“I was a little white kid in the craziest environment!”
The snow blond three-times surfing champ Joel Tudor, nicknamed Tinkerbell, sent shockwaves through the surfing world earlier today when he revealed his involvement in multiple Freak-Offs, the swinging get-togethers run by rapper-host Sean Combs aka Diddy.
Tudor made the shock admission on a podcast, which you can listen to here, telling the funnyman host Jon Wayne Freeman,
“I went to a couple of his parties and I had a blast. I was, like, a white kid in just the craziest environment.”
Here, and weirdly, there’s no follow-up question. Freeman appears to panic, says “If you’re out there investigating stop it now” and the topic moves on to Tudor’s drug smuggling days, which is lightly interesting although the view from the inside of the Freak-Offs is more compelling, especially now.
“I was smuggling, you know, ounces in my shorts back and I had a connection. My friend’s dad at the time was connected to the Hells Angels and he was part of bringing a lot of the quality marijuana over from Canada into the States. So I had, I love telling this stuff, I had a connection to really high quality smoke and so when I would take this stuff back with me, you know, when you watch the cartoons when the scent catches the guy and he like floats away following it, that kind of would happen. Sometimes I would light up a joint and these guys would just be like, yo, where’d you get that? And then it just opened the floodgates of opportunity.”
A better line of enquiry from Freeman centres around an imaginary fight between Tudor and Adolph Bernard Spreckels III aka Bunker Spreckels, the great-grandson of German-born sugar baron Claus Spreckels and stepson to the movie star Clarke Gable. Bunker Spreckels, who died aged 27 after walloping a fifty-mill inheritance in six years.
Freeman: Bunker Spreckels in his prime, apparently trained with some Kung Fu master in the islands. He was a master also with weapons, the nunchucka. Do you do you feel like you would have been able to beat Bunker Spreckels fully drugged up on his cocktail mix of uppers and downers?
Tudor: I will say this because I boxed for years and I still do. Karate and a lot of these martial arts. the belt purchase arts where you can buy your belts and different stuff, when you’re a celebrity or you’re someone that’s really wealthy you get special treatment. No one’s really putting you through the wringer of of real sparring. Given what I know about Bunker from Art Brewer, who was his photographer, and like what Herbie (Fletcher) said to me about him I don’t really think the dude knew how to fight.
Tudor then offered advice on how to choose the right person to scrap with,
“I tell people all the time, if you’re getting in a fight with somebody the things that you’ve got to look at are their ears, their nose and the scarring area between and under the eyes and above the eyebrows. If a guy’s got little short scars in the corners and up above, he’s probably either played rugby, he boxed, he wrestled. So you’ve gotta be careful if someone’s nose is pushed sideways… if your nose looks like mine it means you’ve boxed… I broke my nose 11 times.”
