You know what they say: it’s a funny old game, surfing.
Right about the time last week when we’d expected to be uncorking a decent bottle of bubbles, Patrick Roach and your columnist were instead crying into our second – or was it our third? – beer, lamenting lost opportunity and the fickle hand of fate.
Both of us had been up since the wee hours, watching Patrick’s son, Harrison, known far and wide across Noosa Shire as the greatest traditional longboarder in the world today, bar none, do battle for his maiden World Surf League world title. It had been 15 years since Noosa last claimed a world surfing title when Josh Constable took out the 2006 ASP Tour, but today was to be our day.
We’ll get to what actually happened in a minute, but first a bit of background. Pat Roach and I have been friends for many years, and in my years directing the Noosa Festival of Surfing, I watched young Harrison develop into a very stylish longboarder and a savvy competitor. On the other side of the headland he was also developing into a ferocious shortboard talent, but that was not what I was watching.
Quite early in the piece, Harrison had the talent to make a charge up the longboard world tour rankings, but a funny thing happened on the way to the podium. He looked at what the other surfers were doing to score points from the judges – basically shortboard maneuvers performed on a longboard – and turned his back on the whole deal. He was by no means the only longboard stylist to reject the system, and most of them found their way onto two-times longboard world champ Joel Tudor’s rebel Duct Tape Tour. When we hosted the Duct Tape in Noosa in 2013 and 2015, it became apparent that Harrison was right up there with the best stylists in the world, Tudor included. It was only a matter of time before the new governing body at World Surf League realized what was going on and took world championship longboarding back to the future.
Cut to February 2020, and the first event of the new-look WSL Longboard Tour at Noosa. Harrison is on fire, his only threat, Tudor, 15 years his senior. But Harry gets a dodgy interference call against Californian Kevy Skvarna, and is relegated to seventh place while Tudor goes on and wins it. Then Covid wipes out the rest of the 2020 tour and, as the WSL frantically tries to resurrect the tour with two Californian events towards the end of this year, they also call in the Noosa points from the previous year. Joel Tudor goes into the California end game with the number one ranking.
At the Surf Ranch Classic Harrison looked completely at home on the man-made wave, while Tudor seemed to struggle and finished down the list. But in a disappointing final for Harrison, France’s Edouard Delpero found another gear. Nevertheless, going into the final event, the Jeep Classic at Malibu, Roach looked to be a world champion waiting to be crowned, and so it appeared to be shaping as he racked up two near-perfect scores in one heat. And then along came Skindog.
There’s a back-story here too. I’ll be brief. Back around the turn of the century, during my five-year stint in France, I spent a lot of time in Cornwall, where our Quiksilver crew would camp at the old seaside Vic Hotel in Newquay and get into trouble across the street at Steve Skinner’s brand new ale house, where the beer was good and the hospitality of host Steve was legendary. It was there that we got to meet the regular glassie, Steve’s affable just-teenage son Ben, who was pretty handy on a shortboard but had just turned his attention to longboarding.
Within a handful of years Ben “Skindog” Skinner was a fixture on the world tour and his eponymous surfboard brand was one of Europe’s best. He won plenty of UK and Euro titles but the world stage, although tantalizingly close at times, remained a bridge too far. Until Malibu last week.
So, on day one, Delpero falls to the Brazilians in the losers’ round, seemingly clearing the way for Harrison. With cleaner south swell lines on day two, Harrison motors past Jefson Silva and exacts Noosa revenge on Kevy Skvarna. Now all he has to do is take out Skindog in the semi and the world title is his.
Skindog lines one up perfectly in the opening minutes and scores a high 7. Harry’s on the back foot and the ocean goes very, very quiet. Without priority, Skindog finds another good one and improves on his previous. Now Harry is almost combo’d, with a lot of work to do in the final minutes. It never happens. He’s out of the comp but still in the world title race, if East Coaster Tony Silvagni can dispatch Joel Tudor. Silvagni to beat Tudor at Malibu! Ain’t gonna happen.
But Tony starts positively while Joel is wave-starved. And then the old stager pulls out the drop-knee magic and glides to victory, making it look so easy. On his way up the beach, the oldest ever surfing world champion quips to an interviewer: “At last I found something I could beat Kelly Slater at!”
Tudor went on to win the event from Skindog, while in the women’s, Hawaii’s Honolua Blomfeld clinched her third world title, equalling Joel’s tally, at just half his age.
It didn’t go Noosa’s way, but Harrison Roach is number two in the rankings, and as his two biggest fans in this town blubbered into their final beers, let’s hope he decides to give the tour another bash in ’22.
