It’s confusing when something abruptly goes from funny to serious. Richard Pryor pulled this trick often in his standup act; you're zinging along atop some delirious gutter-mouthed riff on relationship hassles or the jerk neighbor next door, then Pryor changes direction and you’re onto with something else entirely—divorce, drugs, racism—and basically feeling dizzy at how sudden the change was. 

Kelly Slater’s wavepool reveal did that to a lot of people on Friday. 

Wavepools, for me, have always been something to either laugh at or igmore. That was true in the early ‘70s when almost every surf movie had a segment on Arizona’s Big Surf wavepool, and we’d chortle at the slow-motion kook carnage as the Tempe locals got steamrolled by their gurgly toilet-flusher of a wave. It was true just a couple of months ago, when the overhyped Surf Snowdonia pool proved itself the Chevy Vega of artificial surf, breaking down roughly every 12th wave. 

Unlike some, I never felt affronted by wavepools. I steered clear, but not out of righteousness; in younger days the idea of being part of a boozy wavepool junket to an oil-rich sheikdom would have appealed hugely. In my personal cartography of surfing, wavepools were way off to the side, in some unincorporated area whose boundaries were irony and humor and mild contempt.

Then Friday happened. Before Slater completed the first wave in his clip, I wanted to get in shape, order a new board, call Lewis Samuels and see if he might get in touch with Kelly on my behalf to apologize for anything I’ve ever said that might have offended him and thus kill any chance of getting a press pass or whatever to ride his amazing freshwater miracle wave. My already-weak connection to surfing environmentalism took a hit. How big a carbon footprint does each Slater wave leave? Who cares? I wondered how proud and beautiful Tommy Golsby-Smith will look holding the Australian flag during the opening ceremonies for the 2020 Olympic Games, with the sun behind him glinting off the new Slater-blueprinted pool somewhere just west of Tokyo Bay.

Yet I am fighting these feelings. Because I am old, and old people don’t like change. Because I could have the finest board on earth and the fitness of Michel Bourez and still be odds-on for going head over heels on takeoff at Kelly's pool, just out of sheer nerves. 

But mostly because I believe, deeply, that the joy of surfing is in fact built on pillars of difficulty and frustration and chance and flux and wasted time and unmet desire. Do you think the joy of wave riding would still be there without all the suffering? I do not. Anyway, looks like we’re going to find out.

KELLY'S MIND-BENDING NEW WAVEPOOL HAS ARRIVED. NOW WHAT?

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