Tension 11 And The Beautiful, Battered State Of Bodyboarding

“What do you reckon happens to you if you sit in the middle of that thing? Are you going up or down?” I ask Chris White, whose spectacular shot of a circular wave roughly 60 kilometres off the West Australian coast recently went viral.

“I think if you go down, it’s certain death,” he laughs. “It’s funny, we just hopped off the phone with a wave engineer and he had no clue how it works. The rock shelf is stationary, it’s not going up and down, so how does it break on all sides at once, like a plunger?”

More questions than answers. Watch it for yourself. The clip is genuinely mind bending.

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The real reason for calling Chris, though, was to speak to the brain behind the Tension films. The original series, released between 2000 and 2007, were scrappy, prank heavy documents of slab hunting and bad ideas that stitched hardcore bodyboarding together with a Jackass level disregard for consequences. They became cult classics on the fringe and occasional public menaces when the jokes escaped containment and landed on A Current Affair or Today Tonight, framed as evidence of Australia’s moral decline. Which, naturally, only made them funnier.

Why resurrect Tension after two decades? And what does the return say about the current state of bodyboarding culture and its increasingly fragile industry?

Thankfully for Chris, he has never really operated inside the normal logic of employment. “I actually have no idea how I get by,” he chuckles. His side quests include podcasting, jiu jitsu, skateboarding, stand up comedy and a lifelong commitment to prone wave riding. “He’s one of those guys who’s just good at everything,” a co worker explained, sounding mildly annoyed about it.

Tension, to be clear, was a little before my time. But a quick survey of the office elders produced unanimous agreement. The vids were fucking sick. And even if you’ve never cared much for boog culture, it’s hard not to appreciate the sheer wave riding insanity threaded throughout the series.

The return of Tension, 20 years later, was a happy accident. Chris had put together a live show where he played old Tension clips to a crowd. It was meant to be a reunion gag. Instead, it landed with unexpected emotional force. “Almost every premiere, people would come up and say, ‘Dude, that just took me back,’” he says. “A lot of the people watching it in their teens, it was so nostalgic. They had the same feelings as when they used to go watch them.” The reaction stuck with him. “I thought that was pretty cool.” Cool enough that the very next day he bought a camera. “Literally the next day I went and bought a camera and just made the call. I’m going to do it again.”

What followed wasn’t a traditional production cycle. Tension 11 was released for free on YouTube, a deliberate decision that reflects both White’s instincts and the economic reality of niche surf media in 2025. The film itself isn’t monetised, but it isn’t charity either. There’s a director’s cut stripped of licensed music that can run ads. There’s merch. There were tour premieres. Enough to close the loop without turning the project into a hostage of CPMs. White isn’t pretending this is a scalable business. He’s just honest about how the puzzle fits together. “If any traffic can go to the YouTube, that’s great,” he says. “That’s more than enough.”

The process has changed, though. In the early 2000s, White could make an entire film in a week. “The first video I made, one week. The entire movie.” Tension 11 took months per section. “This one, I didn’t make a section in less than a month.” Part of that is higher standards. Part of it is family. Part of it is time catching up. “With family and everything, it’s just a whole different world.” Still, he resisted sanding it down into something glossy. “I wasn’t trying to make it too Hollywood. I wanted it to feel like the old ones, chucked together, but with better audio, better sound and a bit more effort.”

Coming back into filming forced White to take stock of the bodyboarding industry itself. “I felt like I was right up to speed with everything, and then the first few years filming back, I realised I was completely out of touch.” In his view, the sport is still alive, just smaller and older. “I feel like it’s still pretty solid, and it’s sort of run by bodyboarders now, as opposed to back in the day.” At a grassroots level, the passion is undeniable. “Doing the tour, seeing the turnouts in South Australia and Newcastle, there’s a really good club level core mentality.” The demographic, however, is impossible to ignore. “The demographic was definitely forty to fifty year old males with a few of their kids.” There were groms, but not many. “It was an overwhelmingly ageing population.” White isn’t catastrophising, but he is realistic. “One of the huge goals going forward is getting all the older guys I grew up with in there, but also pushing the younger kids. The way back is just for it to be seen as a cool sport. Then kids want to do it.”

One reason bodyboarding has continued to punch above its cultural weight, even as participation has thinned, is that it quietly trained an entire generation of surf filmmakers. Many of the people responsible for shaping modern surf cinematography started prone. Dav Fox. James Kates. Todd Barnes. Andrew Kaineder. Tom Jennings. Guys who learned to read water without fins, to sit deeper, to hold positions others couldn’t, and to make footage from angles that didn’t exist in the stand up playbook. White sees it clearly and understands why many of them eventually drifted toward surfing. “They just couldn’t do what they loved and get paid,” he says. Bodyboarding didn’t lose them because of a lack of talent. It lost them because talent still needs rent money.

There was also, for a long time, a cultural war layered over all of this. Stand up versus prone. Equipment masquerading as identity. White remembers it. “I reckon there was a huge divide early on.” He credits travellers like Mitch Rawlins with helping soften the edges. “I feel like he was pretty fundamental in breaking that divide.” These days, White barely registers it. “If someone says something like that to me now, I don’t get offended in the slightest.” More telling was what happened at the Tension 11 premieres, where surfers kept approaching him to say the same thing. “I’m not a bodyboarder, I’m a surfer, but I can really appreciate the wave riding in that movie.” The shift feels real. Less tribalism. More overlap. With respected stand ups like Creed McTaggart, Noa Deane, Harry Bryant and Ollie Henry bodyboarding and doing it well, the old arguments have started to look childish.

The final section of Tension 11 makes White’s case more clearly than any manifesto could. A cherry picked supercut of bodyboarding’s greatest hits set to Parkway Drive. Heavy slabs. Mutant sections. Aerials that look like physics errors. When it came together, he knew exactly what it was. “I watched it and I was just so proud to be a bodyboarder.” His prescription for skeptics is simple. “If anyone ever writes off bodyboarding, just send them that section.” If it doesn’t work, he shrugs. “They probably won’t ever change their opinion.” Which is fine. Bodyboarding has never survived by consensus.