By PHIL JARRATT
SPIKY-haired big wave surfer Keala Kennelly made history last weekend when she became the first woman to take out the prestigious Barrel Of The Year award at the WSL Big Wave Awards in California.
Keala then made history again with “surfing’s first prime-time queer kiss” – as reported by sensationalist website Beachgrit: “The 37-year-old surfer whipped her arms around actor girlfriend Nikki Di Santo and drank her kisses with gusto.”
The live webcast suddenly had more spikes than Keala’s hairdo!
On stage Keala kept the vibe going: “They say behind every great man there’s a great woman. But sometimes behind a great woman there’s … a great woman … When I was a little girl I didn’t want to be a little girl. I kept hearing I couldn’t do things because I was a woman, women can’t surf big waves … women can’t surf Pipeline … women can’t surf Chopes … women can’t paddle Jaws … woman can’t get barrelled at Jaws. So who I really, really want to thank is everybody in my life who told me you can’t do that because you’re a woman. Because that drove me to dedicate my life to proving you wrong. And it’s been so damn fun!”
A while later, 79-year-old big wave legend Greg Noll made his own unique orally-fixated contribution to the moment with a risque joke about a guy who gets hospitalised with a hairball down his throat (I’m sure you can guess the rest), which he probably should have saved for his local in Crescent City, but in a strange and awful way, the cringe-making jest symbolised how much the social mores of surfing are moving ahead, and not before time.
In the course of post-production of our surfboard manufacturers documentary, I’ve been watching a 1960s ABC program called The Boardriders, in which the former British champion Rodney Sumpter (who grew up on Sydney’s northern beaches) says that girls shouldn’t surf because he doesn’t want to see them with muscular arms. Another gremmie says: “You watch a girl trying to surf and it just looks ridiculous.”
It would be nice to think that those attitudes were left in the ‘60s, but in fact they’re still around today in some circles, nowhere more so than in the testosterone-filled world of big wave surfing. Our own Layne Beachley was the first woman to bust down the door of the sacred macho temple more than 20 years ago, when Ken Bradshaw taught her to breathe deeply and pull in. But Keala wasn’t far behind, making a name for herself as a teenager on big days in her backyard break, Hanalei Bay.
She first hit my radar in 2000, when her dad Brian phoned me in France to ask if I could give her a bed until she got settled for the European contest season. BK and I had ridden waves together on K’aui and the Mentawais over the previous couple of years and become friends, so of course I was happy to.
I’d seen surfing photos of Keala but nothing had quite prepared me for the little punk rocker that showed up at our door. She was a wild child but we loved her immediately. She was soon off to Anglet for a comp, but I recall hearing her let herself into the flat just before dawn after a big night out with a posse of girls, and thinking we wouldn’t be seeing much of her that day.
But I was wrong. Guethary got bigger throughout the morning and I remember sitting out wide with Francois Lartigau on our longboards when this urchin with attitude paddled straight into the pack and took off uninvited on a howler.
That was Keala. Over the ledge, over the edge, no questions asked. I guess it still is. Love her work.
Surfing’s first Pulitzer
William Finnegan’s ground-breaking surf memoir Barbarian Days has racked up so many good reviews in august journals of record since its publication more than six months ago, that huge numbers of the literati who would never have dreamed of reading a surf book have now done so, sending the book as high as number four on the New York Times best seller list.
When we toured together in Bali last November, I couldn’t help notice (yes, with something approaching envy) that his work had touched the reading mainstream like nothing before it. Well, as it turns out, that was only the beginning. Last week Bill and Barbarian Days took out the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the most prestigious award in journalism.
Interestingly, the cash prize for the Pulitzer is $10,000, the same amount Keala received for riding that monster at Chopes. I’m not sure how you evaluate that, other than on a personal level. How would you rather earn your 10 large – a year or more thumping a keyboard, or a split-second commitment to a cavernous beast of a wave?
Me, I’ll do the keyboard time. Lead me to my padded cell.
If you haven’t caught up with Finnegan’s masterpiece yet, Annie’s Books at Peregian has been selling them like hot cakes, so hurry while stocks last.
