“He is the Duke Kahanamoku, Miki Dora, Tom Curren and Kelly Slater of his sport; its godfather figure, its most stylish practitioner and its greatest champion.”

The Oahu-based bodyboarding and bodysurfing legend Mike Stewart has confounded some of the biggest names of the sport after posting a clip of just one of his tube rides at a Brazilian wave pool.

Stewart, who is sixty and who has won the Pipeline Bodysurfing Classic fourteen times and the bodyboarding world crown nine times, was filmed at Boa Vista Village, a planned community one-and-a-half hours from São Paulo, where a developer has built an American Wave Machines tank in the middle of three residential towers named Malibu, Laguna and Pebble.

For a million dollars or thereabouts, well-heeled surfers can buy their way into a private community built around a wave pool surfers are calling the “most high-performance wave in the world.”

And they ain’t wrong.

“Yesterday afternoon I got some of the longest bodysurfing barrels of my life, miles from the nearest ocean. Amazing times we live in,” wrote Stewart.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Mike Stewart (@mikestewart)

Some of the best tuberiders in the world including Jamie O’Brien, Shane Dorian, Mark Healey and Kai Lenny, were too quick to praise Stewart although the best response, amid the sea of fire emojis was one fan who wrote, “Protect Mike at all costs. We should be making statues of this man”.

As Dan Dob wrote on BeachGrit a few years back,

“He is simultaneously the Duke Kahanamoku, Miki Dora, Tom Curren and Kelly Slater of his sport; its godfather figure, its most stylish practitioner and its greatest champion.”

So true!

And, for added kink, Stewart was the first man I interviewed when I got a job in the surf mag biz and I still remember when he walked into my little office, shook hands with me very warmly and said, “I am very glad to see you, we have not met I think!”

I wrote, from memory, “He has a clear head, a good heart, a generous nature and great bodyboarding powers. Altogether a first-class man.”

"Tomorrow morning 6/23 he is having heart surgery to save his life. I said I'd do what I can to try to get some prayers sent his way."

The great Clyde Aikau, little brother of the legendary North Shore lifeguard Eddie Aikau, is in a Las Vegas hozzy undergoing heart surgery for an aortic aneurysm after he collapsed leaving a restaurant.

On Clyde’s Facebook page a family friend writes, “Tomorrow morning 6/23 he is having a heart surgery to save his life. I told him I will do what I can to help and try to get some prayers sent his way. He said ‘brah, I need a million of them’. If you have a minute say a little prayer for him to recover.”

An aortic aneurysm is an abnormal bulging or ballooning of the aorta, which is the largest artery in the body. If the damn thing ruptures it leads to severe internal bleeding, eight times outta ten y’don’t survive, so real lucky his doc caught it.

Older surfers will remember Clyde’s classic win on a wave-score countback with Mark Foo at the 1986 Quiksilver In Memory of Eddie Aikau at Waimea Bay, the famous big wave event named after his brother who went missing while trying to save his crew-mates on the ill-fated Polynesian voyaging canoe Hokule’a. 

The crew had embarked on a voyage from Hawaii to Tahiti to recreate the ancient Polynesian migration routes. The Hokule’a encountered rough weather and capsized in the Molokai Channel. Eddie volunteered to paddle on his surfboard toward the island of Lanai to seek help for the crew and was never seen again. 

Clyde would later claim it was the spirit of his brother in the form of two turtles who guided him to the win,

“So I looked at these two turtles, and I followed them,” he said in an interview with PBS in 2014. “And this is where everybody sits down, all five guys, and I would follow the turtles past them, and go deeper than all of them, about a hundred feet out. And as soon as I got to that point, the biggest wave of the day would just pull right in, and I’d jump right on it. And just rip it up, come all the way in, and I’d paddle out, and the turtles would be there again. And I’d follow these turtles.”

In 1990, Clyde placed fifth in the Eddie, tenth in 2001 and eighth in 2002. 

Maybe you remember the ruckus over the contest which is now called The Eddie Aikau Invitational after the Aikau family rejected offers from Quiksilver when their ten-year agreement expired in 2016. 

Thing was, Quiksilver owned the permits for the 2015-16 contest and canvassed the idea of calling it a different name to circumvent the need to involve the famous Hawaiian family. Quiksilver played around with The Quiksilver: In Memory of Jose Angel, The Quiksilver: In Memory of Todd Chesser, The Quiksilver: In Memory of Brock Little.

Anyway, the contest went ahead in 2016 as The Quiksilver: In Memory Of Eddie Aikau and the agreement was terminated shortly after. Fittingly, it was the last time Clyde, then aged sixty-six, would surf in the event, finishing twentieth out of twenty-nine. 

This year, branded as The Eddie Invitational for the first time ever, the event “proved its worth as the most prestigious surf contest on earth. The mix of terror, art, skill, old-school charging was worth its weight and it made all the sense in the world that viewer numbers smashed any World Surf League event.” 

More on Clyde as news comes to hand.

And if you want to help with the wild medical bills, this is the USA after all, throw a buck or two here.

Kelly Slater, aka Robert Slater, is a top donor with one thousand dollars added to the kitty, which stands at three and a bit gees of a two-hundred k goal.