Hunk needed.

Yesterday’s reported mass sacking of surf industry employees was but the latest in an unfortunate series. Sixty employees slashed from Boardriders’ (parent company of Billabong, Quiksilver, RVCA) Australian bureau. One-hundred and fifty disappeared from the U.S. a week earlier and right before the usually happy holiday season.

The troublesome part of all this blood-letting is that surfing, as a whole, is coming off one of the biggest booms in its illustrious history. The pandemic opening the door to millions upon millions of new participants. Aside from purchasing soft-topped surfboards and tuning into World Surf League broadcasts, though, these millions upon millions have clearly not been purchasing Billabong, Quiksilver, RVCA-branded t-shirts, hoodies, etc.

No mountain and wave covering heart.

The reason? Well, have you heard of “pretty privilege?” The concept has been around for some time and basically suggests that traditionally attractive men and women have an upper hand in life and also lead people towards imitation, trying to look like the beauty set. Now, when the surf industry had its initial spike, in the mid-1980s, it did so on the gorgeous backs of dreamy Laird Hamilton and Kelly Slater. The early 2000s, another lush time, brought the likes of lantern-jawed Andy Irons and Neco Padaratz, steamy Luke Stedman and Rizal Tanjung.

The good looks from the Momentum Generation, alone, could have lit Manhattan for a year.

Each of these men, these surfers, an absolute pin-up and surfwear sales exploded through the roof.

But these days?

While Gabriel Medina and Kanoa Igarashi form one half of a world-beating boy band, they are backed up by… jack. Oh, Filipe Toledo, Griffin Colapinto, Jordy Smith etc. are all decent appearing men, serviceable, but none come close to touching In God’s Hands’ Shane Dorian much less Laird Hamilton’s Cool Water.

Surfing is in desperate, desperate need of a hunk.

Will you answer the call before surf-branded sweatpants are but a faint memory?

Please do (if you have a lantern jaw, dewy eyes, plump lips etc.).

Thank you, ancient Hawaiians.

The highly-anticipated follow-up to Black Panther, titled Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, stormed into theaters a little over a week ago thus far amassing 67 million dollars and is looking to rake in a further 40 million over the extended Thanksgiving weekend.

Critics are declaring, “Wow! You’ll say that over and over again as this mind-blowing, superhero epic unfolds. Wow!”

And, “The most unlikely Marvel film ever… they take these really small bites of grieving, and they can extend them and live in them, and still be able to tell an engaging action-oriented story.”

The story follows, I think, the fictional Afro-futurist kingdom of Wakanda as it deals with the death of its king and an adventure to the underwater world of Talokan, which is based upon the lost city of Atlantis.

But how does one prepare for life beneath the sea?

With special training from surf king Laird Hamilton of course.

According to Pop Sugar:

(The film’s star Lupita) Nyong’o recently gave fans a taste of what that was like. In an Instagram video posted Nov. 18, the 39-year-old actress showed snippets of her underwater workouts and captioned the post, “Swimming down to Talokan was not as easy as it looked!” No kidding. Nyong’o wasn’t just logging laps or practicing her flip turn. Her training consisted of swimming drills, crawling and walking along the bottom of the pool, and walking up underwater steps — all while holding one or two dumbbells in her hands. And of course, Nyong’o did it all while holding her breath, with no oxygen tank in sight. “I felt like a crawfish,” she says at one point during the video.

 

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A post shared by Lupita Nyong’o (@lupitanyongo)

It’s not a regimen you’d attempt without some expert guidance and coaching, and Nyong’o assures us that she was “safely supervised” by Mark Roberts, a human performance specialist and trainer with XPT Fitness, a “performance lifestyle system” by former pro athletes Laird Hamilton and Gabby Reece. In a 2014 article he wrote for Men’s Journal, former pro surfer Hamilton extolled the benefits of working with weights in the water, an approach he attributes to ancient Hawaiians.

As beautiful as it is helpful but… I have just one small question.

If the ancient Hawaiians developed underwater weight workouts is XPT Fitness straight cultural appropriation?

Oh don’t answer. I take it back.

Wakanda Forever.