"I wonder if we will see a collaboration between Urbnsurf and Slater’s Surf Ranch."

The greatest athlete of all time, as determined by The Outsiders star Rob Lowe, has sent surf fans, conspiracy theorists and online sleuths into overdrive after a surprise visit to the Urbnsurf wavepool in Melbourne, Australia. 

Fifty-one-year-old Kelly Slater, along with fluid mechanics engineer Adam Fincham, created Surf Ranch in 2016, a one-off pool near Fresno, California, that has become the go-to for tech millionaire birthday parties and home to the tour’s own Coachella-esque event and festival. 

En route to Margaret River, where the 11-time world champ will attempt to keep his spot on tour, Slater visited the two-year-old Wavegarden pool a short taxi ride from Tullamarine airport. 

And while the Champ’s jumping and swerving was adored, as always, online gumshoes were quick to point out there may be more to his visit than a simple rinsing after Bells.

“Been there, surfed it, seen others surf it in real life and posted! No one, no one has ever destroyed a wave like that… Kelly your a legend! P.S. don’t think I have ever seen you do that at your surf park, must be a better wave here.”

“I wonder if we will see a collaboration between Urbnsurf and Slater’s Surf Ranch. Guaranteed he wasn’t surfing; he was evaluating.”

A psy-op or psychological operation is the use of propaganda, disinformation and other psychological techniques to twist the minds of a target audience’s behaviors.

Think, Operation Mockingbird from the nineteen-fifties when the CIA recruited journalists and editors to spread propaganda and disinformation in support of US government policies or the wonderful MK-Ultra, when the CIA, responding to claims of Commie-brainwashing in Vietnam, used drugs and hypnosis to get into their subjects’ heads, Charles Manson a famous test pilot.

 

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"Everybody talks about people being the GOAT. Tom Brady’s the GOAT, Tiger Woods is the GOAT. They’re…GOATS… but they’re not The GOAT."

The still beautiful eighties heartthrob Rob Lowe has ended the age-old debate roiling the sports world in a bombshell podcast just released.

On “Literally! With Rob Lowe”, the fifty-nine-year-old actor famous for being part of the eighties Brat Pack in movies The Outsiders, St. Elmo’s Fire and About Last Night, and for starring in a sex tape in a Georgia hotel room at his 1988 peak with a couple of fans, one of whom was sweet sixteen, intros Slater with,

“I’m geeking out, man. Everybody talks about people being the GOAT. Tom Brady’s the GOAT, Tiger Woods is the GOAT. They’re…GOATS… they’re…GOOOOOOATS…but they’re not The GOAT. Today, we have The GOAT Kelly Slater. The greatest surfer who ever lived. Eleven-time world champ. Youngest world champ and then oldest world champ. No one has dominated a sport, any sport, individually, ever, in history than Kelly Slater and surfing.”

I’m on the side of Lowe, in this instance, although you’ll remember in February last year when JP Currie wrote fifteen-hundred words on why Slater ain’t the best athlete ever.

Sport is just sport, at the end of the day. But as we know, in the most elevated and spectacular moments – the realms where GOATs play – it can be an awful lot more.

When we talk about those who are worthy of being called the GOAT, we should be talking about people whose sporting performances have transcended sport. We should be talking about figures who are globally recognised and historically remembered, people who are idolised by children and worthy of that status.

What has Kelly done for the world? What has surfing?

How do you compare his impact to Muhammed Ali, for example?

You could argue we should ignore everything Kelly has done and said outside of surfing, but I don’t think we should.

At the highest level of sport, the kind of level reserved for people dubbed GOATs, sport influences culture, brings people hope, and instigates change.

Where do you stand, reader?

Listen here!

“It was like underwater jiujitsu…”

It’d be fair to say there ain’t too many men like John “Gordo the Great” Gordon, a sixty-one-year-old larger-than-life surfer-cinematographer who filmed the tour for twenty years before being dumped by the World Surf League, inexplicably and without warning he says, last year. 

Gordo’s filmic career is marked by awards, acclaim etc. He worked for the Seven News network in Queensland for two decades, in between gigs with Jack McCoy and his series of iconic Billabong films, before shifting into surf full-time. 

“He’s mates with everyone from world champ Mark Occhilupo to Hawaiian enforcer Johnny Boy Gomes to the locals in the black township behind Jeffreys Bay, South Africa, where he’s forged enduring friendships,” wrote Tim Baker in a sweet profile for the online magazine The Coastline. 

Anyway, he’s the pizza boy, the pool boy, the camera guy, whatever you need, he’ll sort it. 

So when a Gold Coast-based nurse jumped into the water at Fingal up there on the NSW side of the border with the Gold Coast and Gordo saw her being washed around the headland, he wasn’t going to stand by and wait for Superman.

“She was in the most dangerous spot imaginable. I looked around and the only person who’s going to save her is me,” said Gordo, who described trying to rescue the gal as like “underwater jiujitsu.”

“I couldn’t believe it. I stepped into nothing and it got me straight away,” said nurse Liv Titor. “Johnny jumped in with his surfboard, told me to hang on and said we’ll get through it together. And that’s what we did.”