Does your significant other love that you surf?
That you have nice triceps and a tan face? That you have a
hair-trigger temper and bring sand into the bed, are often late to
pick up kids and/or dates, sometimes cross into oncoming traffic
because you are rubber necking the lineup, drain the family
accounts on Surfline memberships, etc?
Yes, surfing is an enviable trait but not everyone
appreciates.
OK! Magazine recently reported that famous actress Julia Roberts
begged her cinematographer husband Danny Moder to stop surfing in
order to save their marriage.
According to the popular British tabloid, Moder’s surfing was
seen as overly dangerous as he was too much of a “thrill-seeker”
and she would have preferred that he would have worked out in their
home gym instead of “blowing off steam” in the ocean but he refused
to give up and kept “getting his fix.”
Very sad.
Thankfully, though, Gossip
Cop has debunked most of OK!’s story.
First, Roberts posted a loving tribute to Moder on Father’s Day
featuring him walking with what appears to be a swallow tail’d
fish.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CBtm8iMMfvV/
If she was really so anti-surfing, it seems unlikely she would
use this shot.
Second, the two vacation in Hawaii.
That’s mostly it.
Does anyone know when Ultimate Surfer is supposed to air
again?
How long has our beloved ocean been used and
abused for its good looks, golden sunsets, warm caresses? Oh we
enjoy, certainly, and Instagram our enjoyment but then go and try
to build wave pools on land and crow about how much more
“consistent” with “better air sections” they are.
Bastards, the lot of us.
Well, has the ocean finally had enough?
Let us travel to Laguna Beach, California home of Cocaine +
Surfing (buy signed
paperback, just released, here), where we see a
blushing bride and her loving groom ripped from the rocks in front
of maids and men whilst completing the age old photoshoot
ritual.
As you can see, the cameraman points them to a precarious spot
while the ocean builds, protecting himself as the wave sweeps the
beautiful couple into the deep.
Thankfully, Laguna Beach’s finest were on hand and performed a
daring rescue but, quickly, could Mason Ho make a business out of
this sort of thing?
Couples taking wedding photos on rocks, getting swept out to see
while he surfs right over them and captures it all via GoPro?
It’d be very popular, I think, further frustrating the
ocean.
Thankfully we truly don’t need it anymore as we have Kelly
Slater.
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Massive Great White Shark gets caught in
New Zealand fishing net and dies; experts say not the famed
“Taranaki Terror!”
Shark experts and enthusiasts will recall,
pre-Covid-19, when it was reported
here that an “apocalyptic mass human extinction event”
was amassing off New Zealand’s once-bucolic shore in the form of
“thousands of Great Whites.”
Well, the beasts have arrived in even greater numbers than the
nightmare scenario and in greater sizes too.
But maybe you’ve heard of the “Taranaki
Terror,” what has been described by eyewitnesses as a
20 foot Great White Shark that swims as fast as a bullet and eats
seals in front of sheet-white tourists, covering them in red, red
blood.
The Terror has been cruising for three-weeks, though some don’t
believe, calling it a “complete load of bloody hype.”
I stand with the surfers, however, who have seen it leaping into
the air and the bounty hunters who are out trying to catch it, as
it’s jaw is worth a reported $30,000.
Another massive Great White was recently tangled in a New
Zealand fishing net and perished. It was not the Taranaki Terror
and its jaw was donated to science.
Where will your jaw go when you finally expire?
I hope mine is used as a weapon to strike down the next 1000
CEOs of organized professional surfing.
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JJF and Mark Cunningham. | Photo: Justin
Jay/@justinjayphoto
Warshaw: The bodysurfer Mark Cunningham is
“mindful Zen-infused chinchilla-trimmed Ferrari perfection from
takeoff to beach landing!”
Sunday is Matt Warshaw day, when surfing’s sole
historian and its most quotable writer looses a sprawling
stream-of-consciousness email upon his subscribers.
Today, Warshaw riffs on the North Shore bodysurfer, Mark
Cunningham, a man who is to the North Shore what Churchill
was to his besieged people in 1940: an unwavering symbol of
determined righteousness and with a sorta off-kilter
brilliance.
Read and learn:
Cunningham is of course the world’s most revered
bodysurfer. For many of you, he is the only
revered bodysurfer, but that is because so little attention has
been paid to bodysurfers over the past 50 or so years.
Bodysurfing got way more attention in the earlies;
Ron Drummond wrote a
whole book about it, and Russell Hughes’ one brush
with fame came with this long board-free
ride in the ’68 World Surfing Championships, as seen
on Wide World of Sports. Bruce Jenkins, in this excellent Mark
Cunningham profile, highlights some of the first great
bodysurfers.
The surf leash broke up surfing and bodysurfing, which up
to that point had been united since the beginning—wipeout, lose
board, bodysurf, repeat— and not long afterward Cunningham more or
less became our one-man repository for what some people think of as
the purest form of wave-riding.
It is often said that Cunningham is amphibious, which is
true but incomplete.
It is often said that Cunningham
is amphibious, which is true but incomplete. Yes, he is
amphibious. He is also Ferrari. Photo: DaFin
Cunningham is as powerful and smooth as he is fish-like, in
other words.
He wanted to bodysurf Pipeline the way Lopez board-surfed it,
and that is what he did. No tricks, no wasted motion. Just mindful
Zen-infused chinchilla-trimmed Ferrari perfection from takeoff to
beach landing.
I have to tell this last story, even though it is self-serving
and makes it appear as if Mark bought his way into EOS, which of
course he did not.
While roaming a distant corner of the Surf Expo tradeshow in
Orlando two years ago, I found Mark sitting alone at a booth, his
magnificent head of white hair full and lofty, looking every bit
the hawk-nosed crinkly-eyed younger brother of Nick Lowe.
A perennial EOS subscriber, Mark clapped me on the back and
raved about the site and the importance of surf history and
whatnot, and maybe because I did such a good job at maintaining
cool he suddenly reared back and said, “Are you still taking
donations?” I nodded. He pulled out an ancient two-tone Velcro
wallet, ripped it open and fished out the only bill therein, a
twenty, which he looked at for a moment then folded once and handed
over.
He frowned.
“That’s not enough,” he muttered.
With a snap of the fingers, he squatted down, rummaged through a
duffle bag, and came up with a shrink-wrapped box of Mauna Loa
chocolate-covered macadamia nuts, which he also handed over, then
once again clapped my back and sent me off with more uplifting
remarks.
Listen: Longtom on twenty-year blood feud
with Nick Carroll, why the WSL will change hands for one dollar and
how the Kelly Slater wavepool is an “evolutionary blind
alley!”
Today’s episode of Dirty Water, number eighteen,
contains the forthright opinions of writer Steve “Longtom”
Shearer, a man who believes in the doctrine of eternal
punishment, regards baptism by immersion as essential and is that
most formidable of composite forces – a dreamer who thinks and a
thinker who dreams.
Along with Charlie Smith, various topics are broached, Steve’s
multi-decade feud with the great Nick Carroll, whether or not media
has a responsibility to report on potentially catastrophic drug use
by athletes (Steve recounts seeing Andy Irons at Snapper in 2010
“looking like his life force was gone”), the fading star that is
the WSL and its ambitious $150 million self-valuation and why Kelly
Slater’s wavepool is an “evolutionary blind alley.”
Leave a review, good or bad it don’t matter as long as it’s
entertaining, send a screenshot and your address and we’ll outfit
you with a pretty tail-pad which you can examine here.
(Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher,
TuneIn + Alexa, iHeartRadio, Overcast, Pocket Cast, Castro,
Castbox, Podcast Addict, Podchaser, Deezer and Listen Notes.)
