“That incident in Brazil ended my career.”
Readers of BeachGrit have long become familiar with the passionate, as it has become euphemistically known, behaviour of Brazilian surf fans.
A brief primer:
Read,
and
And on and on.
Earlier today, and thanks to the Quiver Podcast, the surf fan was reminded of Florida pro surfer Todd Holland’s experience with Brazilian surf fans in 1993 that left the Floridian with PTSD.
Holland, who was trying to prequalify for the tour in a regional WQS event in Sao Paulo, needed one result to get him back in the game. He got a paddle interference on local Victor Ribas and then the crowd went nuts after the commentator whipped ’em into a frenzy of righteous anger.
Holland was chased in the water, punched in the head, and only escaped with his life when armed police, guns out, got him to the safety of a jail cell. He was advised to shave his beard and get out of the country, which he did, hidden on the floor of a car that raced him to the airport.
Unable to ever go back to Brazil, his pro career was done.
In a classic surf journalism move, Holland’s interlocutor on the podcast is made uncomfortable by an actual story unfolding before him and so quickly shifts the conversation, but the moment is interesting for a couple of reasons: the way Holland’s voice drops and goes quiet, the pain, and the interesting fact Brazilian surf fans were nuts long before the keyboard jockeys could get into a foreign surfer’s DMs or light up on the WSL’s otherwise lightly used IG.