Pleasure Units

In late 2015, I awoke from a self-imposed several-year nap into a new reality. 

In this new reality, several things that had been unlikely to ever happen had happened. In ascending order of surprise: 1) I had signed up for Facebook and Instagram. 2) The ASP had sort of imploded on itself and been rebranded with a new name. And 3) Kelly Slater had invented waves.

These three things collided in December 2015, as I logged on, one morning, to all of those social media apps that I swore I never would have. And there I saw the same thing that you did: a three minute and 40 second video of an ageless Kelly Slater, clad in a gray beanie and a gray down jacket, hooting excitedly, jumping up and down with a camera-aware performative glee that would make LeBron James blush, his eyes fixated excitedly on what would turn out to be a man-made lake, 700 yards long by 70 yards wide, marooned unto itself in the middle of landlocked King’s County in Lemoore, California, at the carefully-constructed bottom of which something resembling an airplane wing was being pulled by a cable at a rate of speed fast enough to displace water in the shape of an impeccable, repeatable, right-hand barrel. 

Crazy stuff. 

Watching this video, recently separated from my own daze, I wondered what the hell had happened to the sport I had once loved. 

Backing up for a moment: In 2013, I wrote an essay for this very magazine exploring the topic of how and why some people quit surfing. And then I did the one thing that I had not at all intended to do at the time I filed that article—I more or less
quit surfing. 

For a period of about two years, maybe three, I found myself incredibly disillusioned with surf culture, and so I—unintentionally—walked away from it. In those years, my closest association with the sport came in the form of a quiver of about a dozen boards that sat gathering dust in my garage, and a smattering of beach days with my children where I’d run into all the old bros and, when they asked, I’d look at my own pale feet shuffling uncomfortably in the sand and demure that, no, I wouldn’t be surfing today. 

This was a period of time in which I one day found myself cleaning the garage, holding at arm’s length in my hands the rails of a 7’6″ pintail I used to take to the North Shore, sighing heavily, and placing it and a stack of several other boards on the street outside my home, free for the taking. 

Narrative tidiness dictates that I should here enumerate the reasons why I would have given boards away, why I would have taken a hiatus from the sport in the first place, and also present a catalog of lessons learned. But the truth is, this sabbatical period made no sense to me then, and it makes little sense to me now, still. And the truth is also that I simply woke up from that nap one day to find the fog had cleared. 

And when it cleared, it cleared on a December morning as I watched the video of that man-made lake, which I knew the second I saw it was the product of about a decade of work on Slater’s part. I remembered back to 2005, when I was an editor at Surfer magazine, listening to Kelly talk about the potential for a man-made wave that could produce looping endless barrels. Around the two-minute mark, it was clear to me that while I had been busy napping in an existential fog, Kelly had been busy bringing that vision to fruition. 

Once the video had finished I knew that all of the surf pens would begin immediately wagging, and wag they did. Headline after headline blared predictably in all caps: THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING. And I watched as the critical reception to Kelly’s wave took the shape of a binary. The only two questions that seemed to matter in the critical reception were whether Kelly’s wave was “good” or was Kelly’s wave “bad,” which seemed to me to be neither critical, nor a reception. 

In that moment, I was glad that I had taken a bit of a sabbatical from the sport, because it was only from that distance, I think, that one could be able to see two far less binary, and perhaps more important questions: Did Kelly’s wave matter? And was riding Kelly’s wave surfing? 

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For nearly as long as there have been surfers, there have been surfers wringing their hands about wave pools. The earliest pools meant to imitate ocean conditions go back nearly a century, to 1920s England. Surfers first rode wave pools in 1966 in Japan at something called—awesomely—the Surf-A-Torium. From that moment in surfing history, which coincided nicely with surfing’s mid-60s boom, the vision was made clear: Surfers in pools in cities across the world could find, in the artificial waves, what surfers had found in the ocean. A democratized vision of stoke. 

The benefits of this vision are as easy to see as they are manifold. A regulated and predictable wave pool, it was noted from the beginning, could make limitless what has traditionally been a finite resource. Such technology could, theoretically, cut down on the problem of localism. It could bolster a surf industry that relies on a relatively small market of surfers for its success. And it could improve the quality of the act of wave riding itself, as surfers, presented with a blank and infinite canvas, would be able to attempt and perfect new and diverse maneuvers. 

This has been the vision from the beginning, and it’s a vision that also has deep ties to surfing’s competitive structure. In the modern era, competitive surfing is deeply hampered by the unpredictability of swell, tide, and conditions. For all of the deep, lustful allure that surfing stirs up in the dry docked viewers of Roxy ads and Rubio’s commercials, surfing is notoriously difficult to bottle and distribute into two hours worth of seven-minute segments, broken up by commercial breaks. You can’t reliably schedule a televised surfing event if you don’t know when the waves will be good. 

Looked at in this way, and with a respectful tip of the cap in the direction of free market capitalism, it’s important to remember that any person who leads you to believe that wave pools have ever been created to manufacture a quote-unquote better user experience is feeding you a load of happy horseshit. Wave pools have been created, since their inception, because surfers, against all odds, have historically been monumentally terrible at marketing anything more than saccharine lifestyle photos to persons beyond what the insular surf industry likes to call “core.” Surfers, that is, have been colossally bad at marketing their sport in any deep and lasting way anywhere east of the 5 Freeway. 

The Holy Grail to those attempting to monetize the “surf space,” as money types like to say, is the capturing of land-locked youth demographics. The surf industry, such as it is, has existed for something close to half a century. While it has experienced extraordinary bubbles, bubbles habitually burst. Nobody, remarkably, has been able to find anything like long term financial viability in the marketplace for surfers, which is evidenced by any number of cases in point—for example, Billabong’s all-time high stock price of 67 dollars versus Billabong’s stock price at time of writing, which was 57 cents. 

The upshot is ultimately to highlight that it’s not surf rats in Costa Mesa that keep the industry afloat. Rather, it’s their contemporaries in Iowa, who are willing to buy board shorts to the tune of 60 dollars a pop. 

To capitalize fully on the underserved Des Moines market and all it represents, one would need to make surfing more attainable and less aspirational. One would have to give these corn fed kids some surfers to deify, in the same way that they look up to pro basketball players. And, one would have to give them the ability to get in the water. 

For all the fun that surfers have traditionally poked at Rick Kane and Arizona, the film North Shore was based on the reality of Big Surf, a wave pool built in 1969 for $2 million, funded by Clairiol. Rick Kane might be good for an ironic laugh, but he also represents one logical pole of the surf industry’s traditional vision for wave pools—a world champion from Tempe. This vision has carried across many iterations, from the 1985 Professional Inland Surfing Championships in Allentown, Pennsylvania, won by Tom Carroll, to the 1997 Typhoon Lagoon Surfing Contest, won by Rob Machado, at Disney World in Orlando. It was with this understanding and against this backdrop that Kelly Slater, who had begun financing and developing his wave pool back in 2005, in his inimitable style, waited for a decade to release the product with only one ultimate goal in mind: the Summer Olympics.

To discuss wave pools in 2017 outside the context of the Olympics is pure folly. Shortly after Kelly’s wave was produced, Surfer featured the accomplishment on its cover, and packaged an interview with Slater in the issue. 

“I know people have fears that man-made waves could change or ruin our culture in some way,” Slater allowed, “but it’s not meant to replace anything. I’ve always said this is a supplement to surfing in the ocean, and something for fun. I guess it could help the sport grow more quickly, similar to the way skate parks have grown skateboarding, and the potential for the Olympics can’t be overlooked.” 

As surfers have struggled to market their sport to a mainstream audience, there exists a subset within the surfing community that believes the solution lies within the promise of another embattled athletic endeavor that has fallen on remarkably hard times: the International Olympic Committee. In mid-2016, six months after Slater’s wave pool was unveiled, surfing, alongside skateboarding, karate, baseball, and climbing, was named a new Olympic sport, to begin with the 2020 Games in Japan. Almost immediately, surfers decided that wave pools could be an integral part of the sport’s Olympic strategy. 

At which Olympics wave pools might play a role, however, is less clear. Japan, for its part, has made it known that it wants the real thing. Paris, the 2024 Olympic host, has a proximity to contestable waves during the summer months, as does 2028 host Los Angeles. A best-case scenario for a wave pool in the Olympics might just be a decade-and-a-half removed, at the 2032 event, in a-yet-to-be-named location. 

In the meantime, Olympic organizers might be reticent until they see one more proof-of-concept. It’s hard to imagine an Olympics organizing committee giving the go-ahead to an Olympic event in a wave pool when a very basic surf contest hasn’t even been held in one. 

That will likely soon. 

Six months after Slater’s wave was revealed, to probably very few people’s surprise, it was announced in a carefully scripted rollout—a press release, appearances on morning talk shows, and a Bloomberg Businessweek profile of Kelly’s Wave all dropped on the same morning—that the WSL, in which Kelly Slater is a primary investor, was now an investor in the Kelly Slater Wave Co. The incestuous and tenuous details of professional surfing’s circular financing loop notwithstanding, the function of that announcement was to make clear professional surfing’s vision for this new technology as something more than a sideshow oddity. 

“The sudden emergence of the WSL as an owner indicates that the first application for the pools will be for world-class surfers,” Bloomberg wrote at the time. “Today’s
press release announcing the deal will specifically mention ‘a global network of WSL-branded high-performance training centers.’” 

It’s almost inevitable, then, that a WSL contest will be held in a Kelly Slater Wave Co. pool either this year or next, with the intention of proving to Olympic investors that the concept could work, and that an event could be sustained in a pool over a predictable period of several days. Predictability might well be the key that could unlock television contracts and licensing deals, and so when Slater says that the “potential for the Olympics can’t be overlooked,” what he might really be saying is that the potential for income generation from wave pool surfing is difficult to overlook. 

•

During the period immediately after Kelly released his wave to the world, I was asked for my opinion about wave pools. I had once served as an editor at a surf magazine, I was known for writing about surfing, and so what was my opinion—professionally speaking, I kept being asked—about wave pools.

I didn’t know how best to state—professionally speaking, that is—that I did not at all care. That I thought having an opinion about wave pools would be a sort of absurd thing to have. That I would look on the surfing blogs and websites at the time and read capital H capital T “Hot Takes” about how, “This changes everything!” and sort of scratch my aging head. The ground beneath my feet had certainly changed—anybody with eyes could see that—but logic surely still ought to apply, no?

When pressed, I would answer that as far as I could see, and knowing whatever backstory I knew, The Kelly Slater Wave Pool Experiment ^TM changed nothing, at least not for me or the people I surfed with. It was an incredibly impressive technological feat of a thought experiment that existed somewhere in the middle of California, but it had produced little more than an exceptional but suspiciously tidy selection of carefully cropped and highly curated three minute internet videos that did nothing to change anything at all, near as I could figure.

Such a rendering, of course, is as uncharitable as it is cynical. And perhaps it’s deliberately obtuse. It’s fashionable to be glib in these situations, and so it’s important to state that what those videos actually accomplished was to introduce a proof of concept, and to inspire imaginations. What if, we considered, 30 years after screenwriters led us to imagine world champion surfer from Arizona, Rick Kane in North Shore…what if the future was now? And so we pictured San Diego’s best wave, for instance, existing in a now-abandoned field in Vista. We pictured an Olympic surf contest being held in a surf park sandwiched between the Staples Center and the Nokia Theater.

During this time, I was asked to speak on a panel at a surf industry tradeshow on the subject of wave pools. On that panel were wave pool inventors, wave pool investors, wave pool builders, and a smattering of journalists. 

I was struck by, in that odd hour, just how many people were in attendance in the audience of a surf panel in an amphitheater with terrible acoustics on a midday, mid May, Saturday afternoon, which spoke to me of the energy that surfers at large have around the concept of artificial waves. More than that, though, I was struck by the fact that the discussion didn’t seem to center around what wave pools were or how they worked or what their impact was on the environment, or whether they were financially viable in any way, or how this would impact the Olympics, or what good might come, or any of the things that I had read about in the surf magazines and the surf blogs. 

Instead, what the folks in the audience wanted to know was whether surfing a wave pool was surfing at all. The turn that the culture made, that is—and made so swiftly, I might add—was to the existential: What is surfing? What does it require? Who is a surfer? And how do we know when we are surfing? 

In an op-ed for Surfer at the time, Matt Warshaw set the tone: “The WSL just bought Kelly’s wave pool company, which means a ’CT event in Lemoore next year or the year after, and then surfing in the Olympics, and oh man, I just hate all of it. I need to recheck my calculations, but Kelly’s wave pool makes surfing 75 percent less interesting. It turns surfers into gymnasts.” 

He ended that piece on a less-than-hopeful note: “I honestly think our sport is heading for—is perhaps already in the midst of—an existential crisis. I’m already there. Hoping I’m wrong the way the leashes-are-killing-the-sport Luddites were wrong in the early 70s. But no, this is a deeper, weirder, way more insidious deal.” 

One odd feature of surf culture is that outside of a few voices, our experience of the culture receives almost no critical reception. In an enthusiast culture, the norm is enthusiasm. So, when Slater revealed his wave, the critical reception was pure stoke. “Who wouldn’t be stoked?” as one friend wrote me recently. “What’s not to love?” 

Indeed, there’s a lot to love about watching Slater tear through turns on a seemingly endless right-hand barrel that, for all intents and purposes, appears to be presenting a reasonable facsimile of a perfectly winding ocean wave. 

The wave pool is an unmitigated good, the reception seemed to be, inasmuch as it has proved an essential function into the procurement of stoke.

Kelly Slater is stoked: “I think we all have this fascination with surfing a ‘perfect wave,’ and with the idea of building one where we control the parameters,” he said. 

His carefully selected group of test pilot guests? Incredibly stoked. “It’ll be a day I’ll never forget for the rest of my life and I can’t wait to see how the sport of surfing evolves with this new technology,” pro surfer Kanoa Igarashi wrote on Instagram. “I couldn’t believe the perfectness of the wave.”

Later that winter, when he and his team of handlers and PR people and investors decided to hold a drawing to select two lucky winners to surf his wave pool, those winners, you better believe, were stoked, too. 

And that’s good. But what were they stoked about? Is it surfing? Or is it riding waves? And is there a distinction between the two? Over the next decade, we’ll all be presented with answers to those questions.  

[Feature image: With their Lemoore, California, locale pumping out facsimiles of high-end Mexican point waves, and with designs for a “surf ranch” in Florida also in the works, the Kelly Slater Wave Company is working to define the state of the art in the artificial surf experience. Photo by Todd Glaser/Kelly Slater Wave Co.]