“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.
Joel Tudor was “the pencil-thin Raphael of the longboard renaissance”
with a “supernaturally graceful style”, a gorgeous little twink
back in the nineties when he swung open the door to the Diddy
mansion.
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.”
