"Every mother is ready to warm her children."

Ain’t it ironic that the three-time world champ Gabriel Medina has passed through the gates of hell over the course of the last eighteen months and yet has never appeared happier, at least in photographs.

A few weeks back, Medina, who is twenty-eight, quit the tour just before the opening event at Pipe citing his fragile mental health.

“I have emotional issues that I need to deal with,” he wrote.

Shortly after, the breakdown of his marriage to thirty-three-year-old Sports Illustrated model Yasmin Brunet and the fire sale of the pair’s beachfront house in Sao Paulo became public.

According to Brazil media, Brunet, who is thirty-three, refused to leave the joint and put towels over the security cameras so no one could see what she was doing. Allegedly etc. 

And before all that, there was the estrangement of his mama and step-dad, which included a messy split of assets, and a wild feud between his wife and his mama over the existence of a supposed sex tape starring Brunet.

But, maybe, a little sunshine is beginning to appear through the clouds after mammy Simone posted a conciliatory message to her kid along with a photo of Gabriel folded in her arms.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Siimone Medina (@simonemedina)

“This morning I prayed, getting ready to leave, end of vacation!!!!! This photo appeared in my Google photos memories of a very cold day in Trestles, I almost became a penguin lol but even with cold every mother is ready to warm her children. A lot of training day at Trestles. As always rain, shine, wind or hurricane, big waves, shark we are always there as a resting place. God bless you in this new cycle son. gabrielmedina felipemedina_17 @sophiamedina @charlaomedina100 you are my resting place. Love you”

As well,  following Brunet’s departure Medina’s rekindled his friendship with soccer superstar Neymar, a recent post for his pal’s birthday hitting a whopping 700k likes.

“I love you man,” wrote Medina, I’ll let the photos do the talking.”

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by #10 🥷🏻 (@gabrielmedina)

Rams vs. Bengals vs. surfers.

Today, Sunday February 13, is the Super Bowl. For those not versed in America sport, it is much like Pipeline except held at the end of the football season as opposed to the beginning. Now, once upon a time, this Sunday was a wonderful time for surfers to slip out and catch an early evening surf as very many millions of people chose to melt into the couch, overstuffed with 7-layer dips and whatnot, unable to make it to the beach.

This year, though, with Los Angeles hosting “The Big Game” and dastardly too perfect weather descending on the region, beaches and lineups have become overstuffed themselves with hot fans.

According to the local CBS affiliate:

With less than 24 hours until Super Bowl LVI, featuring the hometown Los Angeles Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals, Southern California beaches were far more crowded than normal on Saturday.

Over 100,000 football fans set to attend the big game, many actually headed away from SoFi Stadium, and instead to the sand in an attempt to take in the uncharacteristic summer day in February.

Since many of the people heading into the Southland hail from Ohio, or other Midwest states, 80 degree beach weather is far from normal, in fact, on Saturday in Cincinnati, there was a high of 23 degrees with a likelihood for snow.

So when Becky Matheny, a Bengals fan from Louisville, KY saw today’s weather she made sure she went to thaw out of her winter freeze at the beach, “I love it here,” she said.

“Becky” and her ilk forced San Diego lifeguards to staff up and also made parking lightly difficult for surf locals.

Back to the 7-layer dip, though. What is your favorite decadent sporting snack?

Chicken wings?

Cheese log?

Cheese nachos?

Put recipe in comments please.

"To top it off the combo of drugs has me waking from nightmares so real I can feel them deep down inside and they scare the shit out of me…”

The Oceanside surfer and former world number eighteen, Mike Lambresi, who nearly died one month ago after falling while trying to snatch the perfect angle for an Instagram photo, has revealed the shocking aftermath of the accident. 

In an Instagram story and with words pasted over a photo of the pretty San Diego vista he was trying to snatch when he fell, Lambresi writes, “In the middle of the worst night since my return hospital last Tuesday. I can’t make more of these… I’ve never ever thought seriously about choosing to amputate a limb but at this point my left foot is getting serious consideration. Crazy just seeing it as I write it. All I want is a little relief from the agony. To top it off the combo of drugs has me waking from nightmares so real I can feel them deep down inside and they scare the shit out of me…”

After the accident Lambresi, who turns fifty-eight this year, posted gruesome photos of the injury; images so disturbing Instagram had to place a “sensitive content” warning over ‘em. 

“Lost my left heel and did a pretty job on right leg and foot also. Wheelchair for the next month and more surgeries to come for skin grafts etc,” wrote Lambresi. 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Mike Lambresi (@mike_lambresi)

Lambresi only started stand-up surfing at eighteen in 1982 but got so good so fast he’d won the prestigious California Stubbies Trials within one year. 

Fame and chasing the tour never appealed to Lambresi.

He quit the tour three years later in 1985, aged twenty-one, to stay home with his wife and kid, although he’d dominate the domestic PSAA tour for years, winning it in 1987, 88 and 89.

“I didn’t like the tour,” Lambresi later said. “I hated traveling eight or nine months of the year; it was grueling. I was engaged, and kept putting off getting married because I was always on the road. Quitting was actually a pretty easy choice for me.”

Conflict!

I don’t, in fact, know if the Hurley Pro Sunset Beach presented by Shiseido is going to run today or not but I must leave on an early-ish morning sail and cannot, will not, leave you bereft in case that it does. There will be many conflicts in the water, professional surfer battling professional surfer, but also one major conflict on land.

Shiseido, the presenting sponsor, makes beauty products. So does Hurley.

How did the World Surf League let this happen? In any case, watch the fire works here or here. Chat with your braddahs and sistahs below.

Knives drawn.

Amidst much controversy, the World Surf League released an image honoring Kelly Slater on his 50th birthday that is very much polarizing art critics and lay persons alike.

Harold Rosenberg of ARTnews declared:

Weak mysticism, the “Christian Science” side of the new movement, tends … toward easy painting—never so many unearned masterpieces! Works of this sort lack the dialectical tension of a genuine act, associated with risk and will. When a tube of paint is squeezed by the Absolute, the result can only be a Success. The painter need keep himself on hand solely to collect the benefits of an endless series of strokes of luck. His gesture completes itself without arousing either an opposing movement within itself nor the desire in the artist to make the act more fully his own. Satisfied with wonders that remain safely inside the canvas, the artist accepts the permanence of the commonplace and decorates it with his own daily annihilation. The result is an apocalyptic wallpaper.

Thomas McEvilley of MoMA countered:

The fact that the primitive “looks like” the Modern is interpreted as validating the Modern by showing that its values are universal, while at the same time projecting it—and with it MoMA—into the future as a permanent canon. A counter view is possible: that primitivism on the contrary invalidates Modernism by showing it to be derivative and subject to external causation. At one level this show undertakes precisely to coopt that question by answering it before it has really been asked, and by burying it under a mass of information.

Knives drawn.

What do you feel?

Where do you go when you gaze into the void?

Describe.