City of Huntington Beach offers emotional
support services to anyone who witnessed the fatal police shooting
during U.S. Open of Surfing’s penultimate day.
By Chas Smith
Public service.
The city of Huntington Beach announced, late
Sunday, that it is offering emotional support services to anyone
who witnessed the fatal police shooting that occurred on the sand,
just south of the pier, just as competition was wrapping at the
U.S. Open of Surfing.
The victim, now identified as Ronnie Garcia, aged 43, was gunned
down by multiple officers after he failed to comply with their
orders. He was allegedly carrying a gun that was later recovered at
the scene while hundreds, if not thousands, milled about.
Many, including surfers competing in the event, were deeply
traumatized and looking for a way process the horror. Huntington
Beach responded by providing Be Well OC’s Tony Delgado at
(949) 749-2301. The city will also be hosting a community meeting
in the coming days for those who want to express their concerns and
ask questions about the incident.
Delaware’s beachfront homeowners reel as
property repairs, renovations languish due to cursed social plague:
“I was told by a friend that many contractors are surfers and only
show up when the surf is down!”
By Chas Smith
Big trouble.
Delaware’s cape region, home to President Joseph R.
Biden and Elisabeth Shue, is staggering under an outbreak
of surf-related poor work ethic. According to a scathing new report
in the Cape Gazette,
beachfront property owners are unable to find able bodied men to
repair or upgrade beachfront mansions due the severe social
plague.
Resident and artist Pam Bounds, who lives in Milton, declares,
“I was told by a friend that many contractors are surfers and only
show up when the surf is down. This is a romantic vision for
wannabe cougars, but hardly ever the reality!”
Ms. Bounds recounts a string of surf-contractor horror stories
including unfinished jobs, poorly done jobs, bad attitudes and
surly attitudes too. One drove a “beat-up old car” and forced his
wife to sit in the backseat all day as he worked, when there were
no waves. Another put his foot “irreverently” on her coffee table
“heavily tattooed calf at eye level” though at least it was “a
feast for the eyes.”
The worst was “the (surfer) who mowed our lawn in Milton
for a short while when we were still living full time in
Wilmington. He also painted the bottoms of boats. He wanted payment
in advance and then didn’t show up, declaring, ‘I’m not mowing your
[bleeping] lawn!’ OK. Finally, as my daughter was entertaining
prospective in-laws in the front parlor, the Milton Police banged
on the front door, looking for me on a complaint of phone
harassment since I had been robo-calling him! He knew the ropes of
the law for sure, and how to break it, since a few days later,
broken windows and screens appeared in my backyard as a
warning!”
Strange warning but also extremely surf-esque.
Residents in nearby New Jersey hope the disease doesn’t spread
north but many fear it already has and especially in the best
little town on earth, Asbury Park.
Exploring the nexus between the art of
strangulation and surfing! “To train in BJJ is to continually
drown—or, rather, to be drowned, in sudden and ingenious ways—and
to be taught, again and again, how to swim.”
By Derek Rielly
Surf and jiujitsu. Blood cousins!
A few years back, Kelly Slater, without a hell of a lot
of prompting, advised parents to put their kids in
jiujitsu “before any other sport.”
Forget surf, get ‘em rolling. he said. It’ll teach ‘em
confidence and smash their ego.
“There’s something about it that puts you in your place.”
Slater got turned onto the art of human chess and the various
ways to buckle a man in 1992 on one of his first trips to Brazil;
ended up getting pally with Rickson Gracie when the BJJ legend
moved to California, swapping boards for private
lessons.
“Grappling with an expert is akin to falling into deep water
without knowing how to swim. You will make a furious effort to stay
afloat—and you will fail. Once you learn how to swim, however, it
becomes difficult to see what the problem is—why can’t a drowning
man just relax and tread water? The same inscrutable difference
between lethal ignorance and lifesaving knowledge can be found on
the mat: To train in BJJ is to continually drown—or, rather, to be
drowned, in sudden and ingenious ways—and to be taught, again and
again, how to swim.”
I’d been hearing this sorta thing for years.
I saw jiujitsu swing through Maroubra, a few beaches south of
where I live, in the early two-thousands. Suddenly, at parties,
squeezing a pal’s carotid’s arteries to cause a temporary hypoxia
was all the rage.
“Let me put you to sleep, bruz” was a common
refrain.
I was impressed enough by it I got my kid into it when he was
four. It’s the only martial art where you practise, over and over
over, at a hundred percent resistance. Boxing, y’gotta slow it down
in training or you’re going to get brain damaged. And when you
throw a punch in the street or at school, there’s a chance one of
the participants is gonna end up in hospital, the other down at the
police station.
By the time my kid got into his first fight ten years later he’d
had roughly three thousand fight simulations. The video, kids with
phones weren’t gonna miss it, is instructive.
There’s no panic. He gets low. Bigger kid tries to take him
down. Sprawl. Circles to the back. Arms ring the neck. Legs hook
into the other kid. Fight over. No blood spilt.
The same way Taj Burrow’s trainer Johnny Gannon used to deal
with pests hassling TB. Quickly, expertly, harmlessly.
My kid’s trainer, a surfer called John Walton who’s been in the
jiujitsu and fight game for thirty years, would always tell me,
“Mate, it’s always offshore in the gym.”
So, a little over one year ago, now, I figured, let’s compare
surfing and jiujitsu.
Are they really simpatico? Does one complement the other?
Why are so many surfers, Jack Freestone, Luke Stedman, Richie
Vas, Eli Olson, Joel Tudor, Freddy Pattachia, Dustin Barca and so on, so deeply into
it?
And, at a fitness level, how’s it compare to
surfing?
I told Chas to do the same experiment in southern California,
home of modern jiujitsu. Figured it might help him next time he
gets slapped around at a trade show.
To get real tricky, we were outfitted with apparently revolutionary fitness
trackers called WHOOP straps. Developed by a Harvard
grad who was the captain of the college’s squash team, fittest man
around town, but who couldn’t work out why some days he felt like
he was going to collapse.
“I read something like 500 medical papers while I was in school,
and I wrote a paper myself on how to continuously understand the
human body,” he says.
Company said, write about ’em if you feel it. If you don’t, send
’em back.
Bottom line was, you want to really compare the two sports? Get
some data.
John John helped develop a wrist band called the
Hydrosleeve to stop his precious lil WHOOP being ripped off during
wipeouts.
“I have a good idea of what my recoveries will be and what I
need to do to recover. I know that if I strain from 18 to 20 (it maxes out at 21) one day,
two days in a row, then I know that I’m in need for a big recovery
day.”
Can’t hurt to see what happens.
I ain’t one for watches or jewellery but this is subtle enough.
It’s a black plastic rectangle affixed to a webbed band. And it’s
waterproof.
It uses LED lights flashing into your wrist to measure your
oxygen saturation, combining heart-rate variability, resting heart
rate and sleep patterns to tell when you to work out, when to rest,
as well as strain, how much sleep y’should be getting.
What I wouldn’t realise, then, was how addictive tracking data
is, how it’ll seize you and turn you into a fitness loon:
late-night runs, extended surfs, afternoon-long wrestling sessions,
just to push your strain metric into the stratosphere. You feel
tension if your numbers are ordinary.
Conversely, if you let the battery run down and it’s sitting on
the charger, you have no desire to do anything. Why exert if it
isn’t gonna shift the strain meter.
I also would’t realise, and didn’t think it was possible, that a
new sport could steal me away from the game I’d chased and loved
since I was a kid.
But that was still a few months away.
Next week: The blissful joys of hypoxia and the
realisation that twinks shouldn’t roll with bears!
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Open Thread: Comment Live, Finals Day of
the U.S. Open of Surfing presented by Shiseido!
By Chas Smith
Kolohe, Kanoa, Coco, etc.
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News reporting man shot, killed, by police
at yesterday’s U.S. Open of Surfing was armed and noncompliant,
bystanders describe hail of gunfire: “We started hearing pop, pop,
pop. I thought it was fireworks, that’s how many rounds there
were.”
By Chas Smith
The incident is under investigation.
Yesterday, late afternoon and toward the very
end of the U.S. Open of Surfing’s penultimate day, news began
circulating that a person was shot near the south side of
Huntington Beach’s pier. Details were scant but the World Surf
League quickly released a statement that all “athletes and staff”
were accounted for and that it was “an isolated incident.”
This morning, multiple news outlets are reporting that the
person was a male, that he was armed and, according to officers,
“noncompliant.”
The shooting, which occurred at 3:15 pm, according to Police
Department spokeswoman Jennifer Carey, was in response to calls
from bystanders who described a “suspicious man with a gun” at the
beach. Contact was made with the suspect south of the pier, he did
not comply with their commands and was shot.
Hector Tovar, who lives nearby, told The Orange County
Register, “We started hearing pop, pop, pop. I thought
it was fireworks, that’s how many rounds there were.”
Police say lifesaving measures were attempted before the wounded
man was taken to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead, and
that a gun was recovered at the scene.
The incident is now being investigated by the Orange County
Sheriffs Department.
Finals Day of the U.S. Open will take place as scheduled.