Former Tracks editor Phil Jarratt has seen a thing or two go down in Hawaii in his time. Jarratt was on the North Shore for Tracks in the infamous ‘Busting Down the Door’ winter of 75 when Wayne Bartholomew, Peter Townend and Ian Cairns came under heavy scrutiny from the Hawaiian locals. Phil has also been to his fair share of surfing presentation nights and is therefore well qualified to comment on Noa Deane’s controversial acceptance speech at the Surfer Poll awards on the North Shore, at the end of last year. Below Jarratt gives the whole affair a little perspective.
Words Phil Jarratt
A month or so since the offence and subsequent apologies, let me not go down the road of standing in judgement of Noa Deane for his stupidity at the Surfer Poll Awards. I like his parents too much to put them through the agony of more analysis, and besides, we’re meant to be a little bit stupid at 19, aren’t we? And I’m actually more intrigued by his apology than by his offence.
I’m also well aware that he wasn’t the only one, but Dion Agius’s Xanax fantasies seem to come from a darker place than Noa’s testosterone and booze fuelled mini-rant, so let me just focus on Noa here. And in his defence, this was not the first or last time that an awards show has brought out the bad-arse in some one. In fact if they gave out awards for idiocy at awards shows, journalism’s own Walkley Awards would be right up there, which is why you rarely see them televised.
Within surfing, people have been having shockers since the very beginning, whether it was a food fight at the Kirra presso’s or Nat Young turning the first Surfabout presentations into a political rally for the Labor Party. (And I should note here that the food fight was good fun and no one but the sponsors was upset by Nat’s political statement.) In more recent years the Surfer Poll does seem to have achieved the gold standard in bad behaviour. I swore I’d never attend another one after a bad night several years ago in a car park somewhere in Anaheim, and now that they’ve moved to Turtle Bay they seem even worse, anti-social behaviour being inspired by that storied venue that houses many a dark surfing secret going all the way back to the Beachcomber Bill’s Awards in 1976.
Back in the day, bad behaviour at surfing awards nights usually covered the whole gamut of unacceptability, starting with drunkenness and profanity, and moving fairly quickly into drugs, sex and violence. But I don’t remember a lot of hypocrisy, and perhaps now that the shock and horror of what actually went down on stage that December night at Turtle Bay has quietened down somewhat, that is what will stick in the craw.
“My only goal was to raise the point of surfing not becoming a corporate sport like football,” said sponsored athlete Noa Deane while on stage accepting an award on behalf of his corporate sponsor at a corporate function. Tracks, whose succession of editors over 45 years, myself included, have mostly toed the anti-establishment line, could only agree: “The worst thing was he actually had a good point on the corporatisation of the sport.” Really?
Did Noa have a good point made badly? If so, what was it? That the World Surf League should go and copulate with itself because it accepts money from telcos and department store chains in order to present a world tour, or that an alarming number of his fellow pro surfers (somewhat higher up the pecking order than he) have been accepting money from corporations that promote the fastest-growing killer disease in the western world – obesity?
Maybe Noa meant to say, more fairly: “Fuck the WSL and fuck all pro surfers too, myself included.” Or maybe he just had a moment of boozy idiocy that raised no point at all, which is totally understandable, totally forgivable, and what he should have said in his apology.
