Kelly Slater announces imminent retirement,
back-pedals from earlier claim friends “have literally died” from
COVID vaccines and reveals godson to be “best fifteen-year-old
surfer” on earth!
By Derek Rielly
The champ, candid with MMA broadcaster Ariel
Helwani…
The peerless MMA journalist and broadcaster Ariel
Helwani, born of excellent Jewish stock and a thorn in the side of
the UFC’s famously prickly Dana White, has just completed
a superb interview with the eleven-time world surfing champion
Kelly Slater.
From the opening gambit where Kelly explains why MMA is his
favourite sport to watch, to his blood feud with UFC star
Paulo Costa to his likely retirement in 2022 and the
TV series that’ll be made around it (also admits might be sorta
hard given his no-vax stance), to pivoting the Ultimate
Surfer away from tour wannabes and focusing on kids, fourteen
to seventeen, to the wild ability of his godson Jackie Doz and a
slight back-pedalling on pals dying from COVID vaccines (now it’s
just “horrible reactions”), Slater, and Helwani are in terrific
form.
Essential.
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Rumor: A “full on Covid outbreak” has
ripped through the North Shore’s famed Billabong House weeks ahead
of Pipeline Masters!
By Chas Smith
Troublesome.
Billabong is as fine a surf brand as there is featuring an
iconic lineage, many great products and a professional surf team
that might just be the best in the business. Italo Ferreira, Laura
Enever, Griffin Colapinto, Alessa Quizon, Ryan Callinan, Jack
Freestone, Seth Moniz to name but a few.
It also has a famed house on Oahu’s fabled North Shore where
many notable incidents have occurred (buy here), much fun had,
serious moments of preparation and fine celebrations too.
Unfortunate rumor, from a source planted in that seven miles of
miracle, suggests that a “full on covid outbreak” has ripped
through the selfsame house just weeks ahead of the Pipe Masters,
which just so happens to be presented by Billabong.
There is no word as to who might be sick, quarantine measures
etc. but if a full on covid outbreak spreads beyond those
chartreuse walls into the rest of the North Shore do you imagine
that the Pipe Masters would be clipped?
I imagine so.
The World Surf League has made “an abundance of caution” its new
tagline having jettisoned the recently adopted “It Takes a Day to
Make a Title.”
Troublesome.
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John John Florence casts his all-powerful shadow over
Pipeline. | Photo: WSL
Two-time world surfing champ John John
Florence wins fifth Pipeline crown as little brother Ivan steals
show with perfect ten-point ride and podium finish!
By Derek Rielly
Flo-bros dominate The Pipe!
Earlier today, John John Florence took his iron hard-on
and blew the achey pressure in his balls into his fifth
Pipeline crown.
The almost thirty-year-old two-time world champion with the
impervious reputation adds the HIC Pipe Pro to last year’s
Billabong Pipe Masters, and his three Volcom Pipe Pros, 2012, 2013
and 2015.
Florence took the last-minute win against fellow Hawaiian Barron
Mamiya, little bro Ivan and Kainehe Hunt.
It was Ivan, twenty-five, who stunned the world, however, with a
ten-point ride in the quarters.
If anyone’s surprised that Ivan, who is twenty-five and who
looks like a roughed up Mason Ho, can shred, they shouldn’t be.
As middle-bro Nathan told BeachGrit a few years back,
“Ivan has the sickest style. His style is way sicker me or John’s.
He’s so smooth, like, Tom Curren.”
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Real shame this happy lil house is gonna be
bulldozed.
Dilapidated beach shack in down-at-heel
Gold Coast suburb known as “meth alley” sells for almost
five-and-a-half million dollars!
By Derek Rielly
The last of the great bullish sales!
A decrepit beach shack in a Gold Coast beach suburb
famous for its distinctive rows of run-down houses made in the
nineteen-fifties, curtains drawn even in the middle of a bright
winter day, fronts for the hydroponic and meth units deftly hidden
inside, has sold for $A5.4 million.
The original three-bedder at 233 Jefferson Lane, made from the
fibro cement sheeting popular in that post-war period, occupies
four-thousand square feet of absolute beachfront land and sits amid
various trophy homes and apartment towers, including Kelly Slater’s
joint a few hundred yards down the road at Joy on
Jefferson.
“Is it your time to make a statement on the beachfront landscape
with a luxury masterpiece, where you can create everlasting
memories for your loved ones? Would you like to feel the sand
between your toes daily and rinse off with a therapeutic salt water
cleanse after your morning beach walk?”
The joint harks back to a much simpler time of
surf and TV.
On a recent forum where readers were invited to detail what
suburbs to avoid on the Gold Coast, Palm Beach was regularly
noted.
Full of deadbeat bogans people who dont work and live on the
dole and think its cool. Not all of them of course but alot of
people around those areas are
Palmy, druggies.
All I can say is avoid Palm Beach. Full of druggies and
bogans and has a very high crime rate. Last time I was down there,
there was a chap on his balcony with guns to two people’s heads
screaming and yelling. The SERT team came out and ushered us all
into random people’s garages and stormed the unit complex. From
what I heard afterwards the ended up shooting the dude from the
road. It was like something off TV! Time before that the local
video shop was broken into. It’s getting worse.
Really beautiful beach though 🙂
The sale was, likely, one of the last bullish hits of the great
Australian real estate bubble (six months back a block of Palm
Beach land, not beachfront that had sold for $1.4 mill in March,
went for $2.4 mill in June) which is screeching to a halt under a
combo of expected interest rate rises and an oversupply of vendors
wanting to cash in their joints for outrageous sums.
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Decades after popularizing removable fin
systems, champion surfer Kelly Slater concludes they are great
environmental evil; launches new “green” removable fin system!
By Chas Smith
We live in the futures.
Surfing can, in many ways, be broken up into B.K. and A.K.
Before Kelly and Anno Kelly. B.K., everyone had glass on fins and
purchased paper surf magazines. A.K. everyone rides removable fin
systems and has paper surf-adjacent catalogs junk mailed to their
homes.
And where would we be if Slater had not popularized FCS? In a
world of hurt is where but, decades later, it has been revealed
that removable fins are actually bad for the environment and end up
littering reefs etc. The 11-time surfing world champion, never
missing an opportunity to wash the world a new, glorious shade of
green, has taken it upon himself to launch a more eco-friendly
alternative to those fin systems currently on the market.
Introducing Endorfins.
Per the press release:
Kelly has always had a deep relationship and passion for
fins being that they are a critical component of board design and
performance. We wanted to bring this to life by launching a fin
brand driven by Kelly’s vision of performance and eco
responsibility. We believe as surfers we have a responsibility to
make fins as eco-friendly as possible and ensure we keep our ocean
floor free from “Lost and Broken fins.”
The design of these fins are the culmination of Kelly’s many
years and extensive experience with a variety of designs and
templates. This unique flex pattern is created by a carbon twill,
layered with an ultralight carbon veil over a P.E.T core. The P.E.T
core is 90% air resulting in Fins so light they float on water.
Combining that knowledge, and several rounds of testing and
adjusting over the past year and a half, we are excited to present
Endorfins to the world.
The fins work in either FCS or Futures boxes and will float out
to the great plastic garbage island in the sea instead of getting
buried with sand.
