Gather 'round and laugh at the champ.
Oh my goodness. Rare is the day that I get to stand over the world’s greatest surfer, cover him with shade and boom “YOU KOOK!” downward as if I was a Greek god of old and he but a puny li’l kook mortal. Rare, indeed, but there he is, low plus kooky, and here I am, high-ish, LOLing whilst trying to keep the fig leaf over private in place.
The source of my glorious mirth?
Well, you know my love for snowboarding, how I regularly try to drag it into the conversation, how you regularly and rightly rebuff my exuberance keeping me in my place. So, what am I to do? My love is pure though also juiced by the fact that I married snowboarding royalty Circe Wallace. My fault? No. I was introduced to her by surf filmmaker Joe G. at Julian Wilson’s Scratching the Surface film premier in Costa Mesa, California some thirteen-plus years ago.
Scratching the Surface.
Her fault as she was inexplicably there though the shine on her snowboarding crown has not dulled. (Listen here to a just dropped The Bomb Hole, snowboarding’s version of… a good surfing podcast.)
In any case, and leading back to Slater, he took to Instagram hours ago in order to celebrate a clip featuring a new snowboard that can be nose-walked like longboard.
“Cool clip,” Slater shared.
No.
It is decidedly not cool.
It is, in fact, embarrassing and the 11x champ should know better.
Imagine a surfboard with snowboard bindings on it.
A surfboard with wax on the bottom heated by an iron.
A surfboard taken up a chairlift and into a lineup.
Yeah.
Straight kooky to, like, a maximum degree.
Ain’t the point of innovation actually… innovation? As opposed to pointlessly rolling down a bunny hill on the nose of a snowboard into a tree?
You can now laugh at Kelly Slater too.
A rare pleasure.