Like the CT, Rod Cunthorpe Returns The Superbank

Ten years ago, as the WSL took over from the ASP, premier surf scribe was on hand on the Superbank and falls foul of the new regime.

Rod Cunthorpe here, Bugle Fans. You’ve by now heard the news that Snapper Rocks will return to the Championship Tour in 2025. And while the wave is no Blacksmiths Breakwall, Middleton Beach, or Torquay Point, it least does have history. The Superbank was the first wave ever surfed on the Gold Coast, way back in 2001. As surfing’s premier scribe, I too have history at the event. 

It was here in 2007 that Dingo Morrison once tied me to a bin in the Duranbah carpark, wrapped sausages around my feet and then took bets on whether a goanna or a feral bush rat would bite first. It was a goanna for the record, and a consortium of Taj Burrows, Luke Hitchings and Guillerme Herdy won the 50-buck sweepstake. 

However, it was probably in 2014 that is most memorable. It was a defining time for surfing. The WSL had bought the ASP for a magic bean, a two-bedroom Tugan apartment for Rabbit Bartholomew and three Kelly Slater’s massages for Dirk Ziff’s wife. I travelled up from Rooty Hill in the Datsun 120 Y, dominated the north coast premier wave at Scotts Head before setting up camp in the Snapper Rocks carpark. I lived in the car, ate like a king from the VIP’s area compost bin and composed the following report. Written in crayon on the back of a gorilla grip front pad stolen from Bede Durbidge’s locker, it went a little like this…

March, 16, 2014: Rod’s Final Rendition

I’ll let you know one thing, you donkey fuckers, the concrete walls of the ASP’s Torture Chamber For Repeat Offenders, located in a secret bunker just to the north of Kirra, is no place to watch the Quiksilver Pro. In fact, it was no place to watch anything, unless you count Peter Joli’s graffiti, a desperate scrawl in his blood that now serves as a cursive warning to those who have fallen foul of the ASP’s new thought police. 

The fuckers, I tell ya, have put some thought into this. Taking cues from the highly successful and completely legal operation at Guantanamo Bay, where prisoners were secluded for weeks on end and force-fed a diet of high-volume death metal and waterboarding, the new honchos that have stolen surfing had added some fiendish new twists. 

For one, Joey Turpel’s voice, on loop commentating a 5.65 wave of Travis Logie, was penetrating my skull at a decibel level that equated to the sound of my next-door neighbour Karen orgasming around a John Farnham-signed dildo. The waterboarding was no less tortuous and while I wasn’t being held underwater for minutes at a time, that began to sound appealing after being forced to watch, Clockwork Orange style, the same backhand turn of Bianca Buitendag for six consecutive days. 

And all this for what? Like Chapelle Corby, Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Rumsfeld, I was an innocent. I had simply rocked up to the Quiksilver Pro, as per usual, with the surfing world keen to hear from its greatest-ever chronicler. I mean isn’t that just what the surfing world needs; A highly opinionated and very average surfer sniping away from the peripheries of pro surfing? Don’t you, the reader, want to hear a constant shitstream of snide comments about how fucked up pro surfing is?

Anyway, I was soon to find out that a pro surfing coup had taken place without my knowledge and there were some new sheriffs in town. And I tell ya, I found out the hard way. As was vigorously wanking over a lifesized cardboard cut out of Sally Shitsribbons, perched provocatively on the new webcast desk, I was truncheoned over the head by the new ASP Police Commissioner Kieren Perrow. It was only my previous close friendship with KP, forged over a combined love of two-foot beachies and the early 19th-century romantic poets, that I was let off with a warning, and only eight stitches. 

My luck didn’t last - it was just after I had been busted breaking into the competitor's area, my successful negotiation of the twelve-foot moat and eight Cossack riot police marred by the fact X-ray machine saw straight through my disguise as Mick Fanning’s dog. After being dipped in tar and catapulted from the area by the Visit Queensland-sponsored Ejector Gun, I was starting to realise this new regime really meant business.

I barely had time to re-inflate my punctured lung, before my brand-new GoPro was confiscated for abuse of media rights. I mean who’d have thought taping a camera to Felipe Todelo’s left testicle while he was having a post-heat rub down would constitute some type of breaking of the new media restrictions? 

The final straw, and the one that signalled the start of my enforced incarceration, was when I pulled out my Nokia 3310 and tried to tweet a fantastically snide comment about Dane Reynold’s backside. Charged with not using a Samsung Smartphone in the Surf Competition Area, I was covered in a black hood made from Dion Atkinson’s pubic hair, strapped to a jetski and towed underwater in an oxygenless forced rendition to the ASP’s secret torture chamber. 

Fuck knows who won the comp, there’s a good chance, that just like Nelson Mandela, I will die in jail an innocent man, just for a more worthy cause. In fact, if you are reading this, the Editor has managed to get a hold of this final scribe, which I am writing in semen on the back of my ASP rap sheet. Fans, it was good while it lasted....