“If you can’t have a spectacular ride, have a spectacular wipeout. It’s good for the sport." I don't know exactly when Martin Potter gave us that pithy little 

. Having suffered through what feels like three or four lifetimes' worth of Potter's humorless WCT commentary, I wonder if in fact if actually said it at all. But never mind. The point stands. Wipeouts are great. An unlikely gift to the Sport of Kings; a point of difference between surfing and every other action-heavy sport. Like tuberiding and noseriding, an A-grade wipeout is nearly as esoteric as it is dramatic. I am baffled as to why there aren't a dozen or more commemorative crosses lining the bluff at Shipsterns, or why the Boneyard area at Mavericks isn't filled with real human bones. The forces at play during a bad wipeout are so far beyond me. Nathan Fletcher is still drawing breath after that vaporizing Teahupoo wipeout a couple of years back? Clearly we're still in the training wheels stage in our understanding of wave-reef hydrodynamics. So much violence. So much raw power. And for the most part, so little consequence.

The upshot being that wipeouts are like very short scary movies. With very few exceptions, they are presented for our entertainment. You can see this going all the way to Doc Ball, who chuckled his way through the captions his 

 photo book, which came out in 1946, before the word "wipeout" was even in use. "Taste the brine," was one of Ball's expressions for getting ejected from a surfboard, along with "smeared" and "the royal works." Bruce Brown dropped a half-dozen choice of wipeouts into the opening sequence of 

. The debut issue of SURFER has at least a half-dozen wipeout photos, some of them taking place in huge surf.

Rock climbers don't get to mess around like that. There are no tightly-edited "Free Solo Spills at El Cap" videos on YouTube, like the annual Billabong XXL Awards "Worst Wipeout" nominees. Base jumpers aren't wistfully shaking their heads and talking to the camera about their gnarliest fall, like guys do in Surfline's "Greatest Wipeouts of All Time" series, because those base jumpers are pulped.

We wipe out horribly. We pop up and take a breath, bark a laugh to whoever's nearby, paddle back spiking on adrenaline, and try again. Make a list of all the reasons why surfing is a great sport, and that one has to be in the Top Five.

THANK YOU FOR WIPING OUT!

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