It only took 6 years for him to be recognized by the beer makers.
It has become more and more apparent over the years that surfing as a sport is very difficult to translate into mainstream. The variables are too, well, variable, and without enough consistency and set protocols many people find it hard to understand. For those people who try and get into competitive or pro surfing and who don't have a background in such disciplines, it is nary impossible to work out. Scorecards become hieroglyphics’, despite Ronnie and Joey making is as easy and user-friendly as is possible.
The difference has always come from big wave surfing, when the sport of surfing starts entering the mainstream simply through the ‘wow’ factor. Huge waves look incredibly scary to landlubbers, and traversing them safely is a dark art, with surfers as necromancers, performing on these moving mountains. Mom gets scared, dad goes ‘oh wow, look at that,’ and junior who is at that impressionable age, takes careful look to see if this surfing thing has any merits whatsoever in attracting the opposite sex.
With Gary Linden’s Big Wave Tour going from strength to strength and with the big wave surfers the world over becoming more superhuman in their endeavours, one would start thinking that mainstream sports platforms, be it TV stations, websites, magazines or social media hubs, would start getting it right, or at least be able to work out where the glory should be going.
Yet, amongst it all, Garret’s wave at Nazaré wins the glory as defined by The Guinness Book Of Records. The wave was ridden in 2011, and at that stage Nazaré was still a malevolent unknown beast and we had no way of knowing that we would be paddling into it for a Big Wave Event a few years later. But back to Garrett’s wave…
Without wishing to detract from the enormity of that moment in 2011, frozen in time, there is something clearly wrong with this picture –
We live in a world of instant news, fed to us from a variety of platforms, and all we have to do these days to receive it, is to accept what we think is real news and ignore the fake news.
Between November 10, 2011, so much has happened in the sport of big wave surfing as well as in the world of the championship tour surfer competing on the World Surf League tour that the exploits of 2011 are dusted, and have no relevance today. On top of this, while the wave was a behemoth it definitely has been surpassed a few times over since that day by waves that were heavier, more gnarly, and way bigger – even by Garrett himself as well as surfers like Andrew Cotton from the UK.
Right now Garrett’s recognition sits alongside these following records: The longest wave surfed by a dog; the largest surf lesson and the most people riding a surfboard.
If I need my fix of legitimate big wave awards I’ll head on over to the WSL Big Wave Awards for the real deal, thank you very much.
