Steve Shearer April 10, 2009

The final was held in a funereal gloom, a primal southern afternoon that belonged in a Tim Winton story full of hopeless lovers railing against a world conspiring against them. Nothing was happening and an anti-climax was looming. Fanning was falling, Slater was self-destructing and the afternoon was limping to the kind of conclusion TS Eliot came to in the Hollow Men: this is how the World Ends, not with a bang but a whimper.

I'd spoken to the Old Bald Guy earlier, he walked down the beach and then as a hushed whisper came across the scattered crowd, mostly industry hacks and Total Coverage guys but also including a random scattering of moist young buds from Adelaide who were hoping for a sighting, the King started to adopt the most convincing limp. I swear the whole fricken beach turned and watched this limp, slowly increasing in severity until one thought it may end in a kind of high noon, slow exaggerated spiralling fall to the sand, convulsing in a final death rattle before gasping, 'the horror, the horror'.

I'd approached him after his heat win against Michel Bourez, a sort of microcosm of the Slater slow constriction method of heat winning. The early and relentless application of pressure which leads to Slater freesurfing and the other guy in a combo-ed world of shame. The crowd had gathered around, a sort of freeform media and fan scrum on the dune.

I asked him if I could ask him a question. He said, "you just did buddy". His thin slip of a girlfriend was standing patiently beside him, as calm and patient as a Buddha. He hosed down speculation that surfing had taken a quantum leap this year in competition, describing it as "constant evolution". Yeah, but ......Dusty Payne wasn't doing massive finners last year as his opening manouevre, and Jordy wasn't pulling Supermans.

My read on Slater's message to the public: yeah, these kids are here but the game is still the same, and if they want the keys to the kingdom they have to go through me.

Disingenuous.

That is backstory to the Final. Slater was falling. He had surfed four times that day and looked fatigued. He looked like he was mentally coming apart at the seams, like Martinez in the semi. Martinez: what's with the mental brittleness? In the earlier Quarter against Parko he paddled to a running left rip bowl that at times looked like St Leu and launched the highest air of the day. No-one would've touched him in these kinds of waves, Gabriel Medina showed what was possible all day long on it, and yet. And yet, in his Semi against Slater he paddled out and sat impotently on....Nothing. Nowhere. And then glowered and raged in the carpark later.

How do you solve a problem like Martinez?

Back to the Final. Slater caught more shit waves and fell. Then he caught a small, nothing wave and did a small turn, he looked old suddenly, he came at the closeout and launched...a full rotation alley-oop. His feet were off the board, he emerged standing as straight and proud as a Greek Statue in the white water. The Final from then, was effectively over.

We said yesterday that Pro Surfing was a kind of scaffold upon which a higher type of species could reach into new realms. Slater is the strange and tropical triffid, whose tendrils of greatness have grasped the tree of successive generations of challengers for so long and often that, high above it, but supported by it, he can unfold his crown in the open light and display his happiness.

There is nothing more to say. The rabble pack their gear and clear the empty beer bottles. Flies are buzzing around empty pizza boxes. We return to family and friends. Between the emotion and the response falls the shadow.