SUNDAY JOINT, 10-20-2024: SPORT OF KINGS IN THE LAND OF MONARCHS

Hey All,

It took years, nearly a decade in fact, but I finally cycled through all the stages of grief regarding Kelly Slater's Westworld-lite wavepool—only to end up, surprisingly, more or less back where I started. Nonplussed. Cool. Maybe a bit arch. I could ignore Surf Ranch or laugh at it, whichever suited. Not laugh hahaha, like Raglan Surf Report, but I can eye-roll Surf Ranch and judge it dismissively, as my social media feeds serve up clips of soft-top-riding billionaire-celeb rookie surfers being gently inserted by Raimana Van Bastolaer into those long boring 8-bit Atari tubes, at $500 per wave—or a half-week's wages for your average nonprofit surf history website Executive Director.

Like I say, no problem. Carry on. I will fly economy to the southwest corner of Costa Rica next spring, and if Ivanka Trump, Lewis Hamilton, and Prince Harry are going three-up in the barrel that week at Surf Ranch with Raimana riding alongside like a big friendly Polynesian manatee, screaming high-pitched encouragement while crying inside, I will feel that much better for my non-remunerative life choices

But hold on now. Here comes Slater's new Middle East pool (Surf Abu Dhabi) on Al Hudayriyat in the United Arab Emirates, an artificial wave next to an artificial mountain range on a huge 25-mile-perimeter artificial island, everything 100% master-planned, dedicated to lux-living and entertainment; the whole gleaming terraformed megaproject built by a government-mandated group called Modon Properties. And sure as mushrooms spring from cow flop, we quickly get the WSL-backed Abu Dhabi Longboard Classic (held last month), and the upcoming Surf Abu Dhabi Pro, second event on the 2025 WCT schedule—sponsored by Modon Properties.

I tried to remain nonplussed but confess that this video plussed me a bit—Surf Abu Dhabi, and our chipper onscreen tour guide, both look like they belong in a director's cut of The Truman Show. Then Ben Mondy's latest "Surf Bugle" newsletter—subject-line: "Why the Fuck is the WSL in the UAE? And Why is No One Talking About it?" —hit my inbox on Thursday and that knocked me right back to the anger and depression stages of wavepool grief.

I retired my Bernie Sanders Signature Model EOS political soapbox some years ago, but have dusted it off for today's Joint. Don't worry. This will be quick—my righteous-cause stamina, like this faltering iPhone 12 Mini I'm still using, no longer holds much of a charge.

We start with the Emirates human rights scorecard, which is less-bad than it was five years ago, but still dismal. Don't be gay or female in the UAE, for starters. Check your democracy at the door.

Leading us to sportswashing, which is the emirs and sheiks extending a friendly hand, saying, tell you what, let's just do sports, everybody, all of us, East and West, Muslim, Christian, Jew—you guys have the teams and the players, we have the money, let's put our heads together and make it work for everybody.

Saudi Arabia remains the undefeated champion of Middle East sportswashing, but other Arab petrostate powers are closing the gap, with the UAE washing harder than anybody these past few years. Football, Formula 1, tennis, and of course golf—Arab investment in these and other sports is huge and still skyrocketing. (I no longer bleed Laker blue like I did in my NBA-loving youth, but was relieved nonetheless to find out that the dreaded Celtics are the ones scheduling preseason games in Abu Dhabi.) The Surf Abu Dhabi Pro may seem like the smallest of small fry in the sportswashing game, and on paper it is. But the point is to get our eyes on the field, on the players, on the highlight reels and the standings, and away from the torture and detention and state-sponsored killings and whatnot. You don't get all the goodwill when you buy a team—not right away. But stick around long enough and the fans will forget that the team owners know the guys who gave money to the 9/11 terrorists, and later ordered the vivisection suitcase-stuffing hit on Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi.

Like I say, surfing, by the numbers, is nothing compared to soccer or the NBA or Formula 1. But surfing still looks cooler, more Western, more mysterious, than anything else out there. My take is we lost our hipness cred back when Fonzie was jump-starting the jukebox with his fist, but the rest of the world doesn't know that, and if I was sitting on the fourth-largest economy in the Middle East and trying to throw an invisibility blanket over various and sundry civil rights abuses, sure, absolutely, build a pool and take a million from the petty-cash drawer for prize money for a CT event and Bashar's your uncle, when's the first heat?

That's a good deal from the Emir's side, in other words. But what about us? What's in it for surfing? WSL gets a cut, I suppose. Slater, too. The pros have a new CT contest—except nobody wanted it; the Surf Ranch Pro was everybody's least-favorite tour event by a mile, and moving it from Lemoore to the UAE is not going to bump up its popularity. There are probably some young blue-blood UAE scions who will get stoked enough by the new pool to break out to chase real waves, so count that as a small win, I guess. The sport meanwhile chisels off another piece of what's left of its briny soul, and some tiny few among us take a seat, like Succession extras, on the world's most elite lounges and verandahs. But we're not actually in the club. We are and always will be decorative. When the emir gets up, Slater follows along holding the umbrella. 

Nothing will change or alter the direction we're on. Wavepools are here to stay, the sport has not self-funded for decades, and surfing's marquee names will continue to conform, emulate, obey. I'm writing this to make myself feel a little better, is all; some of you, maybe most of you, are with me on most of this, but you all know that we're basically standing on the jetty, flipping off the cruise ship as it leaves the harbor.

Ben Mondy shamed me into this Joint, just by speaking out first, and I'm grateful. In fact, here is the exact bit in Ben's piece that got me writing this morning, it comes right at the beginning:

“Isn’t it time we talked about the ethics of surfing in Abu Dhabi, 'cause no one else is?”

That was a pitch to a number of the major surf publications I did a month ago.

“I’m there right now, so let’s leave it alone, ha, ha!” was one Editor’s response.

No prize for guessing the name of "major surf publication" (hint: it's a website, not a publication). I was going to do a longer bit on what it means to no longer have an independent non-satirical surf media, but we're out of space.

So there is my bitter little report on the state of play here in 2024, in terms of our our place in the culture at large. We get bigger and duller at the same time.

On the bright side, I suppose none of this means much in the end. We surf to escape all kinds of things. We can therefore surf to escape from surfing.

Thanks for reading, and see you soon—the next Joint will be upbeat start to finish, I promise!

Matt

[Image grid, clockwise from top left: Surf Abu Dhabi under construction; Prince Harry at Surf Ranch; Ben Mondy in Sydney; Saudi-owned Newcastle United FC; Surf Abu Dhabi women's T-shirt; Kelly Slater at the Surf Abu Dhabi grand opening. Michael Takayama, Donald Takayama's nephew, daybreak at the Abu Dhabi Longboard Classic. Cristiano Ronaldo just after signing with Saudi Arabia’s Al-Nassr FC in 2022 for an estimated $200 million per year. The Fonz, about to jump the shark. Happy old surfer.]