‘Instead of saying you’re welcome, say thank you’’: An open letter to the surf industry from the people of the places it visits
Written by members of indigenous communities in Hawaii, Tahiti, and Bali, the Monster Children staff, and the staff of competing publications who are not permitted to talk even a little bit of shit.
We love surfing.
We do. There is nothing better. It has shaped our lives. Fuck standing up; from the moment we glided the ocean’s surface on a heap of fiberglass, battling the waves for the right to exist among them, surfing had us hooked. There is no going back. Once you are enthralled by nature and feel like a speck among the ocean’s vastness - just a bit of algae bobbing around out there with the white wash and the microplastics - you are enthralled forever. Surfing is as close to embracing God as we can get.
The industry around it, though, is far more problematic. It is one that commercializes that which we adore and while the industry around surfing allows all those around us, the surfer, to know that we do in fact surf, it is not a forgiving one. Any apparel brand not specifically designed around sustainable practices is not doing the Earth or its sea any favors, but surfing, for all of its well-meaning ‘what’s up, brother?’’s, and party waves, is as toxic in its production as it is in its marketing. The team/sponsorship model is extremely effective as it allows surfing brands to align themselves directly with those who do it the best, and this letter does not presume to offer a better alternative, nor does it desire one.
All this letter is meant to be is an arrow pointing toward the difficult personalities and poor industry practices that this model and its mentalities have created. These surfers are held up as golden gods, which cultivates a certain egotistical mentality that they are in fact larger than life and above the rest, both in skill, and in priority; it creates an altered personality that assumes oneself to be a celebrity, and that to be present in a group is to bless that group; that by visiting a place and allowing the people of that place to see you ride a wave, you are doing them a favor, when really it is the other way around. They are doing you a favor. You are the guest, and you should be grateful to be in the local community’s good graces.
This isn’t to say that surf teams are made up entirely of dickheads - though, if you spent as much time with pro surfers as we members of the media do, you might discover that in fact, yes they usually are - rather that their celebrity complex translates to athletes who, like Mick Jagger, expect a diet coke to appear in their hands whenever the word coke is uttered. The ocean is their diet coke, they are Mick, and the indigenous peoples of the places where the waves are pumping are the ones who have to go and fetch it.
Simply put: a lot of the time, surfing comes to a place, and they treat the place and its people like shit, and then expect the people and that place to say thank you, and that’s fucked up. While issues of surfing tourism and the surfing industry’s presence in the islands have always been a tumultuous thing, there has been an increase in recent years of absolute bullshit egotistical fuckhead behavior.
Something went wrong - something went terribly wrong somewhere along the line between the exotic travels of Endless Summer and WSL 2024 where surfing thinks they own the strip that they occupy, when in reality, they are guests. Uninvited guests. Surfing believes that they are celebrities among peons just clamoring to take a photo with them. For the most part, these peons do not know who you are, nor do they care if you have a sick cut back or can air or where you were ranked last year. Most of them are hardworking people living their daily lives, burdened and blessed with the perpetuation of thousands of years of cultural history that surfing is just a fraction of. You are just some guy with a white nose pissing in their bushes and complaining about the lack of WiFi at the mega-mansion Airbnb, and all they want is for you to clean up after yourself and stop grabbing their women.
Surfing’s grotesque ego problem isn’t necessarily their fault, in the same way that you can’t be mad at a dog who pisses on the floor when you move the puppy pad somewhere else. Their behavior has been reinforced, year after year, tour after tour, quarterly earnings meeting after quarterly earnings meeting. Moreover, most of what we think of as being the ‘surfing industry’ is based in the predominantly-caucasian global North West, most members of which have no cultural or historical or emotional attachment to the ‘exotic’ beaches and countries and towns that they treat poorly. Truly, they cannot be blamed entirely for what time has proven to be an acceptable way to behave, but it creates a poor dynamic between local communities and visiting athletes, and the industry at large. In indigenous surfing and surf media communities around the Pacific, horror stories are traded about incompetence, a lack of courtesy, or worse, environmental destruction and physical injury.
In Tahiti this past summer, the Olympics destroyed a reef, and an athlete’s Manager threw his chicken bones into a local playground where one of the authors of this piece’s kids play. Both actions are atrocious, both actions and adjacent actions occur more commonly than get reported, and both spring from a mentality ingrained within the greater surfing industry that the self and the mission of the self is more important than all else; that destruction and disregard is simply the cost of doing business, and the cost is never too high; that to behave this way is their right - their gift, even - and that the locals should be grateful for their graceful company.
This is where Naz would like to chime in by inserting skate into the conversation. Just because you are living your teenage dreams of being a pro and hanging out in the parking lot instead of skating the demo does not mean that everyone is sharing that dream with you. Therefore, no one is elated by your very presence in our neighborhood. No one wants your autograph, everyone wants you to stop waxing our spots. If you are going to be a cunt and leave beer cans floating in the ocean and posting it on your shoe sponsor’s IG story to depict you guys as having a whacky party fun time in this strange backwards exotic fantasy paradise, you can suck my dick.
Being a general cunt and not doing any service for the community is one gripe that Naz has. The second is the sex thing. Decade after decade, skaters, skate teams, and members of the skate industry mimic the initial thoughts of their sailing predecessors. They share the same impulse, and they make that impulse known almost immediately, but surely within the first day. That impulse - that singular driving thought shared by white visitors in 1780 and pro skaters in 2023 - is: where are the ‘island girls’, I need to find one to fuck. The fetishization of indigenous women of the Pacific by visiting white men is antiquated and grotesque and usually operates under the conscious or subconscious belief that women of the Pacific are idiot sex objects with their tits out just waiting to be scooped up by any old white guy who might come walking up off of Captain Cook’s ship. It was repulsive in the 1700’s, and it is repulsive now.
This entitled mentality is fundamentally incorrect, and has thus led to conflict and instances of violence, from that time Eddie had to broker a peace between Hawaiians and cocky Australian surfers held up in a hotel in the 1970s, or in 2006(ish), when a very famous surf team came to Bali, paddled out directly through a grieving family’s ash spreading, and the next day decided that the teenage locals needed to get out of the water so that they could shoot a party wave ad and a gand of dads (including the father of one of the authors of this piece) snapped their boards and threw their passports into the ocean, or as recently as last year, when a certain very tall white visiting correspondent from a competing publication treated our Native Hawaiian editor, Naz, like he was that tall correspondent’s waiter telling Naz to hurry up retrieving him one of the beers that Naz bought, and when Naz pulled out a cigarette, that tall correspondent said ‘I’ll take one of those’ and held out his hand expectantly.
While we can offer no solution or compel the industry at large to consider changes that’d require them to face their egos and do some sincere soul searching, when Big Surfing visits some of the best breaks in the world - most often located in some of the most underdeveloped countries in the world - their reflection of the situation cannot end with, ‘wow, my dollar is really strong here, these people are so lucky to have me visit’. The locals, the beach, and surfing deserve more than that.
The demands are not unreasonable. Don’t burn palettes in a bonfire on the beach in front of the RVCA house leaving nails in the sand for our kids to step on for days after. Don’t throw your garbage into our playgrounds. Don’t paddle through our funerals. Don’t be a white person on native land telling the native person to hurry up and serve you. Don’t destroy our reefs. You are a guest in our house, one that we did not invite. All that we ask, collectively, is for you to remember that.
