Kelly Slater sends son of poor Brazilian
fisherman the ultimate compliment, “One of the gnarliest things
I’ve ever seen done on a wave!”
By Derek Rielly
"Absurd," says Yago Dora.
It’s been four years, roughly, since I picked my way through
a maze of serviced apartments in Margaret River, six o’clock of a
cool May evening it was, for the honour of spending two days
with Italo Ferreira.
As clear as if it was yesterday, I recalled the way his
mango-sized deltoids popped as he squeezed his hands together. I
remember, also, Italo showing me the Instagram post from his
then-girlfriend Mari which he’d examined prior to their first
meeting and that made him fall in love with her.
Mari sits astride a chair in white bikini bottoms. Her yellow
hair waterfalls over brown skin and a red brassiere. Both eyes are
closed and Mari’s tongue laps at an imaginary milk bowl in the
sky.
History, of course, tells us that Italo, the son of a penniless
Brazilian fisherman, won the world title that year, putting Medina
on the end of his boot at Pipeline. Two years later, he became
surfing’s first gold medal Olympian although no longer with Mari at
his hip.
A likeable man with good intentions and as flashing and as
relentless as a rapier. But for a knee-injury at J-Bay it’s likely
his volcanic energy would be all over Lower Trestles, doom for
Filipe etc.
Out of the game and with no contests for almost six months,
Italo has been showering his almost three-million fans with posts,
the latest a barrel to boogie-dodge to the gala performance of a
frontside 540.
Kelly Slater, fifty-one and a pioneer of aerial drama, describes
it thus.
“First off, this is one of the gnarliest things I’ve ever seen
done on a wave. And I’m baffled that Italo Ferreira could do a year
on Tour and not make the Top 5.”
Mark Zuckerberg erases haunting sunscreen
surfer sissy boy image in testosterone-fueled all-male floating
battle royale
By Chas Smith
INTENSE.
Mark Zuckerberg, man. And by “man” I mean MAN.
The Facebook founder, once solely viewed as a vindictive nerd, has
transformed himself into a vicious nerd and who would have seen
that coming? Who could have? The pathway to peak end-of-the-world
began when the milky 39-year-old discovered foil boarding.
Befriending super boy Kai Lenny, Zuckerberg foiled here, he foiled
there, he foiled everywhere.
Unfortunately, he was not cool and sometimes did it with a large
American flag and sometimes did it with a face full of white
cream.
Afraid of the sun.
The image became, instantly, meme-ified and Zuckerberg, while
laughing it off, was most certainly frustrated by a public image he
had tried so hard to chase by “riding big waves” and “doing a fair
amount of extreme sports-like stuff.”
Very sad.
Well, lessons learned, etc., and now the world’s seventh richest
li’l guy only wants a different sort of white cream on his
face.
Testosterone.
The Palo Alto local has taken up the fight game, of late,
rolling around, choking out, arm baring and what not. Various big
names in the MMA world have trained with, or on, Zuckerberg and he
appears to be taking it very seriously. Though in a move certainly
intended to chase Scaredy Zuck away, he outfitted a barge with a
wrestling floor and wrestled men on it on the water.
Extremely cool.
Business
Insider reports that stars Israel Adesanya and
Alexander Volkanovski were present and the whole affair was filmed
and posted to Meta with a Mission Impossible soundtrack backing. It
looks INTENSE.
I have one quick question, though. Did billionaires of old,
Rockefeller, Carnegie and the like hire old-timey photographers to
follow them around while they play-acted bear wrestling then send
the newspapers prints? Did Gianni Agnelli hire filmmakers to follow
him around and take movies of him bouncing in a bounce house?
Just curious.
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Busey (insert) dreaming of better moments in cars.
Photo: Point Break
Beloved surf actor Gary Busey implicated in
nasty Malibu hit-and-run likely tarnishing angelic reputation
By Chas Smith
"Utah, get me two (lawyers)."
Of all the surf characters in our pantheon,
from Patrick Swayze to Keanu Reeves, Matt Adler to Matt
McConaughey, Gary Busey is, without doubt, the most beloved. With
important roles in Big Wednesday and Point Break, the the
79-year-old with an expressive face and wily mouth has been able to
capture the best, the purest of who we are both in and out of the
water.
It is with much shock and dismay, then, that it appears Busey
was involved in a very un-gentlemanly hit-and-run whilst driving
the Pacific Coast Highway through Malibu just before America’s
Labor Day. According to TMZ, a woman
was minding her own business when SLAM! her back bumper became hit.
Instead of stopping and exchanging information, which is customary,
the offending newer Volvo station wagon zipped off.
Not about to be hit-and-runned, the woman follows in hot pursuit
until the Volvo pulls into a restaurant parking lot. There she
confronts the driver, who just so happens to be Gary Busey, looking
peak surf chic in a baseball cap, glasses and a khaki jacket.
Very Former.
When asked why he did not stop and follow typical protocol,
Busey boldly declared, “I’m private,” then forwent his lunch and
zipped off again.
I’d imagine with the way the court of public opinion is these
days that Busey’s angelic reputation will be tarnished.
Sad.
But back to fender benders. Of course the thing for the offender
to do is stay and exchange information, but I’ve always been of the
mind that the offended should usually shrug and say, “Called a
bumper for a reason, amirite?” I studied in Cairo, Egypt for six
months during my college years, Arabic, Islam, history etc., and I
was always impressed by the way Egyptians used their bumpers.
They’d use them to move cars and fit into small parking spots, use
them to push traffic along, once I was even in a cab and he used
his to move a pedestrian from the middle of the road all the way to
its other side. They aren’t legal sticklers, like us, all decadent
and in moral and cultural decline.
Maybe the woman in the Busey exchange should think about
that.
Walk like an Egyptian.
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Australian surfer Ethan Ewing ends
month-long silence over broken back and miracle return to surfing’s
San Clemente world title showdown!
By Derek Rielly
"Some days the pain is worse than others. I won't
be one hundred percent."
Yesterday, the surf world reacted with shock, joy,
whatever you want to call it, afterworld number three Ethan Ewingmade a surprise return to the game after fears he would be
bedridden for months following a wipeout one month
ago.
Apart from a brief note to fans and a video of the wave he got
hurt on, Ewing, twenty-five, had maintained a strategic silence
following the wipeout.
The baby-faced Australian from Queensland’s North Stradbroke
Island with an ass described as “overwhelming” was driven by a
desire to keep Gabriel Medina out of the Final Five, back when it
was thought the WSL would make up the numbers with the sixth-rated
surfer.
The favourite to win the contest is reigning world champion Pip
Toledo, whose daddy, Big Rick, has claimed the only reason Pip
don’t charge Teahupoo is ‘cause he wants to save himself for the
Finals, something that didn’t bother mad-dog Ewing, and which also
don’t ring true ‘cause his zero heat total was in 2015.
Anyway, the Brazilian filmer Bruno Lemos got hold of Ewing down
there at Lowers yesterday and got a few words out of the man with
camellia-white skin and dishwater blond hair. He looks rather
tired, not surprising given his journey from his island home to Los
Angeles, but not a whit less charming than usual.
“When I first did it I thought, I’m not going to be surfing for
a long time, maybe, ‘cause I knew there was something wrong with my
back ‘cause I slammed it really hard on the reef,” he tells his
South American interlocutor. “I got some scans, there were some
fractures, not too bad, no risk for the spinal cord. Very
lucky.”
Ewing admitted that some days the pain is “worse than others but
I just have to keep doing my physio, getting better and better each
day. I won’t be one hundred percent but I’ll do everything to put
on a good performance.”
Apart from keeping Medina out of the mix, Ewing “didn’t want to
finish my season injured and in a bad ending.”
The one-day surf-off will run some time between September eight
and sixteen at San Clemente’s Lower Trestles, likely around the
14th or 15th.
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Slater burns Azevedo at Padang and, inset, Azevedo goes
toe-to-toe with Sara Taylor following a clash in the
surf.
Australian tabloids slam Kelly Slater for
sharing waves with “Bali’s most hated surfer” notorious for
“savagely punching” a girl in the surf
By Derek Rielly
“Paradise of perfect waves with Kelly Slater is a
dream come true,” says girl-beater JP Azevedo
A little over five months ago,the Brazilian João
Paulo Azevedo, aka JP Azevedo, was dubbed the most hated man in
surfing when video emerged of him beating hell out of American
Sara Taylor in Bali.
“After being dropped in on on my first wave, the guy’s friend
punched me in the head and then after being confronted about
hitting me, he attacked Charlie on the beach for filming him,”
wrote Taylor, along with video of the attack. “This is insane, does
anyone know who they are?”
“This girl looked like a man, I didn’t know she was a woman. She
surfed like a man, dressed like a man,” he said. “She was riding
everyone’s wave, she wasn’t respecting anyone. She went with my
friend’s wave and pushed my friend out of the loop. I went to ask
why she had done that to my friend. She went by and threw water in
my face, cursed me. And then I lost my mind due to momentary stress
and ended up attacking her. I lost my reason. After I attacked her
I saw that it was a woman. She was wearing a T-shirt and I couldn’t
see her bra. Soon after I apologized, a friend of mine came
paddling up and I said, ‘Calm down, it’s a woman’”
Gender fluidity or not, the guy appeared to have form.
His ex-girlfriend Carol Braga revealed that he put her in the
hospital after a brutal attack six years earlier.
It don’t matter that Slater burns the cunt, give him a close
look at his fins then stares at Azevedo as he rinses his nose.
From the Daily Mail,
But despite the online clash – and Slater’s public repulsion
over Azevedo’s actions – the pair was filmed surfing together at
Padang Padang Beach, in Bali’s south, earlier this
month.
Footage posted to Azevedo’s YouTube channel on August 4
shows the pair sharing a wave, standing just metres away from
each other as they passed under a barrel.
In the caption, Azevedo gushed over how it was a ‘dream’ to
finally surf alongside his childhood idol.
‘Surfing with the GOAT [greatest of all time] Kelly Slater
in Bali, Indonesia, is a dream session,’ he wrote.
‘Paradise of perfect waves with Kelly Slater is a dream come
true, because since I was a child I watched movies and Slater
always inspired me and my friends and everyone in the world of
surfing.’
‘[He was] always winning the world WSL competitions and
raising everyone’s level, both athletes and competitors in
general.’
It ain’t easy being KS, everyone knows who you are, every camera
is aimed at your head, and every person you meet or pass by either
wants to fuck, fight, marry or kill you.
