger they didn’t go very good at all. The design development with those boards at some point just stopped. Reno at the Coke Contest in '77 I was competing in events riding a 6’8” single fin that was somewhere…

As a teenager still in high school in 1970 I made the Queensland State Surfing Team by placing second behind Andrew McKinnon in front of M . That got me in the Aussie Titles on my home beach, Greenmount Point, where I managed to get in a final with the likes of Wayne Lynch and Ian Cairns and finished a respectable seventh overall. From that point on I realised that I was pretty good at surfing and my mindset became. 'How am I going to make a living/ career out of doing this?' Nat and Midget had surf columns in the Sydney papers so I figured that was a start in being professional so I got a column in the local Tweed Daily News, "In The Tube", plus I had…

Kelly Slater hit pro surfing in time to experience the endings of kings from a far more brutal time. Kings they were, no quarter asked, none given. And how Slater noticed, for this was no pleasant way to enmesh oneself in a long preordained career. Beyond the ferocity of Martin Potter in 1989 and the comeback of Tom Curren in 1990 lay a vacuum, enough to stir the beginnings of a 25-year dynasty. His moniker was friendly stealth. Not many peers were aware of it let alone realised how far they'd fallen behind his curve. Slater etiquette became the ASP Tour's default mannerism. Friendly bouts … but with one certain pro holding slender constant advantage. Slotting between more last forays from Damien Hardman and Derek Ho, both of whom poetically…

“IT'S BETTER THAN SNAPPER,” HE SAID DRIFTING OFF. “BETTER THAN… ANYTHING!” As an irresistible distillation of what professional surfing can be, it is hard to go past the Rip Curl Search event at "La Jolla", in Mexico, in 2006. It didn't have the Peahi cartoon surfer factor, or the Teahupoo 'get spat out of a crystal mountain or die' factor, but it had something the heavyweights don't: perfection that pretty much any surfer who can stand up salivated over. You mind surfed those flawless, 6-8 foot sand point barrels until your head hurt, and your heart ached. The event ran in record time too, the first WCT contest to finish in the minimum required four days. "It was the easiest contest to direct, ever," enthused contest director and Rip Curl…

Surfing has certainly changed in the last forty years. It has become a mainstream sport, rather than a pastime or a passion framed by a counter-culture movement. Surfing has been sanitised, packaged and sold to the masses, and this is no more evident than in WSL webcasts cut with Jeep commercials and Samsung Galaxy smart-phone ads. It’s a brave new world we find ourselves in, and all this looking back makes me wonder what could be in store for us in years to come. Since it’s publication in 1931, Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World has come to serve as a blueprint upon which to compare any dystopian imaginings of a technologically misguided future. I’m wondering what surfing’s version of Huxley’s World State would look like? A population of surfing…

FROM THE VAULT - CAPTAIN & CREATOR Tony Edwards shares a moment with his creation - The Pig Of Steel aka Captain Goodvibes. FOLLOW. @worldsurflols photoshop + surfing = lols LISTEN - TALKING HEADS If ya Dad hasn't blasted this at home or showed you Talking Heads yet, then you've been born into the wrong house. Speaking in Tongues was their 5th studio album, released in 1983 way back when Tommy Carroll won his World Title and burnt down the bloody house with a Gath on. Get grooving! BEHIND PAGE ONE - DOM MOSQUEIRA. "This was definitely the wave of the day, and Jack had been hunting for it. There had been some solid sets throughout the day, but this wave had that mutant quality to it. This one popped…

As a child in the early 1960s I remember there were very few names which were held in such high regard in Australia as its great sports men and women. I was unashamedly proud that my father knew three of them. Ben Cropp, Tony Madigan and Mike Hickey. Ben was a champion spear fisherman and television documentary maker. Tony had won Gold in both the 1958 and ’62 Commonwealth Games and also boxed in the 1952, ’56 and ’60 Olympic games; coming 5th, 5th and 3rd respectively, as well as fighting Cassius Clay at the 1960 Olympics in a much disputed semi final, which was won by the soon to be famous Muhammad Ali. Mike was a legendary big wave rider. Mike Hickey was born in 1937 of Australian parents…

By the time the first official International Professional Surfers world tour was announced mid-way through 1976, my editorship of this magazine had reached something of a crossroads. After nearly two years of ridiculing most aspects of organised competitive surfing, from the authoritarian Australian Surfriders Association's state and national titles to the pit-stops on the so-called "gypsy tour" to poor old Stan Couper at Bells, it suddenly looked like the concept of professional surfing might be gaining some traction, and with it some serious commercial interest from people who might become advertisers. Mind you, it was pretty small beer that first year, kind of like the gypsy tour with a new name. The Australian leg had been mostly notable for the emergence of Mark Richards as the heir apparent to Michael…

The golden years. Just look at the highlight reel. Kelly's endless comeback. The dominance of AI. Mick's super-human triumphs. Manifest destiny fulfilled for Parko. The arrival of a new gen, the longevity of an old one. Aerial surfing. Teahupoo. Fiji. The reigns of Layne, Steph and Carissa. A Brazilian ascendancy. But drill down into the past 15 years of exhilarating performances, knife-edge drama, and breath-stealing waves and the meta story of the age wasn't actually about surfing. It was about the transformation and survival of the world tour itself. Forty years after it was cobbled together pro surfing has never been so vibrant, moneyed and successful but somehow it continues to teeter like a house of cards. The ASP World Tour limped lung-shot into the 21st century. Wounded by lacklustre…

Pro surfing is far from perfect but when it's good it’s very close to it. There’s action and drama and upsets and swearing that’s just the guys setting up the scaffolding. When an event runs in good waves – be it at Snapper Rocks, Trestles, Cloudbreak or any other tour stop for that matter – you will be gawking at the best surfing you’ve seen in your life. Guaranteed. Even at a one star qualifying event in mediocre conditions the standard is phenomenally high. Watch and learn. You will be amazed and inspired and humbled. Good surfing in good waves is reason enough to attend but by itself it’s a cake without baking powder. Delicious sure, but a big gloopy mess to try and shove in your face. The structure…

A couple of weeks before the first Stubbies Classic began I flew to Queensland to interview the contest director, Peter Drouyn, about the new rules he’d devised. To keep me amused on the hour-long flight I had a folder full of material – clippings, articles, letters, interviews – by and about Peter Drouyn. I was firmly convinced that the Stubbies would be the surfing event of the year – if for no other reason than that Peter Drouyn was running it – and I wanted our buildup to it to be lengthy and entertaining. I opened the folder and started reading Peter’s letter to the invited surfers, sent out months before in an elaborate booklet: Dear Pro Surfer, Congratulations. You have been selected in the 1977 Stubbies Open Surf Classic,…