Somewhere between surfing and bodyboarding, the softboard movement is going to strange new places.
What is happening now probably has less to do with a wholesale renaissance in bodyboarding and more to do with surfers wanting to get as far as possible from what surfing has become: contrived, corporate, serious.
Beneath the rubble they lay hiding. Hideously disfigured and battling chronic drag-induced psychosis, they roam the underground trenches of this dystopian deep web of horizontal (and vertical) wave debauchery. Gathering in secret. Dragging abandoned slabs to feed their obscure addiction, recruiting those rejected by the mindless control of hard society into their flaccid underworld commune. Not quite alive, not yet in the fiery pits where there’s weeping and gnashing of teeth, they lay in this soft purgatory, awake in anguish where the wages of Drag are surely death.”
Above is the description given online for “Rip 2: Fully Ripped”, an Australian bodyboard movie which opens, appropriately, to Limp Bizkit’s cover of the anthem for the terminally misunderstood: “Behind Blue Eyes”. The movie features guys on bodyboards doing what guys on bodyboards do—dropping into bone-dry reefs surfers won’t touch—but then it also features surfers. Surfers on bodyboards. Famouslytalented surfers like Craig Anderson, Chippa Wilson and Creed McTaggart riding bodyboards…standing up. Then they’re surfing softboards, although it doesn’t much resemble surfing as we know it. The movie makes a comic statement, although it’s not clear exactly what that statement is. It captures the birth of a bizarre mash-up surfing culture, born from a post-apocalyptic bodyboard world and a fringe ensemble of disillusioned surfers.
Denne historien er fra Volume 60, Issue 2-utgaven av Surfer.
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Denne historien er fra Volume 60, Issue 2-utgaven av Surfer.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent? Logg på
60 Years Ahead
We had a whole plan for this year. Funny, right? Surfer's 60 year anniversary volume was going to be filled with stories nodding to SURFER’s past, with cover concepts paying homage to the magazine’s most iconic imagery. Our new Page One depicts something that’s never happened in surfing before, let alone on a prior SURFER cover. And our table of contents was completely scrapped and replaced as we reacted to the fizzing, sparking, roiling world around us. In other words, 2020 happened to SURFER, just like it happened to you.
A Few Things We Got Horribly Wrong
You don’t make 60 years of magazines without dropping some balls. Here are a few
THE LGBTQ+ WAVE
Surf culture has a long history of marginalizing the LGBTQ+ community, but a new generation of queer surfers is working to change that
For Generations to Come
Rockaway’s Lou Harris is spreading the stoke to Black youth and leading surfers in paddling out for racial justice
Christina Koch, 41
Texas surfer, NASA astronaut, record holder for the longest continuous spaceflight by a woman
END TIMES FOR PRO SURFING
By the time the pandemic is done reshaping the world, will the World Tour still have a place in it?
CHANGING OF THE GUARD
After decades of exclusive access to Hollister Ranch, the most coveted stretch of California coast is finally going public
What They Don't Tell You
How does becoming a mother affect your surfing life?
Four Things to Make You Feel A Little Less Shitty About Everything
Helpful reminders for the quarantine era
The Art of Being Seen
How a group of black women are finding creative ways to make diversity in surfing more visible
