A new day has dawned.

Riding high on the impending success of Apple+ Television’s much ballyhooed Make or Break, the World Surf League has adopted a new aggressive tone. On its back foot for the better part of five years, the League has broadcast an either apologetic or pathetic timbre in communiques though all that changed with the suspension of longboard champion Joel Tudor via an excoriating missive from Senior Vice President of Tours, Head of Competition Jessi Miley-Dyer.

“Hello everyone,” it began before turning sharply caustic. “I wanted to address a post that our 2021 Men’s Longboard champion made on his IG account yesterday that was both inaccurate and misleading related to the WSL’s approach to equality. Joel created confusion and called into question whether female athletes competing on the Longboard Tour receive equal prize money. It is important that you know, and that you hear directly from me, that we take great pride in the fact that our male and female longboard athletes all receive equal prize money.”

Ouch.

World Surf League CEO Erik Logan continued the bold resonance in Bells where he cut mutinous petition-signing surfers down to size with slashing barbs such as “It is inconceivable that we could, should, or would eliminate the mid-season cut, which is the foundation of our redesigned Championship Tour.” And “I feel obligated to say that the petition was painfully untrue in many respects – and wrongly attempted to portray an adversarial relationship. I have a lot to say about this.”

Burn.

Now, professional surf fans are feeling the heat.

In an email sent out this morning signaling the potential running of today’s men’s round 1, the WSL communication department hissed, “In case you’ve been under a rock for the past month, the Margaret River Pro will decide the Mid-season Cut. Every surfer in the draw will be looking to put up big scores to stay inside the cut line. Lucky for them (and us), WSL rules and judging expert Rich Porta is here to break down how they can do just that. Watch the crucial event live April 24 to May 4 on worldsurfleague.com.”

Those who choose the active under-rock living lifestyle viciously and publicly shamed.

Porta, in any case, tells the surfers to “surf big” and to go for “big combinations.”

We’d all better watch. Or else…

Come walk the halls of a clifftop and beachfront paradise… 

Bruce Raymond, do you know?

He’s the brutal looking stud with the open jacket and open container of beer in hand from the famous Quikilsver ad, reproduced below.

To know the great Bruce Raymond, superstar businessman, former world number sixteen, therefore, is to love him. 

Surfing’s original surf journalist Phil Jarratt knows. 

In 1977, he wrote, 

“(Bruce) has that dark-eyed sinister air about him that appeals to women and makes men wonder. He would have made a good con man, hustler or gigolo.”

If Bruce’s achievements in the water, North Shore and tour shredder, and out, co-creator of the Quiksilver Pro at G-Land, The Crossing, keeping Kelly Slater, Tom Carroll and Lisa Andersen on Quik during their careers, aren’t enough, Bruce has collected various houses along Sydney’s northern beaches, cleverly buying low and selling high. 

His latest sale is his joint at 65 The Serpentine, Bilgola Beach, which recently went under the hammer two weeks ago for well over five mill (the agent was guiding $5,375 mill-plus), roughly two mill more than he bought it for in 2017.

The four-bedroom house on nearly eight k square feet features a self-contained guest suite which Kelly Slater utilised on visits to Sydney, a heated mineral water pool (a delicious mixer for guests’ wee-wees), pizza oven out the back and, best of all, it squats on the northside of Bilgola Head which means y’don’t get licked by the southerlies that tear the hair off everyone else’s heads whenever fronts pass through the city.

No word yet on Bruce’s next move.

He says he’s gonna stay in the area but downsize a little.

In the meantime, get a little taste of the Bilgola place.

The handsome face of the ultra-vibrant former world champ Italo Ferreira has been brutally rearranged following wipeout.

The stubby, handsome, friendly face of the Brazilian surfer Italo Ferreira has been re-arranged after a collision with his surfboard following an aerial gone awry at Margaret River. 

The pint-sized 2019 world champ and Olympic gold medallist whose Bells campaign was marred by a wild storming of the judging tower amid accusations they were “ruining the sport” took to Instagram to announce the injury. 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Italo Ferreira (@italoferreira)

The ultra-vibrant Ferreira, who enjoys dressing in zoo-animal prints that are the hallmark of ebullient resort wear and who is two rungs outside the cut-off for the September final, will still compete at Margaret River.

Retribution nigh?

Power, man. It is said to corrupt and absolute power is said to corrupt absolutely but what can be said of the world’s current wealthiest man, Elon Musk, completing his stunning purchase of popular messaging application Twitter as just announced hours ago?

For you and me, things are likely not to change much. A little tweak here, there, rich getting richer etc.

But how will the earth shift under surfing great Kelly Slater’s tanned feet?

You must certainly remember that the 11x champion, and cryptocurrency visionary took to Instagram, his preferred platform, just under a year ago and absolutely savaged the South African after deciding to pull back from allowing Teslas to be purchased using bits and bytes.

Slater, flashing teeth, wrote:

Elon Musk and Tesla Motors proudly bought $1.5B worth of Bitcoin for around $34K in Feb. Elon comes out this week and says BTC mining is bad for the environment and they dump their bitcoin for an estimated $804M in profits (but he’s still pushing dogecoin, a useless shit coin).

So a guy who owns an energy company doesn’t understand this stuff before he buys it? Has no problem taking the profits. Does he have an issue with kids mining cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo to build batteries? He could probably address and potentially help solve the real energy issues (68 per cent of the energy produced in the US, for instance, is wasted … seems like a bigger issue to me which would solve any BTC problem).

I think Elon’s board and backers hate crypto and what it’s doing for the average investor and pressured him to put out a statement which they knew would inevitably tank bitcoin. I hope the SEC is taking a good look at this (and all of them who might be buying the dip today and this week in their private accounts). Interesting times. But Elon is bad for crypto.

Zingers everywhere though now that Musk is ultra-ultra-powerful, is Slater is ruing his choice of words? Maybe thinking he hopped in bed with the wrong billionaire?

That would certainly be my opinion but who cares about that?