Do It For Your Postcode
Pros and Joes delivered a thrilling ABB Grand Final, in a format that remains undefeated.
You can leave your apparel sponsor like John John left Hurley. You can leave your coach/stepdad, like Medina left Charlie. You can even leave your namesake surfboard brand, like Jordy did with the SMTH shapes last season, and still go on a title run.
In surfing, most public breakups are just business. But, if there’s one kind of breakup in surfing that is rarely forgivable, it’s this: one does not change their boardriders club.
The Australian Boardriders Battle Grand Final is boardriders culture in its rawest form. 42 of Australia’s top clubs competing in a tag-team format for the glory of being crowned best in the country. Calling it rowdy would be an understatement. More babies were inoculated by stray beer spittle from dads screaming expletives atop Burleigh Hill than there were comments of disgust over Dan Mann winning the latest Stab in the Dark.
It was the second team competition to hit the Gold Coast in a month. Three weekends ago, the World Cup Challenge ran at Snapper Rocks — a newer event that invites clubs from around the world, not just Australia. The prize purses are modest for both events ($22,000 for ABB, $6,000 for WCC), but the spirit is identical: all-or-nothing competitive grit, with clubs surfing almost entirely for honour. And there’s no honour in infidelity, not even in a wandering eye. If you left your hometown club to suit your career path, you can go join Kelly in the doghouse.
Occy gave us the short of it on Saturday morning, dripping wet. With his arm wrapped around a JS, he told me, “I’ve been with Billabong for 40 years and I’m not thinking about leaving them anytime soon,” he puffed. “There are so many different reasons why you might leave a sponsor — if it’s them letting you go, or you finding new ground or better pay — that’s business. But leaving your club? Ooft. That’s heart and blood — way more taboo than any sponsorship split.”
Alister Reginato shared, somewhere in between serving as the MVP of North Shore, that “clubs are a lot more like family relationships. Take Sophie McCulloch, for instance. She flew here from Newcastle last night to compete with us. And then she’s going right back down after this to qualify for the CT. She’s gone out of her way to come and support.”
“Let’s say someone was offered $100,000 to switch clubs — as if there was a boardriders draft. Would people switch in that case?”
Alister smirked. “Well… in the state of things nowadays, I don’t know too many surfers who would turn that down.”
Onto a dangerous game of hypotheticals, I took the question to Hughie Vaughan before North Shelly headed into the semis.
“Nah, even then, I don’t reckon everyone would switch because you always have the backing of your home club from day one. They trust you and have faith in you no matter what. With new sponsors, you have to build that trust, and it would be like that with a new club.”
Gone are the days of clubs being little more than a few cases of piss, a foldout table and some clipboards. Some are almost sophisticated. Take Burleigh Boardriders (2024 ABB Winners), who went from being the most degenerate club on the Gold Coast, to Australia’s richest club by changing leadership and operating the club like a business — hosting the Single Fin luncheon at the Burleigh Pavilion, which gives them enough money to run for the whole year, as well as send their juniors around the world to compete.
Burleigh’s biggest rival is the equally power-stacked Snapper Rocks. Word on the hill was that some parents even considered relocating the whole family to Coolangatta just to save their kids from killing any sacred cows later in life.
Sheldon Simkus of Snapper offered: “I know a few people off the top of my head that have chopped and changed between boardriders clubs. I could name a handful of people, but I don’t want to throw them under the bus. In a way, I get it. Like, you grow up somewhere, then you move for work or something. A lot of people move to the Gold Coast and Northern Rivers because of the Surfing Australia Center and they want to excel and move to a different club. You want to compete, you want to meet community.”
“Ha. Brad Gerlach ditched Palmy to surf for us,” Ash “Champ” Humphries of Burleigh was happy to spill, as he raised two Jim Beams in the air for Maddy Job’s run in the quarterfinals.
“Anyway, he’s back in America now. There used to be some poaching back in the day. Snapper always tried to poach our guys. Some of them would surf for Snapper for a bit, but they’d always come back to us. Nowadays, if Snapper ever tried to poach anyone from us again, Jay (Phillips) and I would have a punch-up.”
However, Snapper was nowhere to be found on Sunday because, in a freak circumstance, they didn’t make it past the first round.
The rain started to pick up midday as we rounded into the semifinals — Burleigh’s day was over, with an upsetting loss to North Narrabeen, Kingscliff, and North Shelly. Though the swell was slightly smaller than Saturday’s keg-fest, the point had glassed off into a three-to-four-foot spectacle.
Semifinal two saw the highest-scoring wave of the event with Nyxie Ryan belting out a 9.08 for Lennox-Ballina, which was ultimately not enough to knock North Shelly out of third to advance to the finals.
What followed was what the commentary booth was calling “the best final in club surfing history.” Hughie Vaughan of North Shelly, Dakoda Walters of Byron Bay, Alister Reginato of North Shore, and Chris Zaffis all came out of the gates swinging with back-to-back-to-back-to-back high-point rides. Hughie decided to risk it all and successfully punted to the air, giving North Shelly the lead.
Tensions built when Zeb Stokes, Kawana’s priority surfer, couldn’t find a score after almost 20 minutes, then decided to block Sophie McCulloch. “I’m glad these boys get to feel like men,” the CT veteran later cracked, unimpressed by the judges call (or lack thereof).
Keiren Perrow jumped Byron from fourth to first with a 7.70 at 25 minutes, finally knocking North Shelly from the top spot. For the remaining 30 minutes, North Shelly, Byron, and North Shore shuffled places on the scoreboard countless times.
With four minutes remaining in the heat, North Shelly led Byron by a mere 0.04 points. Hughie scanned the horizon, anxiously hoping for one more wave to secure their lead before he made the sprint up the hill. It takes about two minutes to run it — Hughie missed it by seconds last year in an upset that still makes the ABB highlight reels.
3:25 left. Hughie starts to paddle but misses it. His teammates threw their hands in the air in distress, shouting, “Get him in!”
2:50 left. Alistar smashes one from up the point. Zeb Stokes on the one behind him. Dakoda Walters on the one behind that. I was getting whiplash from turning back and forth between the projector and the screaming teams behind me.
2:00. Hughie pulls the trigger in a last-ditch effort. A huge, tubing closeout section confronts him. Nerves of steel and a full rotation later, the hill erupts.
Just under two minutes left and all four surfers were still in the water, hurriedly paddling towards the Pav. If Dakota Walters was about ten seconds faster on his run, it’d be a different story. He misses the bonus 5-points from finishing on time.
You could hang your washing out on the tension in the air while scores dropped. Teams bounced on their toes. Faces glowing with anticipation. Hughie’s last wave returns an 8.08 and North Shelly explodes. The Stab High Sydney winner crowd surfs off the platform and into a sea of black shirts.
It wasn’t until later in the evening at home watching highlights that I better understood why Snapper didn’t make it very far: Occy creased his board on his first wave, in his first and only heat. He tried to ride it out but could only muster one turn. And then I remembered: Occy is a Cronulla boy.
If 30 years of loyalty isn’t long enough to absolve you of wrongdoing, I can only hope that wherever in the world Brad Gerlach is, he’s okay.
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