“Modern voice of surfing” Joe Turpel gives beautiful interview to local news station, not a dry eye left in the house!

"It’s still honestly surreal."

The Rumble at the Ranch, now one week in the rearview, reintroduced professional surfing to an entertainment starved public and… to be honest I have not read or heard one good thing about it. Mocking Kelly Slater’s Green Kingdom, its monotony, its “unnecessary irresponsibility,” has become too easy and so I’m always on the lookout for a voice to force me to see it in a different light.

Always on the lookout even to this very day, but while we are discussing voices, the “modern voice of surfing” Joe Turpel gave such a warm interview to his local Hawaiian television station khon2.

Do you forget that Turpel is Hawaiian? I certainly do and/or never realized in the first place but there he was discussing his personal history…

I was taking a summer school class at Punahou and the teacher was Pal Eldredge and he made us do a sports report of our favorite team. I was playing baseball at the time and I did a full Dodgers breakdown of their last game and Mr. Eldredge said ‘hey, you might wanna take this VHS tape back to your parents and show them what you did today,’ and I was like ‘what do you mean?’ He’s like ‘maybe you should do this in your life.’ That was the first time I was like ‘oh my gosh, maybe I want to be a broadcaster.’

His feelings at the dawn of Covid…

We had like a heat to go and we realized this might be maybe the last heat of the year (Carissa’s victory). At the time it seemed surreal. It just felt like ‘wait, is this going to be a couple of weeks or is Snapper (Rocks) gonna be back on?’ Then eventually it led to further down, the full cancelation of 2020.

But most importantly, his being called “The Modern Voice of Surfing…”

It’s still honestly surreal. I have a hard time saying that myself because it feels too big,” he said. “For me, I’m still this kid that loves to surf so to be able to even think that is incredible. I almost don’t spend too much time thinking about it because it feels too big. I’m just enjoying it all. It’s definitely an honor to hear something like that.

If your eyes aren’t moist then you are not human.