Cancel your plans.

“Cord cutting” was supposed to free us all from the bondage of cable, satellite dishes, of entertainment packages we did not care for but were forced to buy. We were supposed to win choice, freedom, a paradise of watching what we want, when we want but alas, reality has not been quite as rosy. It costs a fortune to buy every little separate thing, for one, and our viewing pleasure depends on rock solid internet speeds.

Well, American fans of professional surfing are, this morning, scrambling to add ESPN2 to their channels, damn the cost, while television streamers are frantically trying to increase capacity as the World Surf League has announced that the most watched event in history is set to be re-broadcast tonight.

Per the press release:

The 2022 Rip Curl WSL Finals had it all. In front of the huge crowd at Lower Trestles, a generational talent battled to win his well-deserved first World Title and a legend cemented her legacy as the greatest of all time. Relive the action and watch WSL Presents: The Rip Curl WSL Finals Tonight at 8pm PST/11pm EST on ESPN2.

The huge crowd at Lower Trestles.

A generational talent.

A legend cementing legacy as GOAT.

Prepare for regional brownouts.

All hail!

What a time to be alive, and a surfer. Our favorite pastime, once the sole pursuit of derelicts and junkies, has transformed itself into a gilded palace for the powerful, rich, multi-talented and gorgeous. But who could have seen Mark Zuckerberg falling in love with, and training to conquer, big waves? Jonah Hill scaling Malibu’s hierarchy and seating himself upon Miki Dora’s throne? Gisele Bündchen on the way to. leaving her husband and (hopefully) re-finding Kelly Slater and being crowned King and Queen of Surfing.

But wait.

A new challenger has just emerged from the likeliest of places.

Actual royalty.

For you have certainly read about Prince Harry, King Charles’ son, and his wife Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle and their relocation to the United States of America. But where did they land? In Montecito, of course very near Rincon and the Channel Islands’ shaping bay.

Prince Harry had been pictured surfing in the past but this new coastal move, minutes from Dane Reynolds, all but guaranteed a full embrace.

Next, the two were seen swaying in rhythm at a Jack Johnson concert. Another grand step.

Now, in an expansive new interview, Duchess Sussex revealed an unmissable core kink. When asked, at the end, who “takes more snack breaks” between her and husband, she replied:

It’s funny. People sometimes think we live in Los Angeles, but we’re a good two hours outside of it. We’re commuters. We drove down recently for a day of back-to-back meetings , equipped with chocolate chip cookies the size of my toddler’s head. Also, my husband’s favorite is In-N-Out. There’s one at the halfway point between L.A. and our neck of the woods. It’s really fun to go through the drive-thru and surprise them. They know our order.

I know, exactly, of which In-N-Out she speaks and have stopped there many times, along with every other true grumpy local, on trips to surf Emma Woods, The Ranch and points further north. It is like other In-N-Outs just more silver strandy. Timmy Curran-esque. Al and Britt Merrick-ish.

All hail.

Thoreauean.

The 2022 World Surf League Championship Tour season is now well and truly in the rearview mirror but, from this vantage, we can appreciate the highs, mourn the lows much cleaner. The world’s greatest surfer, Kelly Slater, taking the first win of the season at the famed Pipeline, the same Slater sharing large Teahupo’o waves with his employee Nathan Hedge while the preternaturally talented Filipe Toledo sat and watched in awe, the same Toledo going to Lower Trestles, winning the crown and ushering in eight million (and counting) new viewers, all highs.

The low? Australian mainstay and Olympic bronze medal winner Owen Wright becoming ruthlessly decapitated by the WSL’s cold mid-season cut.

Wright, as you know, has as inspirational a story as any, suffering a traumatic brain injury at Pipeline in 2015 that seemed to have completely derailed any professional surfing hope then coming all the way back to tour, or at least until he was told to leave again.

Well, in a revealing new interview, the Irukandji shares a secret to his recovery.

Per News Corp.

“I was really full on, on trying to recover from the head injury that I had and it got to a stage where everything was just revolving around like physio or different movements and different brain exercises and I just didn’t have that pure joy and like ‘living’ back … I was just so caught up in recovery. So that’s where [camping] came into play.”

Wright went on to discuss how he loves being outdoors, eating stew out of a can, sleeping in a canvas tent that gets very hot in the day, poking the fire with sticks and pretending they’re cigars afterward, burning marshmallows to ash and insisting they taste better that way… or maybe that is just my childhood camping experience.

Maybe Wright’s is different. He takes his own child, anyhow, whenever he can and continues:

“If we are down by a river … where there’s rocks and stuff he’s just like ‘look at this rock, it looks like a dinosaur!’ I don’t hear that creativity when I’m at home … and then when we’re outside he’ll just play and play and play. I end up mucking around too and tapping into my child side and going along with his imagination. There’s nature, and there’s us, and you just get a better connection.”

Beautiful and continued shame on the World Surf League.

Big shame.

Real quick, though, did you ever read Walden Pond? What are your thoughts? I never have, in its entirety, but find the passages I stumble across dumb.