A friendship that we can learn from!
Did you enjoy BeachGrit‘s drama yesterday or did it turn your stomach? Did you chuckle at every turn, every lurch, or think very poorly about how this ship is steered? I think Col. Sean Volland, one-time Florida pro, thinks very poorly. Remember him? He drove Kelly Slater into an Instagram rage by criticizing his surfboards. And underneath yesterday’s story Rory Parker: Why I quit! he wrote, “Are yall here to rape corpses or provide an alternative to news!! In my short appearance on Beachgrit, I find that yall throw bitches under the bus, let people hang themselves, then run with the noose to pad y’alls ego; The rest be damned!!!”
Not a glowing review by any means. Are Derek and I really corpse rapers? Alternative news barkers? Running around with nooses to pad our egos?
A damning thought. But speaking about Kelly Slater, he seems to be a good and permanent friend. No throwing bitches under a bus or letting people hang themselves. There is a new feature in Rolling Stone documenting a surf trip to the Marshall Islands Kelly and his long time friend and famous musician Jack Johnson recently took. It is a beautiful story about a beautiful relationship and photographed beautifully by the incomparable Todd Glaser. Let’s read a little!
“Kelly and I met when we were teenagers,” Johnson says. “He was a couple years older than me. We all knew about Kelly before we met him because it became pretty evident that he’d become the next world champion. He just had a way about him when he surfed with the things he could do on the waves and the way he carried himself. We just met through friends in common and we just became better and better friends. We started playing guitar at the same time. The guy who taught me to play, one of my dad’s best friends, taught Kelly and I chords right around the same time.”
“I became very close with Jack’s family,” Slater says. “We used to laugh about it because when he was away at college in the mid Nineties, I was staying in his room with his parents. They were upstairs and I was downstairs in Jack’s room for a number of different winters.”
And doesn’t this sort of lasting friendship just soothe your soul? The perfect antidote to corpse raping and noose running?
Thank you Rolling Stone! And thank you Kelly and Jack.
Should Derek and I put our corpses and nooses away and pick up guitars instead?
