Honolulu Lite
Charles Memminger
It's bad enough that the French are trying to horn in and get a piece of the post-Iraq war reconstruction action, but now they are trying to deprive a couple of Hawaii surfers of a prize for surfing the year's biggest wave. French surfers try to steal
‘biggest wave’ from HawaiiThere are now five finalists for the Billabong XXL "Biggest Wave of the Year" contest. Two Hawaii residents, Noah Johnson and Makua Rothman, and Australian Cheyne Horan rode 60-plus-foot waves on Nov. 26 at Jaws on Maui and have the pictures to prove it. It was assumed that one of them would win the $60,000 prize for riding the biggest wave.
Then, coming out of nowhere like an anti-war veto at the United Nations, France has the audacity to say that two of its guys, Fred Basse and Sebastian St. Jean, rode larger waves at some cream-puff spot called Belharra Reef off the French coast on March 10.
Two points: 1) If the contest is for riding the biggest wave of the year, the year being 2002, then the Frenchies missed the deadline, and 2) what kind of a wussy name is Sebastian St. Jean for a surfer?
I've seen photos of all the entries (www.billabongxxl.com), and there's no way you can compare Jaws with Belharra, which, I believe, in French means "big comfy pillow."
Jaws is called Jaws because when the wave jacks up on the reef and the enormous lip pours over, it makes "A Perfect Storm" look like "A Flawed Cold Front."
To be towed into a 60-foot wave at Jaws, you've gotta have a humongous pair of, ah, surf trunks, my friend. That surf spot is so scary that when it starts breaking big, most surfers not only will not get in the water, but many actually move to Kansas for the season.
IN THE PHOTOS of Makua, Cheyne and Noah riding Jaws, the waves are so enormous that the three guys look like ants, ants on surfboards. To be more specific, they look like those really tiny ants that hang out by the kitchen sink, not the big red ones in the garage. And it's like some ant-hating psychopath has Superglued little surfboards to the tiny ants' feet and taken them to Maui and forced them to ride waves that are way out of their league. OK. It's not the best analogy in the world, but you get the idea.
The French wave, while pretty big, looks like it's made from some soft and safe material, like Nerf. And the French surfers don't look like ants, they look, and I'm not trying to be nasty here, but they look like frogs. Not those teeny tiny chirping frogs on the Big Island, but those huge buffo toads that show up in your yard after a heavy rain.
And in the photos, you can tell the French surfers are kind of squatting down, froglike, trying to make the waves look bigger than they actually are. The worst thing is that the mushy Nerf waves look so safe that I'd probably go out in them, even though surfing large waves is against my religion (I'm a devout coward). What's really going to hurt the French surfers' chances of winning, though, is that if you look really closely, on the side of the wave, you can make out Jerry Lewis floating on an air mattress drinking a glass of champagne.
The winner of the competition will be announced on Friday in Anaheim, Calif. I'm sure the judges will not play favorites and will pick the surfer on the largest wave, in honor of Iraq, which America liberated, no thanks to France.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com