Spectacle, Grandeur and Social Division at Kelly Slater’s Wave Ranch

Team "World" celebrates its win at the inaugural Founders' Cup. Now that the fanfare has subsided from the WSL's first wave pool event, we're left with one question: Is the advent of artificial waves a good thing? Kelly Cestari/WSL photo.

Driving to Lemoore for the third time in the past nine months, only one of which included a personal surf session, I can admit to feeling a little
eh about this whole Founders’ Cup ordeal.

The drive, the bugs, the dust, and the incessant stench of cow dung are palatable when you receive a wave upon arrival, but because I was unwilling and not financially able to purchase the $10,000 Founders’ Cup Experience for the weekend event (which included a Monday session in the pool), I knew the only wave I’d be catching in Lemoore was of the heat variety, with weather reports calling for a balmy high 95.

Nevertheless, the promise of a novelty event featuring international teams and the first-ever public opening of the Ranch piqued my interest. If nothing else, The Founders’ Cup promised pumping surf, free food and booze (for those lucky enough to have a media/VIP pass), and a perfect vacuum to examine the true fans of surf.

Founders’ Cup attendees couldn’t just wander down to the beach and stumble upon this man-made spectacle. In fact, they had to pay between $80-10,000 to attend the event (a first in surfing), book a hotel months in advance (which I learned the hard way), and drive upwards of three hours from their beloved coastal enclaves to watch the world’s best waveriders surf at 70 percent of their abilities.

As I was saying, true fans.

And if you’re inclined to believe the WSL, they actually “sold out” both days of the event. That’s only 5,000 people, but still… Lemoore.

Now, the prompt from my editor was this: ~1,000 words of gonzo-style reporting on the event, a la Hunter S. Thompson’s
The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved from the year 1970.

A couple problems there:

1. I’d never read
Decadent and Depraved.

2. After reading D&D, I came to understand that Hunter and I were in very different circumstances.

He was a distinguished wordsmith who, despite a history of attending The Derby as a child, would consider himself an outsider in the wider world of horse racing. I am a half-witted surf obsessor who, as a result of avoiding legitimate employment, have become toxically embedded in the surfing industry.

So it would be hard for me to write with a deep-cutting sincerity, or even with a remotely intelligible narrative, is what I’m getting at.

Also, I didn’t have a Steadman.

When reading
Decadent and Depraved, I learned that Hunter’s words from the Derby were famously illustrated by his frequent collaborator, British abstract cartoonist Ralph Steadman.

Steadman’s drawings, which focused mainly on human subjects, were known for their grotesque depictions of the real world. His portraits were so ugly that they often made subjects feel furious and/or depressed at the mere sight, much like a modern day front-facing camera.

I didn’t have that kind of firepower behind me.

The Friday before the event was an athlete practice session/press day, and after watching the surfers paint the pool by numbers all morning, we were treated to a WSL press conference featuring CEO Sophie Goldschmidt and the captains of all five teams in the event — Australia’s Stephanie Gilmore, Brazil’s Adriano de Souza (who was stepping in for a heat-stroked Gabriel Medina), Europe’s Johanne Defay, “World’s” Jordy Smith, and of course USA’s Kelly Slater.

Following a host of softball questions, someone threw a beamer right at Slater’s head.

“So, Kelly, why did you build the pool here of all places?” asked a reporter.

“Well,” Kelly began his typically calculated response, “closer to the coast, land prices were obviously a bit more prohibitive. The privacy around Lemoore was also a blessing in the construction process, but that’s more just a fortuitous byproduct of the previous point. Also the lake was already here, so that saved us a lot of work, and the surrounding land was mostly vacant, so it was a number of factors really.”

That might not be word for word, but it’s the gist of what I’d scrawled on my little notepad.

Speaking of notepads, just across the aisle from me was a small, black-haired man whose fingers worked furiously as the surfers spoke. After a closer inspection I realized he wasn’t scribbling in the shape of letters and words but instead, faces. With a charcoal crayon, the black-haired man was drawing the panel in a rather abstract, scribbly manner.

A sketching of Mick Fanning from. Todd DiCiurcio art.

...Could it be?

Of course, he wasn’t Steadman. Even a rudimentary understanding of time would inform you that Steadman isn’t exactly a spring chicken, and would not likely be found at a surf contest in the middle of inland California.

But I approached the black-haired man nonetheless, half-driven by artistic interest half-driven by a perceived sense of fate.

After explaining my situation and referencing
Decadent and Depraved, the man’s face perked up.

“Yeah, with Steadman, right?” The artist, knowledgeably inquired.

“Yeah, Steadman! Are you a fan of his work?”

“Well, definitely, but I’m also friends with him,” the artist replied. “A few years back we met at his documentary
For No Good Reason and we’ve been friends ever since.”

“Small world! So what’s your story, what are you doing here?” I asked.

“Kelly invited me,” the artist, who had now revealed himelf as “Todd” replied. “He wanted some portraits done around the event, so he called me up and now I’m here.”

Impressed by this fact and propelled by the forces of fate (did I mention it was also Kentucky Derby weekend?), I was able to leverage the Steadman connection/my writing prompt to convince Todd to give me a few of his drawings for this piece.

The artist with former surfing world champion Martin Potter. Todd DiCiurco photo.

All that remained was the digit swap.

After typing Todd’s number in my phone, I was interested to see that he’d come from New York. As East Coasters are inclined to do, I informed Todd of my origins in the hopes that he might once have visited my small coastal village in southern New Jersey.

“You’re from Stone Harbor?” he asked. “What’s your name?”

“Mike.”

“Mike what?”

“Ciaramella.”

“No shit. Take off your glasses.”

I obliged.

“Dude! Mikey! It’s me, Todd Diciurcio. Maybe you don’t remember, but we surfed together all the time back in Ocean City. Y’know, the 7th Street days...”

And just like that it clicked. Todd… Todd Diciurcio, of course! The scrawny naturalfoot was older than me but impossible to forget on account of his stylish frontside hack.

I’m not one to believe in divine intervention, or in divinity at all for that matter, but really what were the odds of this multi-layered connection?

A slight disconnect from the
Decadent and Depraved narrative was that competitive surfing, and especially competitive surfing in a wavepool, is much closer to dressage than it is racing.

The surfers ride their waves independently, performing a special routine in which technique, control, and degree of difficulty are three of the main criteria, and they are scored subjectively by a panel of judges.

Without an expert eye and keen attention to detail, watching wavepool competitions is probably both confusing and tedious.

You might be wondering what the scene was like at the event in Lemoore. With all due respect to Todd, allow me to paint it for you.

The Surf Ranch is organically themed, with wood-paneled everything, and a clean, almost overly polished veneer. Its engineering is impeccable, with no unnecessary parts or misplaced amenities. Everything flows in a seemingly natural, but probably heavily manufactured manner. The facility is run by one of the most professionally trained staffs you will ever encounter. Each employee comes off as smart, kind, and is somehow overly attractive.

Tom Curren's pensive stare, as sketched by Todd DiCiurcio. Todd DiCiurcio art.

It is, simply put, surfing’s first country club.

Which is why the Surf Ranch team must have nervous about letting the untamed masses through the gates this weekend, as born out by the fact that General Admission were kept far, far away from the Ranch’s main lodge – in fact, the proletariat was forced to enter on the complete opposite end of the property, and pack like sardines onto hard metal bleachers. While anyone was free to walk the length of the pool, the VIP section was guarded by local football players with necks that resembled Redwoods in security shirts.

The premium section offered three daily meals–all buffet-style– as well as upgraded seating options accompanied by theme park mist machines that made the sweltering heat somewhat bearable. To top it all off was the open bar, which was manned by two 20-something females in low-cut tanks and drew longer lines than a Columbian hand mirror.

The guests on either side of the literal divide–as defined by their clothing–were probably exactly what you’d expect if casting surf fans into social sects: surfer bro attire in General Admission; button-ups, fashion labels, and fancy hats in VIP. It offputting to see surfing so cleanly bisected by the guillotine of income disparity. At Slater’s Surf Ranch, the beach’s equalizing force was no longer in effect.

Todd, my newly acquired sidekick, was a hard man to find at the event. It seemed like he was nowhere and everywhere at once. Following his Instagram timeline, I was able to figure out where he’d just been and who he’d been there with, but never his current location.

No matter, I thought. The images he was getting were incredible, and unlike with Steadman, Todd’s subjects actually seemed to enjoy his dark and destructive renderings.

But two of his images stand out from the pack, both because they incorporate color and tell a tangible truth about this whole wave, show, event.

Kelly stares out of his portrait with a look of reckoning, as if to say: “Hey world, do you see what I’ve done? Do you understand my power?”

The artist's rendition of the mastermind behind the event, Kelly Slater. Todd DiCurcio art.

And it’s hard to deny this rhetoric. The advent and subsequent improvements to Kelly’s wavepool, which have led us to this precarious moment in history, must be recognized for what they are – revolutionary.

But revolutions don’t happen without a little blood, which is explained by Todd’s wavepool portrait.

His foreground displays the obvious, undeniably perfect wave that 5,000 patrons went there to see, but swirling just behind it is a mess of chaos and confusion.

Now that humans have been able to mimic the most rare of natural phenomena – a 50-second, seamless barreling wave – there are a lot of existential questions that haunt us.

The surfing world is at a critical junction. Do we gravitate towards or run from the inevitable advent of wave pools galore? Todd DiCiurcio photo.

How will this technology–which can be introduced anywhere in the world–affect the broader surfing culture? Will the commodification of waves lead to a larger affluence advantage in our sport, like polo or golf? And does a 10-second tube even count if it’s in a pool? Is the competition less compelling if the participants don’t have to actually try to catch waves?

These questions won’t be answered for a very long time, but that doesn’t make them any less worthy of discussion.

What we do know as an absolute certainty is that the wavepools are coming – everywhere. Slater’s building a couple in Florida and Japan, Australia's got ‘em popping up all over the map, and Seth Moniz just landed a backflip in Waco, Texas that has the surfing world in tatters.

The age of pools is upon us. I don’t see any other option than to jump in head-first.