Finally, when the force of the wave has receded, Mel shoots his board over its face and down its back. The ride is over.
Sitting here on a plastic bucket that’s probably a motion sickness receptacle, I’m struggling to remember the last time I had fun. People who do karaoke probably have fun in the way I’m imagining. As do, maybe, skeet shooters. Surfers definitely have fun in that way, the way going down a slide is fun when you’re a kid: anticipatory, goal-oriented, breath-altering. Some crude calculations reveal that I haven’t felt anything like that in at least six years, not since the last time I went surfing.
For a sporting event whose dramatic stakes easily outweigh those of any other—the Super Bowl may feel like life-or-death, but it’s not—Mavericks is anticlimactic. While we wait for the closing ceremony to begin, the stage is occupied by a band that mostly plays Sublime songs for close to an hour. Much of the crowd clears out before the ceremony even starts. The parking lot looks and feels like Sunday afternoon on a college campus after a Spring Fling weekend: the sun is low, boyfriends are offering up their jackets, everyone has mild heat stroke. I smell terrible and feel like I’ve been slowly drinking vodka out of a water bottle for hours. It’s nice. The beer garden is shutting down, and the surfers are nowhere to be seen. They’re probably eating between four and five thousand calories and hopefully taking a hot shower.
Finally Jeff Clark, who runs the local surf shop and began the contest in 1999, takes the mic, smiles, and recounts some of the day’s highlights. “We saw these guys do things like pulling into the barrel, just getting blown up, milking it to the inside, trying to do floaters on 15-foot elevator drops,” he says. “It was fun.” Clark calls the finalists up to the stage one by one: Peter Mel, Alex Martins, Greg Long, Zach Wormhoudt, Mark Healy, Shawn Dollar. Their faces, which nobody’s seen all day, have a blue cast to them. It’s hard to imagine them truly warming up for at least another 24 hours.
Peter Mel is the winner. When his name is announced, the audience goes benevolently wild. Clark puts a kelp lei over Mel’s head and gestures generously to the award board. The prize is $50,000. Mel, who sports a full mustache, looks like the man on the Brawny paper towels logo, but swarthier and even more handsome. He takes the mic from Clark, grins, and looks at his fellow competitors. “We do the mutual thing, you know, as a brotherhood,” Mel explains. “We decided to split the cash.” At this, all six guys embrace in a rowdy group hug.
I come back the next day for another look. It’s achingly perfect out, even more so now that the Jumbotron has been dismantled and the road is clear. The surfers are already gone; most just drove home after dinner and went to bed. It might be one of the only mornings that these guys have slept in.
There is no place more beautiful than where I am right now, and nobody cooler than the people who surf here. I am made aware of these kinds of superlatives every time I come back to California, and I luxuriate for a few minutes in the experience of knowing something for sure without having to think about it at all. And then I drive away.
RAFFI KHATCHADOURIAN
The Chaos of the Dice
FROM THE NEW YORKER
IN ORDER TO MEET FALAFEL, the highest-ranked backgammon player in the world, I took a Greyhound bus to Atlantic City, and then hopped a jitney to the Borgata Hotel. Falafel’s real name is Matvey Natanzon, but no one calls him that, not even his mother, who calls him Mike, the name that he adopted when they emigrated from Israel to Buffalo—one leg in a long journey that began in Soviet Russia. Now even Falafel calls himself Falafel.
Falafel was in Atlantic City to support a friend he calls The Bone, a professional poker player who was registered in a tournament at the Borgata. The Bone, who is from Ukraine by way of Brooklyn, used to play backgammon, but he switched to poker because there is more money in it. Falafel is either a purist, or unable to master poker, or too lazy to really try, or all of the above. He is committed to backgammon, which is his main source of income—to the extent that he can find wealthy people who want to lose to him in cash-only private games. There are more of these than one might expect, but not a lot. Finding them and hanging on to them is a skill.
The jitney that travels between the Atlantic City hotels is run-down and slow, a horrible way to travel. Falafel would never take it. He can make $10,000 in half an hour playing backgammon; he can make many times that in an evening—and he can lose it all just as easily. The money comes and goes. Currently, he has no home. He has no driver’s license. Until just a few months ago, he had no cell phone, no bank account, and no credit card. Pretty much everything that he owns can fit into a large black suitcase. Still, he allows himself certain luxuries, and one of them is to hire a car rather than sit in a jitney.