Brothers Brace for Surf Battle

At least we’ll be spared a proud father waving inane signs from the bleachers when pro surfing’s version of the Williams sisters meet today in the fourth round of the Bluetorch Pro at Huntington Beach.

Pete Lopez will be home in Florida, sweating it out in front of his computer while he watches the live webcast of his sons, Shea and Cory, going head to head with a spot in the quarterfinals on the line.

“It’s going to be interesting,” said San Clemente’s Shea Lopez, who beat Hawaii’s Shawn Sutton Friday in the heat before his younger brother defeated Hawaiian Conan Hayes. “We’re usually helping each other out and this is going to be very different.”

Cory, ranked No. 5 in the world, and Shea, No. 19, have met just two other times in World Championship Tour mano-a-mano heats, each winning one. But they’ve surfed against each other in countless other heats through the years.

“The first time we competed against each other, I won and he took second,” said Shea, who is 26. “Cory was nine and I was 12, so I had a pretty big size and strength advantage back then.”

Cory, who lives part-time in San Clemente and part-time in Florida, said his dad wasn’t going to be happy about the pairing, but he wasn’t going to stress about facing off against his older brother.

“It’s unfortunate that one of us will lose and be out of the contest, but on the bright side, one of us will definitely be in the quarters, so that’s good,” he said. “I’ve always looked up to him. He’s always pushed me to get better. So, in one way, the pressure is off because I won’t feel as lousy losing to him as I would if I lost to someone else.”

That, however, is not to insinuate that the competition won’t be fierce.

“We’ll both be going all-out,” Cory said. “There won’t be any holding back. I think we surf harder than usual when we surf against each other.”

And if one has priority--meaning he gets the choice of the next wave--and the other needs a certain score to overtake his brother as the heat winds down, the leader will do whatever it takes to keep him from getting it. Even if he has to fake taking off on every wave until the heat ends.

“If that’s what it takes, that’s the way it will be,” Cory said. “If he has to sit on me for five minutes to keep me from getting a score in the last five minutes, that’s the way it will be.”

He paused and smiled and said, “And vice versa, of course.”

THE RUSH OF JUDGMENT

The controversy surrounding the Assn. of Surfing Professionals’ judging guidelines continues to rage. New-school surfers, inspired by the radical moves of skateboarders and snowboarders, believe high-risk maneuvers are not properly rewarded and as a result, surfing is losing popularity with the extreme-sport generation. Surfers who have mastered the more traditional powerful carving turns that are the foundation of scoring are happy with the status quo.

The ASP made ever-so-slight adjustments in the wording of the judging criteria before this year, but surfers such as San Clemente’s Shane Beschen don’t believe there has been a significant change.

“They’ve changed the wording, but as far as changing the judging, apparently it’s going to take something else,” said Beschen, who beat Australian Shane Powell Friday and will meet top-ranked Sunny Garcia in the quarterfinals today. “Maybe we need some new judges. These guys have been judging for so long that it’s hard for them to change. It would be really cool if we had some former pro surfers judging, guys who know the difference in how hard a move is.”

Former pro surfer and current free-lance journalist Nick Carroll, who travels on the WCT tour, believes there has been a gradual change in the judges’ attitude toward aerials and other radical maneuvers.

“The guidelines have been changed but for the judges to apply them, they have to be fully exploited by the surfers,” he said. “And I suspect many of the surfers are mistrustful of the judges’ desire to award big scores for supposed new-age moves like airs, flips, etc., and so tend to focus their skills on the high-end core moves, which by the way are at least as hard to do well as any trick.

“My experience through observation this year is that judges will reward solid air moves about as strongly as they’ll reward solid carving turns at speed, no more, no less. They’re also tending to reward easy tube rides with excessively high scores. As most top pros know, straightforward tube rides, even fairly long ones, are simple things, but there’s no quicker way to push your score above eight than by getting a barrel.”

That’s something no one will have to worry about at Huntington Beach, where there’s zero chance of anyone earning a cheap eight for disappearing into a long barrel.

WORKIN’ IN THE SLOP SHOP

A nasty south wind combined with low tide to make for some very sorry conditions Friday morning. The beginnings of a decent south swell were starting to show and things had improved by the afternoon, but there were slim pickings in the early heats.

“It’s definitely kind of dribbly out there,” said Australian Nathan Webster after he defeated countryman Toby Martin in the second heat of the day. “Every once in awhile, there’s a good one, but you really have to be patient and wait it out.

“The most important thing you can do when it’s like this is concentrate on your own game and not worry about what your competitor is doing. You just have to pick the spots to make your turns in between the chop and find the pockets where you can make a maneuver with scoring potential.”

Shea Lopez, who competed in the third heat of the day, said there were a lot of factors combining to “try and knock you off your board.”

“There’s a strong riptide, the chop from the south wind, it’s cold and it’s early and you haven’t quite got your feet under you,” he said. “It’s all about capitalizing on the few waves you catch. There might only be one or two a heat with decent scoring potential so you have to make the most of them.”

A BOSSY AUSSIE

Event director Ian Cairns, a former world champion from Australia, predicted waves from his part of the world would arrive in time for the weekend. “We have to send you guys waves, everything, mate,” he said.

The chauvinism doesn’t stop there.

“Americans brought performance surfing in the form of hot-dogging to Australia in 1959 but we took it to another level,” he says, smiling.

Six-time world champion Kelly Slater--a Floridian whose radical surfing revolutionized the sport in the ‘90s--might want to argue that point.