It is not just because people don’t surf that they may not watch it. Very few people do gymnastics, or dive, or pole vault. Even fewer compete at an elite level, enabling them to grasp the subtleties of scoring. But it’s easier to understand what is at stake with these sports, because we understand the basic laws of gravity, the natural bend of the human body, the force it takes to spring to impossible heights, and the reasonable limitations of friction.
Surfing takes place in a world most people have never even entered — the ocean. And even those who may have ventured into the beckoning sea have rarely encountered the swirling, shifting, unpredictable environment once their feet no longer touch the earth.
Of those who have, while they may have felt the rise and fall as the waves move from swell to breaking crests, felt the majesty and buoyancy of salt water, few have a sense of what it feels like to fly along an open face, held by a force that confounds gravity, or to freefall from the height of a ten-foot building, leashed to a board with sharp points on its tip and bottom.