Surfing and celebrity. What a heady, titillating mix. Famous people wearing not much at all!! A sport that supposedly doesn’t care about celebrity anyway!

Surfing and celebrity. What a heady, titillating mix. Famous people wearing not much at all!! A sport that supposedly doesn’t care about celebrity anyway! Sun and sand and six packs and plastic boobs!  I mean, just think of Matthew McConaughey, for chrissakes. Now there’s a veritable modern day Hawaiian surfing chief.

Of course when celebrities go surfing, it’s not for the pics, or the coverage, but for the soul, man. As a recent example, check out Hollywood heartthrob Zac Efron on a recent surf surf lesson he undertook in Sydney with seven times world champion (and PR wizard) Layne Beachley. You can really feel Zac’s zen.

In fact it seems celebrities just can’t be taught by any old salty dog. They need someone on the upper echelons of surfing celebrity, someone with the same amount of ‘suction’, as they say in The Wire. Thus when Cameron Diaz does it, she does it with Kelly Slater…

In the same vein, when American Vogue recently did a cover shoot with Gossip Girl’s Blake Lively based around surfing, the mag drafted in Rob Machado as the go-to surf coach dude. The article, featuring in the June 2010 edition, was written by Hamish Bowles, the European Editor at Large for Vogue who is recognized as one of the most respected authorities on the worlds of fashion and interior design.

Click here to read his crazy take on surfing. Be warned though: his piece comes in at around 3000 words, and is pretty much indecipherable to anyone who knows anything remotely about surfing. So I thought I’d take the liberty of pulling out a few choice quotes and attempting to decipher them for the benefit of anybody living in the real world.

Bowles: “And now I was about to be abducted into this bitchin’ netherworld of tubes, lips, and barrels.”

Mondy’s take: He took a surf lesson of his own free will. He may, or may not, get to his feet.

Bowles: “I duly repair to the fashion closet and spend a good half hour attempting to prize myself into an O’Neill bodysuit, gloves, footwear with bifurcations for the big toes, and balaclava.”

Mondy: He put on a wetsuit, glovies, booties and hood. Either that or he decked himself out ready for a bank robbery.

Bowles: “Out in the ocean, a man is miraculously walking on water. Actually he is standing on a board and holding a paddle. Jon’s eyes roll. Surfers and paddleboarders are apparently engaged in an Oklahoma!-esque farmer-and-cowboy turf war.”

Mondy: I have absolutely no idea what this clueless idiot is talking about. 
Bowles: “The ocean is like hammered steel, the sky cerulean. The droplets of water on our board are like scatterings of cabochon moonstones. It is hallucinatory.”

Mondy: The water is a grey, the sky is blue. Despite this rather normal state of affairs and him being new to the ocean, he appears to have taken the extraordinary step of dropping acid.

Bowles: “I understand why landlocked surfer dudes seem to be in a near perpetual state of postcoital lassitude.

Mondy: While Bowlesy now seems to understand the connection between being unable to go for a surf and the need for a post-root nap, I am still somewhat in the dark.

Bowles: “and Machado—ice-blue eyes shaded by Dragon sunglasses with giant lenses that transform with the light from Tequila Sunrise to The Blue Lagoon—arrives in an ultramarine VW van (‘the original surf vehicle’)….”

Mondy: Bowles seamlessly fulfills the terms and conditions of Machado’s appearance.

Bowles: “At one point I look over, and to my astonishment Blake is coolly lying with her back on the board, looking up at Rob as they crest a wave. ‘I want to watch you watch the wave, to see what you are experiencing’, she tells him.”

Mondy: An unorthodox approach to the already unorthodox sport of tandem surfing, granted. But one which seems to indicate Machado may be in line for a celebrity shag fairly soon.

Still, who I am to denigrate one man’s (and one starlet’s) journey to the spiritual heart of surfing? For all I know, maybe I’ll next see Bowlesy dropping down a 10 foot Sunset West Peak, or witness Lively lying on her back macking through a Desert Point tube.

They’ve got celebrity and they’ve got surfing, which is more than I can say for myself.

Ben Mondy