Just when it looked like it might get interesting, the season-opening Billabong Pipeline Masters was suspended last weekend due to a Covid-19 outbreak amongst the World Surf League officials, including CEO Erik Logan.
As I write, there is no news on whether there is any chance of a restart within the event window, which ends on Monday our time, but what seems more likely is that the WSL will baulk at running the three confirmed tour events until the US vaccine program kicks in. Whichever way you look at it, it’s another body blow for pro surfing.
No doubt fingers will be pointed at the globe-trotting US-based surfers, like Kelly Slater, who has spent much of the past three months on “professional duties” in Indonesia, mostly sliding into barrels on the Bukit peninsula with his good mate Rizal Tandjung, but according to my friend Mark Cunningham, the former chief lifeguard on Oahu’s North Shore, the real issue is the large crowds that gathered along the shores of Ehukai Beach Park to watch the spectator-free Pipe Masters, with no masks and no social distancing.
“I just wish more members of the community and surf fans visiting out here would take common sense of masks and social distancing a lot more seriously,” Cunningham said.
Meanwhile, the soon to be 49-year-old 11-times world champion Slater showed dangerous intent in his first go-out in a championship event in almost a year, casually sneaking into a couple of overhead Backdoor barrels on the same little Epoxy twin fin that he’s been smashing Bali apart with for months. In fact my spies over there tell me that not only has Slater been shredding perfect Uluwatu and Padang-Padang, but he’s been punting the biggest airs ever seen on side-shore days at my home-away-from-home break, Canggu Rivermouth.
It’s too early to tell what might unfold, but if there is to be a world tour of 2021, we’d better get the record books out and prepare to break them. As Shane Dorian said in the infected commentary booth the other day: “Kelly is on a barn-burner!”
Vale the crazies
Two blokes I met very early in my life and career passed away last week. Neither of them ever rode a wave in anger, or anything else, but in their own ways they were so brilliantly out there that they left us with a legacy of laughter.
In February 1972, fresh from surfing Cyclone Daisy in Noosa, I arrived in Canberra to take up my new job in the Sydney Morning Herald bureau at the Parliamentary Press Gallery of the old Parliament House. After question time in the Reps, my mate John Stubbs took me down to the non-members bar (such an evocative name) for a well-earner schooner or three.
As we entered through clouds of blue ciggie smoke the most raucous and uncontrolled laughter I had ever heard emanated from a far corner where a crowd of journos was gathered around a gangly, bearded guy in an ill-fitting suit, ciggie in one hand, beer in the other, shaking with laughter. I heard him saying, “And then Biddy says to Sonia … ”
I can’t tell you what came next, not in a family newspaper, but it was anatomical and hilarious. This was my introduction to Mungo Wentworth MacCallum, Canberra correspondent for the Nation Review but mostly famous for his impersonations of the ridiculous prime minister of the time, Billy McMahon, who couldn’t say his Ss nor satisfy his attractive younger wife, Sonia.
Mungo came from a long line of ratbags who meant well. His dad, also Mungo, was a journalist and member of the Sydney Push who spent drunken times on the island of Hydra with novelists George Johnson and Charmian Clift. His uncle, Bill Wentworth, was, at the time I met Mungo in 1972, the Minister for Social Security and the most eccentric MP in the House, apart from the prime minister. Not even Uncle Bill escaped Mungo’s blow torch in his hilarious political columns.
Mungo and I became friends and he got me a moonlighting gig with Nation Review. (Because Herald journos were not allowed to write for other papers, my articles appeared under the byline “Jill Pharratt”.) When I left the gallery to go to Europe the following year, those paltry pay cheques kept me in sardine and wine on a beach in Portugal.
Mungo retired to Byron Shire a long time ago and had been unwell for years, but the pen kept producing, right up to the end. This was his published farewell just last week:
Christmas is coming and Australia is flat
Kindly tell us ScoMo where the bloody hell we’re at.
And when we’re certain that you know that you haven’t got a clue
Then join in our Yuletide chorus as we sing: F— YOU!
I met John Ley when he rented the back bedroom of my friend Rennie Ellis’s house in Melbourne in the 1970s and made it uninhabitable for generations to come. On the other hand, the bloke his one-time flatmate Michael Caton called “a misguided genius”, entertained many in films like BMX Bandits (alongside a very young Nicole Kidman) and the first Mad Max (in which Johnny gets killed off soon after the opening titles).
He was a man of many talents and considerable weirdness, blessed with the ability to make you laugh in the worst of times. It hasn’t been an easy trot in recent years. RIP, old mate.
Kong has been!
The mighty Kong came, saw and conquered a big crowd of fans at the Noosa World Surfing Reserve fundraising ball at Sunshine Surfie last weekend. The big fella was in top form and had us all in stitches with his tall tales and true as he helped raise much-needed funds for the 2021 stewardship program.
