Discover the the squads, the teams, the mini-federations that surround your favourite pros!
I don’t want to wrap you up in too much expectation for this episode of Peter King’s #TourNotes. It ain’t Taxi Driver. It ain’t A Dog Day Afternoon. It ain’t even on the same scale as King’s earlier beats. Emblematic, perhaps, of a general drift among filmmakers to throw anything live.
But, a contest swings around and you want to know what’s happening on the ground. As King says, “I’ve been around the tour, I know it. I was on tour for three-and-a-half years, back when girls wanted to hang with Shaun Tomson and Rabbit Bartholomew and were 35 years old and wore high-waisted bikinis, do cocaine and all those things I didn’t know about. And what do I remember about my time on the tour? It isn’t the heats. I wanna show the fun. I want to show the silly little conversations.”
This episode, mercifully, is saved by Matt Wilkinson, the former world number one, and his suave virtuosity in front of the camera.
Watch here!
Wait, no Pawle in Wilko’s entourage?
That’s cute, Peter. But I think we’d all rather see Mick “White Lightning” Fanning snorting lines of coke so fast that we need to see it in slo-mo 8k
Squad does sound better than hanger-ons.
I prefer “camp followers”.
I was confused by the use of the term because surfing is a very ‘un-urban’ sport.
christ couldn’t this banal behind the scenes look at pro surfing use a squadron of high waisted poodle-haired 80’s coke sluts to liven it up.
makes golf look like gonzo porn.
I don’t know whether it’s cos they have learned that it’s easier to just get poontang each night than pay for a couple of poontangs tickets and have to deal with them complaining about how you fucked the other one harder etc or whether professionalism has ruined surfing. Travelling with mates usually trumps travelling with a chick unless you’re going to somewhere deserted. Then it’s definitely the right choice to bring a hot woman. It’s nice to have something to grope each night.
I’m worried for the Commentators’ desk Lobsters. Tubby Turpel looks like he’ll reach over and eat one or both of them whole.
Desk lobsters?
..the various aquatic creatures in the Commentators’ desk fish tanks. There’s 2 lobsters and a small school of ?sardines, and you wouldn’t want to get between Joe’s and a seafood dinner these days.
Ah ok, thankfully I haven’t seen or heard Turps or Pottz yet, been all heat recaps. Are they fully kitted out in traditional portugese attire too? Rockin’ sombreros?
Joe’s wearing his usual air of harmless disengagement, Strider wears a thin veil of sociability over his simmering core of repressed anger, while Pete Mell sports a haircut that says “haircuts are essentially unimportant things”. Ross brandishes a pen like Kerry O’Brien in his heyday while Rosie wears blue and her golden locks flow in alluring cascades that draw the eyes ever down to her glorious decolletage. Gigs and Pottz are interchangeable tough nuts in beanies and can be told apart only by various levels of glint in the eye. In the meantime, the Lobsters scurry sideways, rut occasionally and fear Joe.
I despise nearly everything WSL (but also never miss an episode!). But thanks to imaginary jesus for Rosie, a class act