Given all the Dane Reynolds hype of late it's easy to understand how Daneofilia (DANE-oh-FEEL -yah) is now infecting a wide swath of today's young surfing prodigies. Some doctors describe the disease as a virulent strain of languorous behavior, others refer to it as syndrome more commonly known as the fuck-its.

Notable young talents (especially those residing along the surf-industry-laden California coast) run the highest risks of contracting this virus, but the symptoms typically flair up once they've left their comfy little pond for the bigger, badder world of global talent, where they soon discover winning isn't nearly as easy as they, their publicist, biographers, videographers, agents, managers, coaches, bloggers and astrologers, thought it would be.

Consumed by self doubt, they begin to question not just the nipple they've been sucking on since they got their first pair of free trunks, but the very body producing all the nourishment. And the fleeting nature of their most flavored surfer status hits hard. If things don't work out...they soon discover...they're replaceable. At the end of the day they're just tools. Marketing tools. Being exploited to sell wares. Oh the horror.

The lucky ones, like Dane Reynolds, seemingly have a choice in this matter. They can make a career out of being anti-pros, choosing to go down a "soul surfing" route filled with cameras and cameos. The vast majority of pros don't really have that luxury.

Take Adriano de Souza, who by most measuring sticks is the anti-Dane. They both love surfing, no doubt, but Adriano actually thrives in competition. That makes him incredibly uncool in hipster circles. After all, he always gives 100% (what a jock!) He loves to claim (kook!), and what's with that (fugly) wide stance? All that annoying hard work and touchdown dance behavior makes Adriano the tour's perfect villain.

But look deeper into his story and you might begin to see things differently. While growing up in a poor corner Sau Paulo Brazil there were years when his next meal wasn't guaranteed. He and his family fought hard for everything they had, and when the remote possibility of a surfing career appeared he left home for good to chase it.

Thanks to hard work and dedication he's succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Today both his mother and brother are living in houses that Adriano provided with his winnings. Knowing all that, you might understand the passion behind the claims, and you may even start respecting some of his surfing strengths, like how he manages to put his board in all the right places with healthy dose of speed and power.

Adriano's path was undoubtedly a tough one. And it remains so in the court of public opinion. Meanwhile, as we learn in the new Surfer Magazine interview issue, Dane Reynolds road has been obstacle free, and he's essentially flying blind out there.

After all, he prefers to travel with six packs over exercise balls. He doesn't want to waste energy chasing a 5.5 to get through heats just to please sponsors. He finds his friends in Oxnard a lot more interesting than all the exotic people he ignores while traveling. And, oh yeah, Kelly Slater really hasn't done all that much for surfing. (Apparently Dane doesn't count the zeroes in his checks before depositing them.)

All this listlessness makes him a huge surfing hero.

Now he's searching for even less stress. He wants to ride ugly boards in mushy point waves and hang out with his friends scribbling on T-shirts, posting on his blog and making webisodes.

And not surprisingly a handful of younger "highly touted" Californians think the same path will work just as well for them. Incidental stardom is apparently just a cool little blog away.

Of course they'd kinda like to skip that part that Dane had to endure...y'know, the part where he actually earned all his value, the part where he made the tour and validated his hype with brilliant victories on a big stage.

Wait - victories?

Well yes and no. As Slater so aptly noted during his Surfer Poll speech last year, Dane Reynolds has never won anything. Not even the NSSA Nationals. But we needn't weep for him.

Fact is Dane's simply not cut from the same heat-winning cloth as most tour stars. Nevertheless the tour is filled with Daneophiles (DANE-oh-FILEs) for good reason: once he made the tour, he subsequently made more than a few dents with his freakish flying and carnivorous carves. Dane's biggest victories haven't been mathematical ones, they come in statement form - by how he wins heats, and sometimes by the way he loses them. Either way he's made more than a few boundary pushing proclamations in his contest jersey, and that's what's made him the A-lister he is. He's won hearts.

But whether Dane knows it or not, he won the majority of hearts up on the big stage, and his message resonates more from that platform than anywhere else. There's a simple reason for that. Performing on demand in front of hundreds of thousands without the safety net of Final Cut Pro is simply more difficult than posting on a blog, drawing up T-shirts, and shooting videos.

Nothing cheap and easy has value, which is why all that other stuff is considered just surf porn. It's great for a few seconds of fleeting pleasure. Given the choice, the majority of Dane's fans would rather see him keep pushing.

Of course, after years of grueling travel and that hefty work schedule they have on the ASP he's certainly earned the right to pursue what makes him truly happy, be it fashion and film or beer bongs and surf smut. If we've learned nothing else from the dearly departed Steve Jobs it's that loving what you do is the only way to do great work. And we love Dane's great work.

But history tells us that once surfers leave the tour behind a clock starts ticking on their allure, because flash fades a bit faster in this new media age. A few short years from now when Dane's added 15 pounds to his boiler, his neckbeard is grown out, and he's home watching a new generation of stars pick up where he left off, it's possible he could feel more exploited than ever being a video floozy seeking Facebook followers...By then a few 5.5s might just pale in comparison.

Sebastian Junger, William Finnegan, and Winston Groom are just some of the esteemed authors giving Chris Dixon praise for his new book "Ghost Wave: the discovery of Cortes Bank and the biggest wave on earth."

And rightfully so.

Dixon, the founder of surfermag.com, spent most of the last year researching the world's most frightening maritime hazard, a massive wave that breaks 100 miles out in the middle of the ocean off of San Clemente, California. His goal was to separate legend from lore, and unearth the rich history of trial, error and terror that surrounds this fabled wave, and it takes only a few pages to realize he delivers.

While uncovering the multi-year mission to surf these massive open-ocean waves makes up the backbone of this story, Dixon goes beyond, researching the entire list of renowned maritime mishaps and the graveyard of dreams that haunted men long before its first descent.

Dixon found the fishermen, divers, treasure hunters and nation builders who were lured to the bank for their own reasons. "Hardly anybody knew a thing about Cortes Bank before these guys summitted it in 2001," Dixon told me during a recent swing by the grind media offices. "I became obsessed with it after I went out there to watch them in 2008. And the more I poked around, the more I figured these stories - this story - had to be done."

The book hits shelves on November 1st.

Years ago Chris Rene was merely a popular member of the thriving skateboarding scene in and around Santa Cruz, California, a town steeped in surf/skate culture. Life was fun and simple then. Like a handful of his friends, when he wasn't rolling through town or sliding down rails at the skate park he was usually playing music. Sadlly, he also started dabbling in drugs.

Now after a painful multi-year trip to hell and back the 28-year-old seems to be back on his feet and seeing clearly. And he's got a lot of America hoping so. Because after earning a starring role on the debut episode of Simon Cowell's new show, "The X Factor," which premiered on Fox Wednesday, he's now on the brink of becoming this country's newest singing sensation.

Rene was serve up as the climax of this week's episode, performing a smokey rendition of his own original tune "Young Homie," which not only put the crowd on its feet, it rendered the usually sour Simon Cowell to stunned disbelief, as he seemed at a loss for words.

When Simon did finally weigh in he did so with a huge compliment. "It's always my favorite thing in the world when I sit in this chair and meet a star for the first time."



But Cowell and his judging cohorts were equally moved - and concerned - by Rene's back story.

Before performing Rene held his head high and told the crowd how he hauled trash for a living. That he had a young son. And that he was merely hoping for some stability in his life after emerging from drug rehab. In fact, when he stepped onto the stage he was just 70 days sober after years of abusing alcohol, cocaine and methamphetamines. His plight is one that's all too familiar in the Santa Cruz skate and surf scene.

Among Rene's catchy lyrics he threw in an ode to his struggle, "It's been two months now, I haven't had a drink, and I'm startin' to see clear now."

Record executive L.A. Reid, another X Factor judge who's nurtured artists ranging from Usher and Pink to Justin Bieber, gave Rene the ultimate compliment, telling him, "You are the truth." But being well aware of how fragile Rene's situation is he tempered his excitement with a challenge:

"I'm going to give you a 'Yes', but man you gotta stay straight!" Reid demanded. "And when I call you, I don't want to talk to your sister...You better pick up the phone and let me hear your voice so I know that you're okay."

"Chris? We have a deal here, right?" Cowell added. "That if we're going to put you through, for you, your son, we stay on the right track, yeah?"

"Yeah...yeah." Rene responded, nervously.

"That's the deal we make. There's no breaking it. Got it?"

"I got it Simon."

"Fine. Then you've got my 'Yes.'"

As Rene exited - his life clearly altered - he was embraced by his brother Mike backstage. Whether Mike knows it or not, a good chunk of America immediately joined the family's cause of keeping his brother on point.

While we learned quite a bit about Rene Wednesday, what America will soon find out is music and lyrical talent runs in the family. According to the Santa Cruz Sentinal, (a paper still reeling from Santa Cruz crooner James Durbin's success on "American Idol" last season), Rene's sister is Gina Rene, "an accomplished soul/hip-hop singer in her own right."

The Sentinal also notes that the Rene siblings are children of the late Googie Rene, a soul/jazz singer from the 50s and 60s who recorded on the Class label established by their grandfather Leon Rene, who wrote the familiar 50s tune "Rockin' Robin".

You tell me.


Africa from French Connexion on Vimeo.

The ASP has been debuting its new product line at the Hurley Pro, and among the racy new features is 18-year-old John Florence of Hawaii.

Florence getting called up to the majors is a direct result of the first-ever mid-season reshuffle, which, for those of you not in the ASP complaint department, is one of the hottest of hot-button issues they've been dealing with in recent years.

The new operating procedure works like this: twice per year (mid-season and end) the world tour laggards are replaced with fresh legs in order to keep the product offering fresh.

Any world tour members not able to maintain their Top 32 world ranking (based on the previous 12-months of ASP results) are shown the door, and replaced by those in an upward trajectory.

Now, reserving the 32 elite slots for the best performers is a perfectly logical move. That said, even Vulcans like Kelly Slater somehow manage to cloud logic with emotion, and the rest of us humans are far worse. We all ache when a guy like CJ Hobgood gets sent to the bench. And whether you believe Bobby Martinez is idol or idiot, sending him to the showers hurts too.

But this pain will be temporary. And as cruel as it sounds, the healing process gets a little easier when a guy like John Florence starts playing an immediate role in the world title race, like he will on Tuesday when he meets Owen Wright in Round Three.

As Slater so aptly described it in New York, there's nothing wrong with Wright's surfing right now. He has very few if any weaknesses, and he seldom crumbles under pressure. Florence, meanwhile, is a rookie who needs no introduction. We've been charting his every move since the time he was 8 years old. So that his deep arsenal of moves will be playing a factor on the big stage at Trestles is a nice gift as far as this fan is concerned. Thank goodness we didn't have to wait another year for it.

[UPDATE: In the most exciting heat of the morning, John Florence took Owen Wright the distance in their Round Three clash before falling in the waning moments. Wright needed a 9.1 in the closing moments. He ripped a wave on his backhand with two lethal inverted hacks. While there's little doubt it was his best score, there was plenty of debate on whether it was deserving of the 9.77 the judges gave him. Florence's total score of 17.13 would have won any other heat.]

Frankly, [especially given the show Florence put on today] I don't need any more convincing that this new ASP system is working.

That many of the world surfers aren't as convinced of this should surprise nobody. World tour surfers (of every generation) have fought hard for protection from new threats. Like each of us they want stability in their lives. But stability and job security have no place in sports. Just ask any player in the NFL, MLB or NBA, who, at the end of the day, must justify their spot in the starting lineup on a daily basis.

Surfing is a dynamic act that's highly fluid. The sport should be too. Granted, a lot more tweaking needs to be done...but so far, I like this era.