Kelly Slater? Is that you?
The eyes of the surfing world are, currently,
cast toward Torquay, Australia and its notable Bells Beach. Yes,
the “world’s oldest surf contest” is scheduled to kick off any
moment now with a forecast so… unchill that those professionals
dancing around the mid-season cut line should be rightly terrified.
Yes, they will be forced to dance for their lives in “jumbled”
waves with “unfavorable” wind.
Yikes.
It will be the fourth event in a row with very poor conditions
but at least the first two were on Oahu’s North Shore with its
haupia pie, Spam musubi, Turtle Bay resort filling in the long
hours between Jessi Miley-Dyer calling the day’s competition off
again.
But when was the last time you actually stayed at Turtle Bay?
For me it has nearly been a decade but I have the fondest memories
of that brutalist hulk perched upon those emerald mini-cliffs. The
poolside mai tai is second to none and I’ve never had finer
escargot than I’ve had at Lei Lei’s, no not even in France.
Well, apparently the hotel features much more as revealed by a
Bloomberg reporter who went undercover in various jobs in order to expose mighty
“White Lotus-esque” secrets.
The naughty bits are, in truth, relatively tame. European women
sunbathing topess on the beach, chubby diners nipping extra eggs
Benedict from the buffet and taking it to their rooms, honeymooners
getting into lobby fights, influencers stealing golf cars and
crashing them for the likes, etc. but one revelation shocked me to
the core.
Namely, when working as a bellman, the sleuth made known that
surfing was “a big priority for many on staff” and that one of the
other bellman “has won multiple world surfing championships.”
Has won.
As in not necessarily finished winning.
And whoa.
For we all know one Kelly Slater, currently at Bells, is below
that mid-season cut line. We all know that the next event, Margaret
River, could very well mark the end of the winningest-ever surfer’s
gilded career. We all also know that Slater lives part-time on the
North Shore where he enjoys renting one of his
homes for $36,000 a month. And, lastly, we also all
know that the 11x world surfing champion is notoriously cheap,
never picking up tabs etc.
Might it be that Slater is preparing for the end, moonlighting a
few weekly hours at Turtle Bay in order to cash in on employee
discounts for rounds of golf and/or Lei Lei’s?
Stranger things have, certainly, happened.
See: Armie Hammer selling
timeshares.