Minutes after I poke at his surfboards! This one's for you Nick Carroll! It's a trilogy!
I pressed publish on BeachGrit’s newest feature Real Talk not ten minutes before Kelly Slater won the Pipeline Pro a banana surfboard beating Jamie O’Brien, Bruce Irons and a gorgeous little McNamara.
Real Talk talks real and I had written that Slater Designs surfboard are very ugly and they make me not want to surf them and they are poor. And then Kelly Slater won, surfing like a demigod, top turning like Tom Carroll.
Nick Carroll wrote:
Real Talk: That’s about enough Kelly for a while. I mean fucken hell, just this week you’ve had him saving a (non) doomed family, going on about 9/11, and lying next to his wacky quiver for the second time in a row. How much attention does he need?
and then:
Christ now there will be another KS feature won’t there. at least this time it’ll be about his surfing.
Nick Carroll is right! Kelly Slater won and won convincingly and won smoothly and won in my face. Such Kelly style. A master of rubbing a man’s nose in his own excrement. But I still don’t want to ride one of them. Do you? Really? Do you really?
Chas, if those boards came with a complimentary pair of Vuitton espadrille’s you’d be swooning over their refined yet subtle lines.
and the legend continues…….
The only true about Kelly is how good he surf, all the rest is bullshit , another man in this world traing to be rich, or…..more rich i mean.
Can we move the Pipe Masters to January, please????
And yes, four man heats would be awesome….you can add more wild cards and still finish the comp in three days.
4 man heats. The WSL must be hating life at how good that was.
is it not obvious that 4 man heats are much better viewing, and such a simple way to get through a 36 man field in 2 days which is usually the length of your average swell. just make the heats 45 minutes or whatever works. less downtime, which means less of turpel filling the airwaves with his inane bs. how does the wsl not get this? and for god sakes pay sal mas whatever he wants.
Vaughan Dead was the one for me. Knowledge and humour combined.
Agreed.
Agreed with all that. You know Vaughan Dead is Ronnie Blakeys’ brother, right.
love him. his podcast with jed smith is hilarious.
The WSL should have taken been taking notes through that entire contest. The production was not only better; it was way fucking better. Off the top of my head:
– There was always a window on what was going on in the water, even during the ads
– There were several ads for each sponsor, so we weren’t slowly growing to despise whatever was being advertised
– The Drew Toons animations
– Sal Masakala
– Dave Wassel
– The use of midgets for post-heat interviews
– The ex-military drone pilot
– Really good waves
And you have to ask yourself if any of this is because the event was broadcast by redbull.tv? You can only wonder about how things could have been if someone didn’t get too greedy a couple of years back…
I loved the Volcom ads just because they were different to the utter bollocks that Rip Curl, Quik, Billabong and the rest of the shit that kids wear advertise. Having some humour in there lifting it away from the usual slick, spiny graphics was a delight too.
Vaughan Dead was a revelation behind the mic. Just nice to hear someone knowledgable and literate instead of Strider and Pete Mell talking about god knows what.
That drone footage of JOB’s 10 though…
Agree with all the above… “BUSTED STICK!”
Agree with all of the above, except Sal, who is OK, but can get caught up in the predictable rhetoric. The camera work was certainly exceptional. They didn’t need Joey Turpell there, with his rhetorical & predictable style. Personally, I always have loved the Volcom comps. They are fun. Wassel is amazing. The post-heat questions were spontaneous (unlike WSL predictable scripted).
Red Bull player sucks. Everything else I agree.
Well nobody has to like his surfboards ya know. It’s about a 50/50 split between world champs whose boards most people could ride (AI, Curren, Fanning) and world champs whose boards most people could barely stand up on (my brother, KS, Pottz). There’s a theory here somewhere but fuck, it’s too late in the day to think about it.
I tried wearing the same condoms my favourite pornstar uses but the chick was different and it didn’t fit.
Used to have an AI trade-in by Arakawa back in 2000. It was magic. One of the easiest boards to surf that I’ve owned. Buckled it twice and handed it down to a friends younger brother. Wish I had kept it.
I don’t think it was a banana. It didn’t have a wing on it and it looked just like a normal step up. I bet Arakawa shaped it and they painted a black stringer on it.
As usual Mason’s post heats were the best part but in a close second was how HUGE Mason looked standing next to Jason Shibata! Oh ya. JOB’s 10 was OK too.
The banana at a Sydney/south coast rock ledge slab would be fun no doubt about it. Someone send me a 6’1 and I’ll happily get smashed trying it out.
all you bruce haters suck eggs
Why? He came 4th. No one gives a shit about 4th place
@radbruceironsfans
he finaled at pipe in a stacked field, and surfed really impressively along the way, after being written off by numerous internet haters. and he got the chesser award. it was good to see. how them eggs taste?
Eggs? I bet on Slater to win. So that tastes good. And stacked field? There were only 4 or 5 World Tour surfers in the comp. And one of them beat him. He came 4th with a booming heat score of 6.73. 4th place is Mediocrity.
I bet on Slater, too, but aside from him and JJF, World Tour surfers aren’t the best surfers out there when it’s like that. the locals are. three out of four finalists were local pipe specialists, the cream of the crop, and the other surfer was the most decorated surfer ever out there. and Bruce made the final. that’s not mediocrity.
The “Pipe specialists” is a bit of a myth in regards to competition. In the last 9 years only 1 (Mason Ho) has made the semi finals or better in the Pipe Masters. If they were that good they would do better. They do better in the Pipe Pro because the competition isn’t as strong as the Pipe Masters.
been another one in a sea of Lairds, that’s mediocrity…