I look at it this way - The best of the best when it comes to longboarding, seem to be pretty much over it. When Danimal told me the WLT was going down, I listed off a bunch of names, asking if they were competing (Tudor, Kremel, and so on) to which he replied "NOPE" to all. I can't quote verbatim, but I heard Joel rolled through the parking lot of HB during the US open last year or the year before, saw a bunch of long shortboards and those little robbins brothers dorks, said "FUCK THIS" and drove off. He's won that contest like 69,420 times but with the way the judging is going he's over it.
So long as air's and going vertical (Which isn't that hard actually) is scored higher than style and noseriding, we are not going to see the best longboarders strut their stuff. SO how do you fix this?
It could be argued that style and noseriding can't really be judged at all being that it's more of an artisitc, natural type expression rather than a forced display of manuevers. The way it is right now, the more manevuers that are squeezed into a single wave, the higher your score is. This fucked up my surfing for a long time because i'd surf nssa's and try to please janice fucking jargon's opinion of what was "good longboarding". In reality it made me surf ugly by flailing to fit maneuvers on the wave that weren't called for, rather than actually riding the wave. Had I surfed the wave properly with half as many forced movements, I would have first round clowned more than I already did.
Can style be judged? I'll leave you with this example from last weekend's firey offshore goodness at bolsa on Sunday...Captmouth was taking photo's from the beach and after losing my board and spotting some hard bodied bodacious babes on the beach, I took a seat next to him. He leaned over and asked "Who's that fool with the checkers on his board?" He was asking about a dude named John Husak, who was one of many people out in the water ripping. There were the usual high performance dudes trying to go bonkers and what not, but it was Husak's minimalistic approach and smooth as fuck noserides that caught Captmouth's eye, and he doesn't even surf ( he shred's at skating. like switch blunts and shit). After I told him who it was, Captmouth merley replied, "SHREDDER"... The person who looked most comfortable and stylish in the ocean caught the most attention...There you have it. Or not. Commence idea discussion -
What would dora do? Burn it to the ground
