What are we to make of the article on surfing in today’s Guardian? Its teaser, on the front page of the G2 supplement, was the rather apocalyptic: “How surfing went mainstream… and lost its soul.” The text, by Patrick Barkham, delved neatly into a huge paradox at the core of modern surfing. How does surfing – with its almost existential emphasis on individualism, freedom and flow – dovetail at all, let alone harmoniously, with the market forces and commercial imperatives of the industry?
The Guardian’s teaser, perhaps penned by a surfing sub-editor who, on the day the page went to press, was more than usually frustrated by desk-bound London life, does not, for me, stand up all that went to scrutiny. We all know that surfing has become more mainstream, and, as Barkham notes, the Watergate Bay Hotel and Extreme Academy in Cornwall is arguably the leading exemplar of this trend. The piece cites sporadic examples of localism in north Cornwall, and is illustrated by a picture of some 40 or so beginners on foamies at Polzeath. Barkham makes serious and valid points about the way in which surfing has metamorphosed from its counter-cultural animus of the sixties and seventies into an altogether different beast.
But has surfing “lost its soul”? Merely because the beaches of Devon and Cornwall are awash with beginners every summer, has surfing in the UK lost its indefinable essence? Barkham alludes to one irony that, in itself, somewhat detracts from the doom-and-gloom teaser: surfers in counties such as Devon and Cornwall need the beginners, the merchandise, the commercialism, simply to survive. But beyond that, the truth is that everyone has to learn. Who among us has the right to decree that surfing has lost its soul, because there are too many beginners or even incoming “weekend warriors” of varying ability trying to ride waves that are somehow the sole preserve of a small band of people?
Localism itself is something I have seen virtually nothing of in Britain and Ireland. If you paddle out into a line-up and behave respectfully, the locals will welcome you. Those who feel that they have a right to puncture the tyres of a visiting surfer, or to abuse him or her in the water, are more than likely embittered and inadequate souls on dry land. Mercifully, though, there are so few instances of localism that I believe most tales of its appearance are apocryphal.
The truth, as I see it, is this: good surfers, local or otherwise, will always find a wave when it’s on. If they bemoan the existence of beginners or any of those less than expert they are guilty either of laziness (why not walk around the point, or along the beach?) or of precisely the kind of hierarchical thinking that has a place in the cut-throat commercial world, but not in surfing. So, has surfing lost its soul? Ask a beginner, who has just ridden upright on a foamie for the first time; ask the intermediate, whose bottom turns are improving with each ride; and ask the hardcore surfers who paddle out in Britain throughout the year, from Cornwall to Scotland, from Wales to the north-east. And then tell me that surfing has lost its soul.
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