Another Spy Team Rider - Jake Kirschenbaum - Grabs the Cover of Eastern Surf Magazine!
Spy Optics's very own 20 year old Jake Kirschenbaum is on the latest, very well deserved, ESM cover charging the infamous Pipeline, Hawaii.
This outstanding East Coast surfer of Cocoa Beach, Florida has proven himself in one of the toughest proving grounds known to surfing.
Way to go Jake!
- Surfeyes.com
Spy Optics Surfer Keala Kennelly leaves the pro tour for a new HBO series: "John from Cincinnati"
By DEAN KUIPERS - KEALA GRABS FRONT COVER OF LA CITYBEAT
The hollow, monstrous wave on the southeast end of Tahiti was Keala Kennelly’s favorite stop on the Association of Surfing Professionals Women’s World Tour, a thick, bone-breaking wave that drove onto a shallow reef, and on which she seemed invincible. Called Teahupo’o (cho-poo) by the locals, or sometimes just the End of the Road – because that’s where the road stopped – Kennelly was the first woman to get towed into deadly, 10-foot barrels there, and she won the Billabong Pro Tahiti contests there in 2000, 2002, and 2003.
So when tour officials decided in 2006 the women wouldn’t surf there anymore, Kennelly’s frustration was rising. No big barrels meant no big challenge for her and less chances to excel. Then HBO came calling and the 28-year-old boldly did what she has always done: dropped in.
Kennelly is now living in downtown Los Angeles, far from her beloved Kauai where she grew up, and appears as a regular character in HBO’s new show, John from Cincinnati.
In Hollywood terms, she’s scored another great wave, with potential for lots of the kinds of media attention that sponsored athletes learn to crave. John from Cincinnati creator David Milch cut the strings to his massively influential show, Deadwood, in order to work on this new series, which he described on Variety.com as being “about surfing and the tragic, incoherent world at the border of Mexico and the United States … . It’s where the water’s polluted, and nobody has documents. Drugs are being brought in by the ton, and people are found dead in the estuaries – and that’s just the beginning.” Sounds like fans of Deadwood and HBO’s edgy fare will have a new show to obsess over, and Kennelly will have a new opportunity to either shine or get worked.
“David has only written the script up to where we are filming so nobody ever knows what is going to happen next,” Kennelly writes via e-mail from locations in L.A. and San Diego, where the series is being filmed on Imperial Beach. “In the beginning, you think it’s about this surfing family that is totally dysfunctional. Then … all this really weird stuff starts happening. It definitely has a supernatural element.”
Kennelly’s character, Kai, is a surfer, board shaper, and artist struggling to pull her surf-king boyfriend out of a whirlpool of drug addiction. The dark side of the surf culture is familiar territory for series collaborator Kem Nunn, who is infamous for the desperate, criminal, and even comically satanic depictions in his surf novels like Tapping the Source. None of which is that much of a stretch for Kennelly. Growing up fully immersed in the culture on Kauai, she lived in a geodesic dome designed by her bohemian mother, who split from the family one day while Keala was at school and left a note on her pillow. Having always been a total tomboy, her refuge became the surf and she was pretty much treated as a sibling by soon-to-be three-time ASP world champion Andy Irons and his brother, Bruce.
“When I was growing up, surfing was everything to me,” she says. “It was my identity, it was my escape, it was the only way I felt like I could truly express myself. It made me feel like I had value as a person.”
Surf culture companies spotted that value straight away, and Kennelly jumped into the pro tour at an early age. Though she never won a world championship, she placed as high as third in 2003 and has always been a standout when the surf gets heavy, dominating at places like Teahupo’o and Pipeline. You may recall seeing her grab some good waves at Pipe in the movie, Blue Crush, in which she played herself. Not looking forward to getting nibbled to death by teenage girls who can rip in two-foot beach-break, she’s using the show as a much-needed hiatus and a transition to a new surfer profile: She’s now going to be the first woman in Billabong’s Adventure Series.
The Adventure Series is the next evolution in the sport and how athletes get paid; in it, top surfers are sponsored to tour the globe searching for, as Kennelly says “the heaviest, hollowest, most perfect waves in the world” and get them on film. “It will be the perfect match for my surfing style,” she adds. “A lot better than a 25-minute heat situation.”
Kennelly is an upbeat, aggressive, quick-witted woman, fun to talk to, and unlikely to take any shit from anyone. Did I mention her towing into 10-foot Teauhpo’o? That’s 10 foot as measured Hawaiian-style, off the back of the wave, which in the case of that particular break means being inside a tube big enough to drive a Greyhound bus through with a 50-foot thick slab of uncountable tons of water over your head breaking so fast it dredges almost all of the water off the skin-shredding reef. Good times! The resolve and the risk involved in surfing that kind of hazard has led her to some critical and even political positions.
“It was really hard in the beginning to be a woman trying to get respect in a male-dominated sport. I took a lot of hard knocks over the years,” she says. “There will always be the macho-man mentality that won’t die in some guys, but for the most part, a lot of guys have changed their mind about women surfers.”
Enlightened or not, she notes that inequalities persist in pro surfing. “The men make an average three-to-five times what the women make. That pay gap between the genders is a problem in society in general, but it’s definitely amplified in the sports world.” With that in mind, she and her colleagues on the tour are trying to entice the mainstream world to take another look at the image of women’s surfing. She mentions names like Revlon, Tampax, and Gillette.
And Hollywood. Kennelly says her sponsors are all thrilled by this HBO development, adding, “More people will see me in five minutes on the show than would see me in 10 years on tour. So, if you are looking at numbers and exposure, then I am ahead of the game. I feel really lucky to be in the middle of such an exciting project.”
Stepping up to the new challenge, she has done her best to tackle Los Angeles, loving the diversity in the people and the fact that you can tweak your restaurant orders to make them more healthy without so much hassle. She’s upset by the traffic, by the homeless people, and by the fact that no one dances at the clubs. (“I mean, seriously, come on, people!”) But, despite the bad water comparisons between Hawaii and California, she’s found a few things to like here.
“I like rooftop pool decks, watching the sunset. I like mojitos made to perfection. I like frou frou cocktails (lichee-infused dragon fruit martini with cucumber mint juice in a chilled martini glass frosted with a citrus sugar rim and just the slightest squeeze of shnazzberry) … Shnazzberry? I just totally made that up, but it actually sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?”
Right there, she’s hit on one of the big differences between men and women in the water, and the reason she will triumph out there, beyond the end of the road: her sense of fun.
“Have you ever been in a line-up when there are a lot of girls in the water?” she asks. “It changes the whole dynamic.
They are laughing and giggling and some of them are absolutely ripping. Surfing should be fun. That’s why we all got into it in the first place.”
- Surfeyes.com
Spy Team Rider Parks Bonifay gets the Cover of Alliance Wakeboard!
PARKS BONIFAY WINS THE CARNIVAL IN ORLANDO
Spy Sunglasses Team Rider, Parks Bonifay, wins “the sports most important rail contest” as stated by the press release for The Carnival, after being off the water for over a year from a serious knee injury. This was Parks first contest after being sidelined for so long. The crowd at The Carnival were on the edge of there seats for the final runs between Parks Bonifay and Keith Lidberg.
Keith had to pass up four other riders in order to knock out the defending champ of the last Carnival, Parks Bonifay. Parks stepped up to the plate and made Keith bring out all his big tricks, but in the end it just was not enough to take down Parks.
Looks like the Park is back in the swing of things again…
Be sure to check out the June issue of Alliance Wakeboard Magazine with Parks on the cover and a 20 questions interview with Spy's Optics Tino Santori.
- Surfeyes.com
