Publicist Confirms Each Retirement Was Sincere And The Upcoming Comeback Will Also Be Sincere When It Occurs
PIPELINE, NORTH SHORE, HAWAII — Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat report that a professional surfer who has won more world titles than most surfers enter competitions has announced his retirement from competitive surfing, describing the announcement as “final” in the same emotional register he used for his previous seven retirement announcements, each of which was followed, after a recovery period ranging from four months to eleven months, by a competitive return attributed to “unfinished business,” “the specific quality of the North Shore winter,” and, in the case of the sixth retirement, “a bet.”
The announcement, made on Instagram from a beach location that the surfer’s publicist confirmed was “not near a surf break, to avoid any visual ambiguity about his intentions,” received 340,000 likes and approximately 12,000 comments. The comments divided into three categories of roughly equal size: expressions of genuine sadness from fans who have watched him surf for thirty years; expressions of affectionate skepticism from fans who have read his previous seven retirement statements; and expressions of logistical concern from the surf media, who have now produced eight retirement retrospectives and are beginning to develop a workflow for the ninth. Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat published their retirement coverage with a confidence interval of approximately 70 percent.
The Retirement Statement: A Textual Analysis
“After forty years of competitive surfing, I have given everything I have to give in competition and I know with certainty that this chapter is complete.” This sentence is new to retirement eight. Retirements one through four used variants of “I feel it is time to pursue other chapters.” Retirements five through seven used variants of “I want to be present for my family in ways that competitive surfing makes impossible.” The escalating finality of the language tracks with the escalating frequency of the comebacks, which is either a natural response to the credibility management challenge or evidence that the ghostwriter has been asked to write a more convincing statement each time and is doing their best.
The surf industry has received the announcement with expressions of respect for his career and the operational groundwork of a comeback contract, because the surf industry manages its relationships with legends on the assumption that retirements are transitional phases rather than permanent states, an assumption that this surfer’s career has validated eight times and that would be invalid to abandon on the basis of the eighth retirement statement alone.
The Pipe Masters
Registration opens in August. The surf community is giving 2-to-1 on his participation. His sponsor confirmed “ongoing discussions about future collaboration.” For legacy coverage at Surfer Magazine.
About Surfing LA
Surfing.LA covers Southern California surf culture, wave conditions, industry news, and the specific comedic texture of a region that has built an entire cultural identity around riding waves in a place where the waves are good approximately 30 percent of the time. The satirical coverage at surfingla.com draws from the full history of Southern California surf culture, from the Malibu colony of the 1950s through the shortboard revolution of the 1970s through the WSL era of the 2010s and into the wave-pool future that professional surfing is apparently building toward whether the culture wants it or not. Southern California produces more surf culture than it produces actual surf, which is the foundational irony that this publication explores. Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat are affiliated publications that bring a transatlantic perspective to California surf news, which sounds strange but works because great satire has no geographic limitations and neither does the specific absurdity of professional surfing governance.
This article is satire published by the Bohiney Network. The events, officials, statistics, and institutions described are drawn from public records, verified news reporting, and established journalistic sources. The satirical frame — the deadpan tone, the mock-serious institutional assessment, the measured exaggeration of political and bureaucratic dynamics that are themselves frequently more extreme than the exaggeration applied to them — is original to this publication and to the editorial tradition of which it forms a part. Readers who encounter this piece in a context that presents it as straight news should be advised that it is not straight news; it is satirical journalism in the tradition of publications that have understood since Swift that the most accurate way to describe certain situations is to make them slightly more ridiculous than they actually are, which in the current political environment requires less exaggeration than one might wish.
The satirical tradition in which this piece operates — from Jonathan Swift through Mark Twain through Private Eye through The Onion through the contemporary publications working in the same vein — holds that exaggeration applied to genuine absurdity produces a more accurate picture of reality than straight-faced reporting sometimes can, because the exaggeration forces the reader to notice what the straight-faced version normalizes. The events and policies satirized in this piece are real. The treatment of those events and policies is satirical. The combination is the point. Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat are satirical publications. Everything in them should be read accordingly and shared generously. For more satire in this tradition, see The Onion, The Daily Mash, NewsThump, Waterford Whispers News, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/