Everything old will be new again, or so saying the goes. And it seems true enough. Look at the obsession with retro equipment that’s taken hold over the last few years. Look at Surfcore 2001’s popularity on Instagram.
Front pads.
Fluoro wetsuits.
The list goes on.
But for everything old to be new again, it kind of needs to be old for a while, doesn’t it?
This whole Red Bull Airborne thing for instance. Airshows probably needed to be dead for another ten years before they got dug up and reissued. Not that I’m particularly against Kerrsy’s vision—sounds great in theory—it’s just the guys on the CT are generally pulling more airs and wasting less waves than the dudes in those heats.
Same with the aerial video contests. The whole Kustom Airstrike model that was big ten years ago. Seems some sticker company in the States just ran another one and Flea and Ratboy judged it and some dude from Virginia won $20K for a fairly large rotation. Our own Reef Heazlewood got second and probably should’ve won. But that’s besides the point.
The point is: that whole deal is old in the way Myspace is old, not in the way, say, playing Mortal Kombat on a miraculously still-functioning Super Nintendo is old. One is old and lame. The other is older and much more cool.
Which brings me to my long-winded point.
A full-blooded hack contest. Same general format as the Kustom Airstrike, where guys submit their clips in a set timeframe, but just with the meatiest, most ball bag-tearing hacks and gouges known to man. Open to anyone.
Imagine it!
Get Occy and Pancho on the judging panel. Fuck that, let them enter. It’d be mindblowing. Literally anyone could win it—Zeke, the Spartan, Margo, some tradie from your local who has all the style of a caveman but by fuck can he move some water.
Airs have been done to death. We could all do with a little holiday from those things. Bring back the grunt. Throw $50K on the line and see what kind of water gets displaced.
It’d be a hell of a spectacle.