The greatest of all time?

Fine wine: The voice of Joe Turpel!

By Chas Smith

9 years ago

Did he, a few short months ago, deliver the greatest call in sporting history?

Sporting history is littered with amazing calls by equally amazing broadcasters. Vin Scully describing the last batter of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game, “He is one out away from the promised land, and Harvey Kuenn is comin’ up. … So Harvey Kuenn is batting for Bob Hendley. The time on the scoreboard is 9:44. The date, September the ninth, 1965, and Koufax working on veteran Harvey Kuenn. Sandy into his windup and the pitch … a fastball for a strike. He has struck out, by the way, five consecutive batters, and that’s gone unnoticed…”

Bill King describing an Oakland Raider fumble, “The ball flipped forward is loose! A wild scramble, two seconds on the clock. … Casper grabbing the ball … it is ruled a fumble … Casper has recovered in the end zone! The Oakland Raiders have scored on the most zany, unbelievable, absolutely impossible dream of a play! Madden is on the field. He wants to know if it’s real. They said yes, get your big butt out of here! He does! There’s nothing real in the world anymore!”

Vin Scully, again, describing “The Catch,” “Montana … looking … looking … throwing in the end zone … Clark caught it! Dwight Clark! (Crowd noise for 29 full seconds)It’s a madhouse at Candlestick”

Chick Hearn drawling, “This one’s in the refrigerator, the door’s closed, the light’s are out, the butter’s getting hard and the jello is jiggling…” near the end of every Los Angeles Laker win.

I could go on all day! But do you want to know a call that gets finer and finer every time I hear it, and I’ve heard it many many times recently? Joe Turpel describing the Mick Fanning shark incident of ’15! The cool calm in his voice, his refusal to get rattled, and that initial priceless description, “As we look at Fanning on the rankings. Oooh we can see a little splash…”

I’ve written about his work that day once before, right after the incident, likening his use of “Mick gets back on the ski to reset” to Edward R. Murrow’s “Good night, and good luck.” But these things take time to enter the historical pantheon and, months later, I think it is very clear that Joe Turpel delivered the greatest call in sporting history. And it is the front half, the initial sentence, that soars. The “oooh” so delicate, air sucking slightly in, placing the word “little” before “splash.” I mean, seriously, does a call get any better than that? Does it? I have to say no. I have to say Joe’s calm juxtaposed against the very clear enormity of what was happening on screen makes it the greatest of all time.

Turn your speakers loud. I dare you to disagree

Loading comments...

Load Comments

Mick: “About listening to my stomach.”

By Chas Smith

9 years ago

The most popular surfer in the world takes a stand against sex trafficking!

Here’s a serious question…has Michael Eugene Fanning usurped Kelly Slater’s “most-popular-surfer-in-the-world” throne this year? First there was the shark play, then helping a young child overcome cancer and now? He is lending his voice to stop sex trafficking.

Mick is an ambassador for Project Sparta, a gym that pledges 100% of fees toward bashing the sex slave industry. “It’s a scary trade…” he says “…No one really talks about it and we’re losing girls, and young boys, into a world we never know about.”

The fact that he has become the go to for wonderful charities bodes well for the White Lightening brand. He moves the people! He thrills! And, of course, there will always be that shark incident. The news report, detailing his miraculous escape from the jaws of curiosity, began with it which prompted Mick to say that he listens to his stomach these days and gets out of the water when feeling uneasy. He also said he likes to surf with lots and lots and lots and lots of people.

“I’m not worried about the crowds, I tell ya. The more the merrier!”

Embracing all-comers will only continue to enhance Mick’s status and so again I ask, is Mick Fanning more popular, worldwide/across all-platforms, than Kelly Slater?

Loading comments...

Load Comments

“You know what gets my dick hard? Helping out my friends.” John C Reilly, narrator of View from a Blue Moon, with the relentlessly fantastic surfer-filmed duo John John Florence and Mr Blake Vincent Kueny.

“Is John John Florence gay?”

By Derek Rielly

9 years ago

And other funny keyword searches that land you right here…

One of the fascinating parts of operating a website is watching the behaviour of your readers. Who are you? Where are you from? What are your personal kinks?

In the print game, no one knows, knew.

The closest I ever came to identifying who read the jams of whatever mag I was editing was via those surveys we stuck in the mags and from focus groups that’d cost 20 gees and yield nothing.

Readers in focus groups do this very human thing where they say what the think elevates ‘em in the eye of the other participants or sub-consciously say what they think you want to hear. And, besides, who knows what their true motivations and likes are?

The problem, as any student of human behaviour would explain, is that surveys are filled out by people who like filling out surveys or ‘cause they want to win whatever trinket you had as an incentive.

Readers in focus groups do this very human thing where they say what they think elevates ‘em in the eye of the other participants or sub-consciously say what they think you want to hear. And, besides, who knows what their true motivations and likes are?

Your electronic movements, however, are beautiful to watch.

For those unfamiliar with Google Analytics, it’s an application that tracks website traffic. More than that, it allows publishers to see how many readers are on the site, what country they’re from, the electronic device they’re accessing your site from, what story they’re reading, where they came from and where they go after you.

And, tellingly, what keyword searches got ‘em there.

It’s become a game between Chas Smith and me to send each other funny keyword searches as they come up, briefly, on the Google Analytics dashboard.

Like this. Is true? asked Chas. We laugh because it couldn’t be more absurd!

Who taps these words in? Man with Bear fetish?

Is that you Peter Taras?

Drowning fantasies?

Healthy young man with beach-y fantasies?

Lovely Latinas!

Angry South African man?

A Kolohe Andino fan! For life! (Maybe me!)

Reliable medical advice for advanced cancers?

Do the secret kinks of man make you laugh?

What keyword searches lurk in the recesses of your web history?

Loading comments...

Load Comments

Slater & the murder of Amy Gellert

By Derek Rielly

9 years ago

The champ remembers the childhood pal killed in a still unresolved murder…

You might’ve read here a couple of days ago, a little editorialising about Kelly Slater’s hot fingers on Instagram on Twitter. It seems like it only takes the slightest provocation to send the Champ into an electronic rage, replying to nobodies as if their opinion actually matters. This, is typical.

But Kelly is a man of substance, of complex emotions, and he mixes his petty online wars with thoughtful, and often moving, posts. A few minutes ago, we see Kelly at six years old, in a class photo. His caption reads:

“1st grade class when I was about 6 or 7 years old (2nd from R). Funny to look back at old shots and remember us as kids. Still close with a few of these little humans. Most of this class went from Kindergarten to graduation together. Far left in blue was a friend named #AmyGellert who was sadly murdered in our hometown in a still #UnsolvedMystery in the early 90’s. Her parents were also attacked yet lived thru it. There was a show recently dedicated to reopening her case and finding any potential info about her story. One of her brothers now works for @patagonia and another was my best surf buddy in high school then became a military guy and was injured at war in both Iraq and Afghanistan and now works in some sort of secret service work, I think. It would be a real blessing if her case were ever solved. Google her name and read about the case. Amy was a good egg. We all miss her.”

Amy Gellert was stabbed to death in 1994 by a masked man with a gun and a knife after she found him in her parent’s home. The details of this unsolved murder are ghastly but if you want to read about it, you might as well click here.

Or watch a 43-minute documentary on the case here.

It always surprises me, and perhaps it shouldn’t by now, how many unsolved murders just disappear into nothingness through the passage of time. Detectives retire, people with useful information never offered die, others forget.

And yet the horror of these events never truly disappears, even as the killers still walk among us.

Loading comments...

Load Comments

"You cannot be a hero without being a coward," said the playwright George Bernard Shaw. So wise! Watch Filipe turn this worst-heat-in-the-forty-year-history-of-professional-surfing into the motivation that gets him over the ledge at Pipeline in December.

Scenario: Filipe Toledo fails Pipe, wins title

By Derek Rielly

9 years ago

What sort of questions would surround a Filipe Toledo world title?

When I think of Pipeline in season it evokes the pleasure of seeing the world’s best surfers amid the turbulence of the world’s heaviest wave. Pipeline amplifies weakness and has no time for gratuitous theatrics, claims aside.

In three weeks, six surfers will compete to win the 2015 world title: Mick Fanning, Adriano De Souza, Owen Wright, Julian Wilson, Gabriel Medina and Filipe Toledo.

Five of the six are comfortable at Pipe. One is not.

The scenarios are many, and you can read the spreadsheet here.

Most what-ifs I’ve read presume the waves are going to be six-feet or better, a classic mid-sized west-north-west swell with south-east winds.

But the cumbersome nature of the WSL’s format, with its 36 surfers and its two no-loser rounds (rounds one and four), and the unlikelihood of a swell stretching for such a period, means crucial heats have a nightmarish tenacity to be run in poor waves.

Run down a list of the Pipeline Masters winners and if it ain’t Kelly, John John, Jamie O’Brien, KP or Andy Irons in the last dozen years, it wasn’t classic Pipe.

So what is possible this year if the first few rounds of Pipe run in marginal surf, is the elimination of Mick Fanning. And if Mick finishes 13th or worse, this scenario comes into play.

Let’s examine.

– Owen Wright & Julian Wilson will need a 1st

– Gabriel Medina will need a 3rd or better

– Adriano de Souza will need a 9th or better

– Filipe Toledo will need a 13th or better to clinch the World Title

Therefore, Filipe Toledo, who made pro surfing history by not catching a wave in a crucial heat at Teahupoo and later explaining it away with an unconvincing story about a sore elbow, could swing through one heat in crummy surf, lose when it gets good, and win the world title.

Can you imagine a world title with more question marks around it?

How would history record such a thing?

Loading comments...

Load Comments

Eat beach grit spam!