Local teams battle it out for Surfing X Games Gold

By NSL • July 30, 2005

Puerto Escondido in the morning is a beautiful place. It’s cool enough to walk down the street without sweating like a Columbian drug lord; the offshores blow cleanly over the mountains and into the bluegreen barrels; the smell of baking bread, tortillas and coffee line the main street and no one’s drunk enough yet to be surly. Almost paradise.

And this is no secret: by 7am, a crowd of hundreds line the beach in front of the X Games scaffolding, and hundreds more are gorging themselves just offshore in the building swell. After yesterday’s trial Game — won by the Tiburons — Ger decided to pit the Mexican teams against each other in better conditions, and the audience loves it.

Rather than running a full Game, it’s decided to run two twenty-minute quarters, so each team gets a solid chance at some high scores without having to spend the whole day with jerseys on.

The swell is building, and some well overhead barrels are spitting along Playa Zicatela’s infamous sandbars. Today, it’s "The Mexican Pipeline" — albeit on a small day — and the ten surfers on both teams are showing off some serious local knowledge. Impossible drops are made fairly effortlessly. What at first resemble closeouts are in fact four-second barrels with an exit out the doggy door. Shoulders are hacked up and big sections floated over. Coaches Parsons and Kechele are in full Game mode, barking into walkie-talkies to their water coaches and pacing up and down the dugouts. The crowd screams at each wave. A stray dog lopes into the compound.

And then, as it sometimes happens at surf events, one wave comes and makes everyone sit up and swallow his or her papaya. It looks like a harmless five-footer as it sweeps in from the south and into the contest area. Eighteen-year-old Cristian Corzo is in the perfect spot as the thing jacks into a perfect, ruler-edged left barrel. He drops in late, sets his edge and just stands there on his 5′11", shacked from here to next Tuesday. He comes out with the spit and the crowd goes even more mental. Gerlach says, "That was electrifying" and it was.

It’s the bottom of the second quarter, and his team — the Tiburons — needed that score badly to get back on the board. Now all they need is someone to better their score by 3 points in the next four minutes. Plenty of time, everyone thinks. But the Malaguas Bench is yelling and screaming and pointing at their watches, hoping to speed time up. Two minutes pass without anyone catching a wave, and the Malaguas are working on their victory dance.

All of a sudden a Tiburon is up and riding another near closeout left; he’s driving behind the frothy curtain for a few seconds and comes screaming out the front, hands in the air, deservedly claiming it. There are 30 seconds left, but the crowd quickly realizes this is none other than … Cristian Corzo. And he can’t better his original ten. (Though his second wave of 9.5 gives him a total of 19.5 — the highest Game score ever, anywhere.)

The Malaguas Bench erupts. Cristian comes in absolutely beaming — even though his team just barely lost, he’s still trying to wipe the smile off his face. Hell, you’d be stoked too: the first perfect 10 of the contest, followed by a 9.5, in front of dozens of cameras and his entire hometown? It couldn’t have got much sweeter. "I still can’t believe it," he beams as various TV crews shove microphones in his face.

The two teams shook hands in a most sportsmanlike way afterwards, and they went back to what they’d normally doing on a Monday morning — getting more barrels. "Well, we got that by the hair of our chinny-chin-chin," says Coach Kechele. "But we’ll take it."

Meanwhile, the East and West teams are out in the water getting used to Puerto’s heat and thick, sand-bottom tubes. Everyone’s getting a few shacks, and tomorrow’s supposed to be bigger. They wanted extreme — it looks like they’re going
to get it. Stay tuned here tomorrow for the full wrap up. –Marcus Sanders

FINAL SCORE:
Malaguas: 47.5
Tiburions: 47.25

WINNING TEAM: THE MALAGUAS