Who owns the record for the world's shortest sporting retirement? Sugar Ray Leonard or Carissa Moore?

Shortly, before Christmas the four-time and reigning world champion of surfing, Hawaiian Carissa Moore, shocked fans when she announced she’d be taking a year off the tour.

“I have dedicated the last ten years of my life to competing at the highest level and want to continue to do that well into my thirties,” said the twenty seven year old. “This break is a press refresh so that I can come back to the tour happier and more excited than ever in 2021.”

The announcement came as Hurley’s new owners Bluestar Alliance were winding down their vaunted surf team, the best ever assembled, unable to see that the sponsored surfer is the magic elf of the industry, paid hundreds of thousands, millions, for their ability to influence sales and define brands.

If you had a termination clause in your contract you were gone.

Filipe scraped under the wire with a contract until 2024; Kolohe Andino’s was good until 2022.

Carissa, however, started appearing in IG posts without Hurley stickers, even with a contract reported to be until 2025. The ol Olympic Clause, which forces surfers to ride logo less boards in the games, was a convenient deal-breaker, according to our source.

“This Carissa thing ain’t what they’re saying,” said the source. “She was gone via notice at the end of the last year while still basking in her world title glory. And mightily pissed how it was handled. Now they’re paying her and Eli Hanneman more than they were before. It’s fucking crazy.”

And now, despite the pre-Christmas announcement and the need to refresh, find happiness etc, Carissa has flown a dozen hours across the Pacific to Australia to compete in the Sydney Surf Pro.

As I said, a mystery, and, almost, the world’s shortest sporting retirement.

(Sugar Ray Leonard retired five times during his career, once for a week.)

https://www.instagram.com/p/B9cyL_eHwqo/?igshid=1dvsv5s14ol9o

Come for the waves, stay for the delicious sweets…

The boys went on a Ments trip last year. FukkYeahThaBoyz.

I’d been invited but thought bugger it, the Ments is shithouse, I’ll stick to my usual dose of wobbly garbage at Curl Curl.

Maybe the island chain dancing off Sumatra was golden back when Slats was forced to bunker down with Hoyo, Quikkie’s most inexplicably bizarre barrel-hunting duo, while being ferried ‘em all over from one insane set up to the next, Hoyo yelling out fuck yeh non-stop and Jimmy Slade eyeing off the camera, in between weaving fifteen-second jungle tubes.

That was then.

This is now: you get wedged in with a bunch of international deadbeats from Australia to Japan to Hawaii to Merika to Brazil to France to Finland, all fighting and flaring for the wave of their life, man, while you’re trying not to do too much unnecessary bark-scraping on the Surgeon’s Table or get yelled at by the steroid-jacked Paraguayan boogieboarder who thinks cage fighting to the death is art mate.

Nah, not for me.

The place can get stuffed.

Well, luckily there are finer steeds than I still keen and willing to tackle the place and they always seem to report back they bloody loved it.

Fair enough.

What sparked my interest, while being inundated with the pics of this odyssey I’d avoided, was just how extraordinarily gay the trip looked.

Not gay as in lame. Gay as in Athenian Olympics, Greco-Roman wrestling, Aristotle, Socrates and Oscar Wilde, the Village People getting chock-a-block at the YMCA, Tom Hanks succumbing to High Five in Philadelphia, Ricky Martin He Bangs HE BANGS, he looks like a flower, he stings my ring piece. Gay.

Fit lads, all tanned up and shirtless, getting grogged and hugging, sweating all over each other, hollering I luv ya, I luv ya, I luv ya, no females within a few hundred k radius, minimum.

Super gay.

And I love gay.

My father’s gay. My son’s gay. My husband’s gay. I love the gays. I love the gayness. I’ve seen the future. And the future is really, really, really gay.

Yet surfing culture is trapped precariously between the staunch manliness of a bygone era and the armpit-shaving regimens of our current crop of elite stepfather-approval-seekers.

Are surfers ready to face up to how intensely and wonderfully and perfectly gay surfing is?

We dedicate our lives to tight rubber and boardshorts, to smearing sunscreen on each other’s backs in the carpark, to splashing cutty waffle in each other’s faces in the lineup, to watching barely grown men prance top to bottom, bottom to top, on glassy lumps of ocean blue.

We gayz wistfully to the horizon, bore non-surfers to tears with Point Break quotes, travel to the emptiest corners of the earth surrounded exclusively with each other’s testosterone to camp under the stars, cuddle up close in the roar of a romantic fire and fall asleep with sweet, sweet dreams of deep, juicy pits.

*Liam Carroll is the author of confessional roman à clefs Slippery and Sweet Dreams of Fanta, which you can buy here. He’s also a commodities trader, physiotherapist and massive kook.