The heaviest losses came from Slater (41% of picks), Barron Mamiya (10%), Kanoa Igarashi (4%), Griffin Colapinto (3%) and Italo Ferreira (1%).

Over a thousand people entered the arena of the Surfival League, their dreams shimmering with thoughts of five-thousand American dollars in cash and three custom PANDA surfboards.

Winner take all.

Surfival League was born, of course, after years of surf fans winning the Surfer or WSL’s fantasy leagues and getting stiffed of prizes.

Three years back, we interviewed Shane Starling, a forty-eight-year-old cycling enthusiast, who picked ten of the eleven event winners that year and his victory came and went entirely unremarked and unacknowledged by the WSL.

The first year of Surfival, a handyman from Colorado won a thousand bucks (world champ CJ Hobgood placed second).

Last year, a butcher from Bondi won three-gees and a three-board quiver from PANDA surfboards.

Rules, real simple.

You pick one surfer, they advance past the Round of 32, and you advance. They don’t, you don’t. Winner take all.

Well, the round of 32 just concluded at Pipe and 64% of the league is out.

Six-hundred and forty players from that initial one thousand, gone. 

Usually 10-25% of the league is gutted after each event. 

This year, the heaviest losses came from Slater (41% of picks), Barron Mamiya (10%), Kanoa Igarashi (4%), Griffin Colapinto (3%) and Italo Ferreira (1%).

Who hath angered the Surfival Gods so?

What’s next for those 64% who are out?

Go back to Fantasy Surfer?

That’s no fun!

The Surfival Gods are cooking up a Loser’s League.

And we’re open to ideas.

Whatcha got?

“I’d never done [ecstasy] before. I didn’t even know he’d put it in my drink!"

In a jaw-dropping interview, Pamela Anderson has revealed it was the notorious party drug ecstasy, famous for turning whomever is in your immediate vicinity into the greatest love of your life, a drug by turns absurd and compelling, for her decision to dump Kelly Slater and marry glam-rocker Tommy Lee.

Anderson, now fifty-five, tied the knot with Lee after he followed her to Cancun, Mexico, after which she says the drummer spiked her champagne with ecstasy. 

“I’d never done [ecstasy] before. I didn’t even know he’d put it in my drink,” Anderson said in an interview with Dax Shepard on the Armchair Expert podcast. “My skin was melting, I was drugged out.”

And then,

“[Tommy] goes, ‘Do you want to get married? And I go, ‘Absolutely!’”

Anderson, who was supposed to meet Slater’s family in Florida following the shoot, had to call the then twenty-three-year-old two-time world champ and explain why she wouldn’t be swinging by to meet Mama Judy or brothers Stephen and Sean. 

“My first phone call was to him to tell him I was married. He was like, ‘What?’ That was horrible.”

Slater, whose every pectoral and abdominal muscle is still clearly defined and who is still in the full rude vigour of perfect health, is a testimony to the long-term benefits of abstinence, as compared to Lee, now sixty, who is a dried-up stick of a guy, neck shivering with turkey wattles, hair died a sad onyx.

Anderson divorced Lee after a DV beat-down for which he was imprisoned and married another five men in her desperate search for a meaningful love, although no one could compare to Slater.

“He was my big love actually,” says Anderson. “He was such a sweetheart to me, and so good to me.”

Slater, meanwhile, has maintained a steady relationship with Chinese bikini designer Kalani Miller for an astonishing fifteen years. 

The pair are yet to marry but, says Slater, he and Miller plan to wed in the future.