By Julio Adler:

(During the Rio Pro laydays Julio has been providing a diversion for Swellnet readers, retracing Brazil's short but colourful surfing history. This is part two of a potential four part series - it depends when the contest resumes.)

If you like analogies like I do then you might relate to this: Rio de Janeiro is playing a similar roll in professional surfing now as Zaire and Philippines were for pro boxing in the 70's. Take the world champ to Zaire to fight Foreman and you have the best fight ever, watched by passionate people hooting and booing - what an audience!

Audience equals market. Sure, it's in shitty waves, but hey, it's an emerging country!

I love this quote on the back cover of 'The Hardest Game' by Hugh McIlvanney:

"The morning's work in the Philippines had drained him as none of his previous fifty fights – not even his two defeats, the first epic with Frazier and the night Ken Norton broke his jaw – had drained him. No champion in history has ever had access to a greater storeroom of physical and spiritual reserves, but Frazier seemed to have emptied it, to have forced Ali to lift the floorboards and scrape the very foundations of his nature for the last traces of strength..."

"On the way back to the dressing room, his face had the greyness of terminal exhaustion and he moved as if the marrow of his bones had been replaced by mercury."

Epic contests. Surfing can still have them, even if just small moments between Slater and Parko.

Andy and Kelly were more a Joe Frazier and Ali thing, Andy in the perfect roll of Frazier: strong, insinuating, combative, proud. "I think God's gonna slap the hell out of him one of these days," Frazier said of Ali's antics. Just like Andy talking about tearing Slater's picture.

Now, Andy's gone and we've got Slater vs Parko. It's similar to Ali vs Foreman. Maybe. Time will if they form a great rivalry. And in the Brazilian corner Adriano might just be Ken Norton, the one who broke Ali's jaw.

My father used to love boxing, the noble art. We had boxing fights nights here in the 70's and the 80's. Ali, Sugar Ray, Duran, Tyson. Eder Jofre from Sao Paulo was bantamweight world champ twice; a great boxer, 50 knock outs in 72 fights.

Boxing, the noble art, and Brazil, an emerging nation. A good match. Yet another important aspect of our young, emerging nation was the role of television. TV played a big part in our lives.

In 1983 a Rio de Janeiro TV show premiered that would change the face of Brazilian surfing forever. It was called Realce.

You might wonder why this is even relevant for a foreign audience?

After Realce, created by Antonio Ricardo and Ricardo Bocão, surfing went national. Every fucking Saturday afternoon, national TV, everybody could tune in and drop out.

We were in the primitive era of magazines receiving them just once every two months. Suddenly those two surfers brought us the world of surfing, ASP included, to our homes, weekly!

It was the first board riding shit on TV around the world: skate, windsurfing, surfing, handgliding, skim board, bodyboard...anything!

Don't mind the exclamation marks, it's just how it was.

We could watch Curren in his amazing comeback in 1990, dressed in black leather jacket, jeans, Aviator Ray Ban shades, after beating Bainy in the semis at Santa Cruz. It was the first event of the year and Curren told Bocão that he, "Wouldn't reject the possibilities of going for a world title."

Realce aired the European leg, Aussie leg, Hawaiian leg, South African leg, every year. I must repeat, every year. It was a revolution for Brazilian Surfing, and it was chaos.

You see, competition surfing was on the rise. If you surfed in Brazil, you'd compete, no matter what.

Then came Fabio Gouveia, the first Brazilian to make the tour, and surfing was never the same here. Steven Allain, editor of Hardcore Magazine in Brazil remembers:

"Realce was the only show I watched as a grommet, as it was the only surf show on TV. Bocão and Antonio Ricardo were trailblazers in that sense, traveling the world and bringing home images of far away contests, surf trips and interviews with great surfing legends. Realce had an almost cult following because it was the first and only show on open TV dedicated to surfers. It was the only way we could see and relate to the surfing world. It was so 80's that it couldn't be wrong."

Sometimes, Realce would show a contest only a week after it'd finished, when you readers in Australia or your buddies in California would never have had a chance to even watch it, you'll be satisfied to see a picture in the magazine and the results - a month or two after.

So what? You might ask. Well, we watch it and learn, like Gouveia learned style from Curren, some of us learned from Dave Macaulay, Glen Winton, Rob Bain, Bryce Ellis. Sometimes we learned maneuvers over style, so you can blame those guys for arms flying all over the place in Brazil!

For thirteen years, Bocão and Antonio, under different TV show names - Realce, Ombak, Rip, Extra - now they have their own channel, Woohoo, with 7.6 millions subscribers and they follow the ASP world tour.

Nobody has a more complete archive of competition surfing history, not the ASP, not Dynacom (who?), not Chilly Video.

The result is that here in Brazil you have a lot of 30- and 40-something year olds with an uncommon knowledge of surfing because of that. Those guys do not fool around in the Stab or Waves (biggest website in Brazil) forums, theyd rather read Rabbit or MP's book, even though the last one it wasn't the brightest piece of writing coming out of Oz.

So when Nick Carroll writes, "These still-emerging surf nations have learned a lot from us through the years," he means it. He knows.

Because that is how we do it. And we learn fast.

Julio Adler is a native of Rio de Janeiro. He travelled as a professional surfer during the late-80s and early-90s and got completely involved with the pro surfing hustle, questioning judges and journalists and wondering what the fuck they were all doing. Around this time Julio began writing for surfing magazines and is now a regular columnist for Surf Portugal and Hardcore in Brazil. He's never had an English lesson in his life and can thank surfing magazines and Neil Young songs for his grasp of the Queen's tongue.