The Outsider - Day Seven
Steve Shearer April 06, 2009
The slaves are revolting here at Bells Beach: it's like the Eureka Stockade revisited.
Freddy P - happy little Freddy P - accused the commentators of having Owen Wright's testicles in their mouth. And that was after he won! Why would you do that? I mean Freddy P is practically the Establishment.
Yes, we are now living in a post-Post Surf world, where every little munchkin Pro Surfer has dreams of the kind of verbal freedom reserved for Lenny Bruce or Lewis Samuels. Freddy P's spray was mercifully cut from the heats on demand but he was fined by the ASP for...well, we're not quite sure. He tweeted later he had been fined a K by the ASP and finished with the unbowed challenge: Fuck you ASP. Later he retracted this statement....well, even a grand don't come for free. But what the hell is going on here?
Flores maintains his Gallic Fury towards the judges and fellow competitors saying, 'there are so many fake guys out there that talk so much shit'. But who Jeremy? All we're seeing are these completely unadorned displays of pure honesty, right down to the most intricate graphic detail.
What will be the next Rubgy League-style scandal? Kieren Perrow accosting some old pensioner on the street and giving him a violent shakedown?
The ASP, those old bourgeois slave drivers, have lost control of the slaves. Something, some beast with freedom of expression tattooed on a broad sinewy chest, has arisen from the dusty old archives and nothing and no-one is safe. The "summer of sycophancy" as mainstream journo and gossip peddler Fred Pawle termed it is over. Surfing is in the news again.
Hallelujah!
Drugs, sexual misconduct, racism, corrupt judging, biased commentators, PR spin, the whole complicit game of snakes and ladders has been turned upside down. It's like the Prague Spring in Victoria right now and the freed Pro Surfers are revelling in this new found liberalisation. This is better than the 70's.
But, we have to ask, where does this all end?
Will we see some kind of crackdown by the ASP? A Stasi-style re-education camp somewhere at the back of the jacuzzi where all this heady freedom can be 're-calibrated'. Gangs of mirror-sunglassed Ton-Ton Macoute militiamen dragging away Pros who somehow step out of line. This could go anywhere people. The tour is being held together by the flimsiest of social contracts, at least from this angle.
Anyway...another layday. My home break has been pumping and that is crushing. Andy Irons did an amazing chop-hop to rock-and-roll coping slide. He is loose. And in a good way this time.
It's dawn here in Victoria, I can hear a magpie carolling in the foreground. They must surf today. Surely.....otherwise the slaves will revolt.
The Outsider - Day Six......The Outsider - Day Five
The Outsider - Day Four....The Outsider - Day Three