"Wonderful example to promote," says world champ in latest instalment of multi-year blood feud.
Only four weeks ago, the eleven-time world champion surfer Kelly Slater proved, again, that the pen is mightier than the sword when he slayed an historically inaccurate Instagram troll who had accused him of racism after a post on Chinese fishing in the Galapagos Islands.
“Writing me out of the blue talking shit is such a crock of shit. Accusing me of being a racist? My girlfriend is Chinese. You’re on glue. You’re a miserable coward. And now you’re blocked.”
“Hahahaha,” wrote the kid.
Earlier today, a new front was revealed with Kelly’s riposte to Peter Schroff, the noted LA-based shaper and artist who has made turned his hate for Asian-made surfboards into performance art.
In 2019, the San Diego-by-way-of-the-Philippines-and-New-York shaper Mark Polintan had given his Happy Battles shop to a Schroff show where a Slater Designs board was cut in half by Schroff using a chainsaw.
A handprinted t-shirt was made for the occasion and sold for fifty dollars.
(For a quick education into Schroff’s previous attacks on Slater Designs, Firewire and so on, click Blood Feud: Schroff v Hayden Cox, Relentless: Schroff’s War on Mark Price, Peter Schroff Does Yellow Face, Modern: Peter Schroff Doubles Down and Three-Way: Dorian v Tudor v Schroff.)
When Polintan reposted a photo of the tee on his Instagram account @happy.battle, Kelly sent a pointed direct message.
“Hahaha. Must be great to be in your mid-late 60’s, on drugs, sexually confused and dying for any kind of attention. Wonderful example to promote.”
Polintan replied, “The shaper you’re referring to who happened to be gay is not sexually confused. How (is) being gay sexually confused again? Get your head out of your ass.”
Two years ago, I interviewed Schroff, then sixty-three, where he said he was “a stick of dynamite…The methods that we’re using is to ridicule Kelly and Mark Price and to have local people be too embarrassed to buy the boards. That’s the strategy.”
Paradoxically, in an interview in Surfer magazine in 2019, Schroff revealed himself as a Slater fan.
“Kelly Slater has never stopped surfing and that’s why he is still the best surfer alive,” said Schroff. “Even at 47 years old. Sure, maybe not as much in contests anymore, but his surfing is so stylish, it has so much character and, shit, he’s so driven. Nobody else has ever come close to that drive. That’s part of his style. He’s like Marlon Brando’s character in Apocalypse Now.”
Good times etc.