One of the most common (and aberrant) dialogues I know is usually when I say:
Surfing is not a sport.
In that case, almost by reflex, I know my interlocutor will answer:
And what is it? A lifestyle?
And no. Let me see how I can explain.
It is difficult not to fall into the cliché, especially in a massive and massively misinformed society like ours, which moves through abstracts, clichés and I will see the film when it comes out. It is very difficult not to fall into the cliché when the topic is repeated massively from the media, with images of 20 year-old surfers with long blonde hair, a two-week old beard and as much attitude as a pickle in a glass of salt water.
Surfing is not a sport, although it can be. In reality, everything can be a sport: even oyster farming in depth. From the moment someone says "I can do it faster" and someone else bites, there's a sport. Surfing is not intrinsically a sport, because it's not about scoring goals, beating an opponent, putting anything through a hoop or dropping a wave faster than the others. In fact, the criteria by which judges determine who wins a manga, in surfing, are as arbitrary as they could be, say, in a calçot contest:
Man, number two has a hotter sauce, that takes away points!
Do you take them off? For me it adds them up!
That said, surfing is not a lifestyle, except for four freaks who have believed in the intense publicity with which multinationals and advertising bombards them.
Surfing is much more serious and at the same time much dumber than all that. Surfing is a game. Or rather, it's playing. Because a game has rules, while playing doesn't. Surfing can be done in your hair, with a board, a mat or an inflatable killer whale (note: catch me one for next summer). Surfing can be done standing, lying down, sitting, showing your ass like Miki Dora or drinking a good beer.
Surfing, when understood as a way of playing, is a useless, playful, expansive, free, fantastic, innocent, creative and sensual act. It is something with many forms, as many as people practice it. Surfing is all we can think of, and more. That's why I like my ass that I want to reduce something so wide and complex to a single option, sports surfing.
I won't deny that sport surfing makes me weak. I'm serious. I can't tell you who won not one of the last five or six world championships, and I'm not interested. I'm not more interested in airplanes than laybacks or hangouts: they're just things that are there and can be done, or not. And that's it. What happens is that reducing surfing, as the mainstream industry does, to sport surfing is like reducing the whole world from motor racing to Formula 1. It's like reducing sex to porn. It's like reducing the cuisine to McDonald's.
I'm off the subject. Surfing is much, much more than just a sport, and of course, it ceased to be a "lifestyle", whatever that is, at least 50 years ago.
In my particular case, surfing is a search, I still don't know very well what, although I suspect it has to do with innocence, purity, art and beauty. In other cases, it'll be something else. When I get romantic (and it doesn't happen to me very often) I remember spending a summer clinging to a cork tree in Florianópolis, Brazil. I'd be 6 or 7 years old. And he'd hug me in the cork and surf for hours. Maybe that's what I'm looking for, I don't know.
