Monday, January 18, 2010

DANE'S WORLD

I’ll begin with Stuart Nettle’s review on Swellnet. Without swimming too deep in my own shit, it’s my favourite review of the book to date.

“The narrative often veers away from the main trail while the author pulls a thread of his surfing life through the history of surfing and the world at large. And so, one moment you are reading about travels with Ted Grambeau through the Tuamotos and the next a philosophical explanation why human beings have an inherent need to wander, replete with quotes from Umberto Eco. McAloon connects idea and anecdote seamlessly.”

So I read the review, was pretty buzzed to be mentioned in the same sentence as the late great Grant McLennan (singer-songwriter with The Go-Betweens), and then drifted around the ‘net, as you do when you’re draining a sixer of Crackenback Pale Ale. Eventually I ended up on Dane Reynolds’ blog, Marine Layer (his most recent entry riding Yadin Nicol's 5'4" quad is v.cool but I highly recommend the October 14 entry of Dane riding Rob Machado’s 1997-era fish below... among others).

Dane makes a brief cameo in Deep Water, bobbing up in Madrid of all places. I did a few trips with him when he was but a talented and uncertain teenager, a few years before he was anointed as the next American surfing hero. I chaperoned him to the Canary Islands when he was 16 years old and sponsored by Rip Curl. It was one of my favourite surf trips, but I don’t think it was one of Dane’s. The kid was green and the European contingent attempted to force-feed him the local “culture” when all Dane wanted was an In-N-Out Burger. But man, could he surf. Dane was a late replacement for Pancho Sullivan and, despite a fairly respectable line-up of Rip Curl’s finest, the relatively unknown teenager from Ventura stole the show. One morning we scored the islands’ premier wave, a gnarly reef break that does a pretty reasonable impersonation of Pipeline (its name is roughly translated as “the beast”) and detonates on an urchin-infested slab of volcanic rock. It was howling offshore, low tide and uncrowded; considered too sketchy a proposition even by the heavy local bodyboard crew. But Manoa Drollet barely batted an eyelid and, in his typical laidback Tahitian style, sauntered into the take-off zone with Dane and Darren O’Rafferty in his wake. Now the man dubbed the Prince of Teahupo’o had his backside tube-riding down to a fine art – grabbing rail on take-off, side slipping down the face before letting go of the rail at the base of the wave, then casually stretching out inside the tube. It was a hyper-critical approach honed through years of surfing Teahupo’o that Manoa made look all too easy.

But the beast was hungry... After a tentative opening, Manoa came unstuck on his second wave and got throttled. Raff and Dane, both yet to catch a wave, watched on in a mixture of horror and disbelief. It was a pretty heavy situation and 16-year-old Dane could have easily been forgiven for taking a backward step. While Manoa barely missed a beat – the Tahitian swapped boards and was soon back in the fray, flying out of a series of incredible caverns – it was the kid who proved the surprise packet. While even now his heavy water credentials are sometimes called into question (I’d suggest they’re simply overshadowed by his fun approach to surfing and ridiculous above the lip act), he was soon mimicking the Tahitian’s hands-free style, albeit a little less casual than the master. The steep learning curve was remarkable to watch.

Over the next few years Dane’s raw talent reached a wider audience. And, while torn between competition and chasing a Dan Malloy-inspired free-spirited surfing existence, he became the focus of a bidding war that saw him part ways with Rip Curl. He initially embarked upon the free-surfing route with new sponsor Quiksilver and produced a mind-blowing movie, First Chapter (the surfing was mind-blowing, the movie itself was pure surf porn), before eventually landing on surfing’s elite tour a much more complete surfer. I talked to him about it when he made his debut on the Gold Coast in 2008.

“I try not to think of surfing as a career-wise,” Dane explained. “To make decisions with a career in my mind, it just loses the fun of surfing. I hate thinking of it like a job. If I get tired of competing, I’ll quit doing it. When I was a kid I remember I did an interview with Rip Curl, I was like ‘I want to be world champion’, because that was burned into my brain, that was what you say. But I don’t really care. I’m not willing to sacrifice as much as you have to sacrifice in order to win a world title. You look at Mick (Fanning) and he dedicates his whole life to competing and winning, and that’s great, he obviously gets a lot of satisfaction out of it. I don’t think I get enough out of it to really give up a lot of the things that I do… well… I’m not ready to not go drink beers before my heats and stuff. My whole goal is to not compromise my surfing for the competitive format; surf heats as if it wasn’t there... I just kind of question my competitiveness when I see people bank their whole emotional state on how they’re going to do in each heat, and I don’t feel that. For me I’m kind of in a fortunate position; to go out there and not care if I win or lose, and really surf the way I want to surf.”

Few would question whether Dane has achieved this – the kid is an excitement machine. But in his second year on tour he’s also achieved a few other things; his quarter-final at Jeffreys Bay was arguably the performance high point of the year, while making the final at Trestles and the semi-finals at Pipeline secured his first top 10 finish. And while there is no doubt that Parko would be a popular and well-deserving world champion in 2010, in my humble opinion, so too would Dane Reynolds.