Billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg successfully overturns ref's decision in jiujitsu contest and, inset, former BFF Kai Lenny.

Surfer and combat sports enthusiast Mark Zuckerberg accused of cheating and throwing tantrum in wild showdown at debut jiujitsu contest!

“You take some head blows along the way!”

The fight world was cock-a-hoop yesterday following Mark Zuckerberg’s domination of a jiujitsu contest where the Facebook founder and part-owner of Instagram won gold and silver medals competing in the Gi and non-Gi divisions.

A who’s who of the fight world were quick to dive onto Zuck’s snorkel, including UFC champs Brandon Moreno, Alex Volkanovski and Izzy Adesanya.

It was a long way from his hard-core big-wave sessions on Maui with one-time BFF Kai Lenny that had become so full-on they tested, he said, his very mortality.

“I do a fair amount of, like, extreme sport type stuff so I’m definitely aware of (my mortality),” Zuck told podcaster Lex Friedman. “I train hard. So if I’m gonna go out in a 15-foot wave then I’ll make sure we have the right safety gear, make sure I’m used to that spot and all that stuff…(But) you take some head blows along the way.”

After an almost uniformly positive response to his success on the mat yesterday, the billionaire following fellow celebrity Tom Hardy into the competitive jiujitsu game, footage has emerged of Zuckerberg appearing to argue a decision in his gi match and, later, pulling on his opponent’s elastic yoga pants in the no-gi roll.

Real hard to tell from the footy taken from the back row but looks like his opponent tries to cross-collar choke the billionaire from Zuck’s closed guard, a classic white belt move that works often enough at the lower levels, either that or he stacks him on his neck, Zuck taps, fight stops, Zuck says he didn’t tap, fight gets recast as a draw, something y’don’t often see in the jiujitsu game.

And, in his no-gi brawl, Zuck starts tearing hell out of his opponent’s plastic tee and pants before the ref pulls him into line.

No comment yet from Kai Lenny who has previously described Zuckerberg as “really cool” and “Super fit. Like … strong, strong strong. Physically strong.”


Open Thread: Comment Live, Day Two of the Gold Coast Pro where the spectre of Kelly Slater haunts workaday scrubs!

Hand jam.


J-Lo and JELo (insert) sharing a love of surfing. Photo: Surf Ranch
J-Lo and JELo (insert) sharing a love of surfing. Photo: Surf Ranch

Pop megastar Jennifer “J-Lo” Lopez likens the wild highs and devastating lows of raising children to surfing!

Get in the tube.

We surfers, we dancers upon the waves, know the extreme highs and devastating lows life can bring, generally experiencing both during one thirty to forty-five minute water session. There is a wave that spikes up right in front of our eager faces and we spin, stroke, slide down its face, make a scintillating turn 3/4 of the way back up and believe, in our minds, to be a roundhouse cutback.

There is a wave that spikes up right in front of our eager faces, directly after, and we spin, stroke, stumble down the face, bog rail and know we are ill-suited.

Well, the great Jennifer “J-Lo” Lopez, pop megastar, actress, wife to Ben Affleck, Mark Anthony before him and a dancer before him and P Diddy somewhere along the way.

“They start challenging you. You have this baby for a while and then it’s like, your best little friend who loves being with you all the time … all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Get out of my room’,” she told Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos, co-hosts of Live with Kelly and Mark, who are married and have three children together.

“It’s a time when they are individuating, and they are challenging everything you say and everything you do and everything you are, and that’s what it is. And you have to kind of just ride the waves. I feel like it’s like surfing. I’m just riding the waves, and then it’s like, ‘Oops, I just got knocked over!’ I’m back. I’m back!”

Nice.

But, quickly, do you think World Surf League CEO Erik “ELo” Logan borrowed his very cool nickname from J-Lo?

Should we begin calling him and his Chief of Sport Jessi Miley-Dyer JELo?

It has a ring.


Slater (pictured) packing his bags and staying home. Photo: WSL
Slater (pictured) packing his bags and staying home. Photo: WSL

Rumor: Surf king Kelly Slater rips hearts from fans’ exposed breasts, set to skip Gold Coast Pro after being gifted season-long wildcard!

Very sad.

Today was to be the day that surf fans, the world over, would see surfing’s greatest draw, 11x champion, Pipe Master and Pro Pipeline, Kelly Slater surf for the first time since a mock execution less than two weeks ago. You certainly remember how the 51-year-old, there in Margaret River and facing the World Surf League’s dreaded mid-season cut, faltered and was lain beside Kolohe Andino, Nat Young, Jackson Baker et. al. under the guillotine’s wicked blade.

His career, spanning decades, over in the blink of an eye unless he could somehow, in some way, muster the gumption to crawl back to the Qualifying Series, gain enough points and victoriously return to the bottom rung of the Championship Tour.

Well, in a wild, last minute reprieve, the World Surf League, which had already changed its rules under cover of darkness allowing for professional surfers named “Kelly Slater” to earn points in surf competitions where others cannot, swooped in and rescued the ageless-but-clearly-aging wonder, gifting to him a season-long wildcard that would allow him to stay on tour for basically ever.

Slater, though, was still slated to join his beheaded former stablemates in Coolangatta for the Gold Coast Pro Challenger Series event that opened its window yesterday, set to surf in round 64, heat 12 running later today. He has a home there, familiarity with the wave and surf fans, the world over, thrilled to see if he could regain some form, maybe even make a fairytale Olympic push.

Those hearts are now flopping on the sidewalk like gross little fishies out of water.

The last squirts of blood wheezing through vena cavas.

For, allegedly, the greatest athlete ever has decided not to participate in the event. A well-placed source declares he is currently in Hawaii, and will not get on a westbound jet plane, because “he doesn’t have to.”

“He’ll just re-qualify through the tour now that he has all the wildcards.”

What do you think about that?


Original power couple Kelly Slater and Luke Egan, inset, and Egan's sprawling Burraneer Peninsula estate, main photo.

Basso-voiced former world number two surfer Luke Egan buys mid-century beach shack on sprawling quarter-acre estate after selling beachside bunker for almost six million dollars!

Egan and fam to relocate to Sydney's exclusive Burraneer penninsula after swinging 3.5 mill at almost waterfront compound… 

Back in December, the “powerful, basso-voiced” former world number two Luke Egan, described as the “the best all-around surfer in the world after Kelly Slater” offloaded his redundant beachside bunker in Cronulla for almost six million dollars despite a housing market that was teetering on its glitzy high-heels. 

Egan, who is fifty-four and his Fox Sports presenter wife Jess Yates, had commissioned the build of that five-bed cubist joint four hundred metres from the sand at Wanda after buying the dirt for a little under one-and-a-half mill in 2014.

Now, the pair have spent $3.5 million on a mid-century shack on a sprawling quarter-acre hunk of wildly fertile dirt wrapped in a downy luminous green grass. The Morris House, as its called, was offered for the first time in sixty-four years.

“Create a luxury family estate or land bank for the future,” said its selling realtor.

Even in its slightly run-down form, it’s a house with a gorgeous skeleton that requires little more than a quick blow and go, as they say, to make it spectacularly liveable for Egan and his little family.

Egan retired from the world tour prematurely, it was felt, in 2005 to become a marketing manager for Billabong, leaving eight years later.

Although rarely putting a foot wrong, his real estate chips are the stuff of legend, Egan’s one misstep was his foray into “adventure wear” with the brand Depactus, “a technical outfitter for surfing’s modern youth”.