Luke Rockhold, expert surfer
Luke Rockhold, hotter than Africa, as they say, in almost every regard. | Photo: Soul Artist Management

MMA’s God of Thunder Luke Rockhold revealed to be expert surfer!

Derek Rielly

By Derek Rielly

"Still got that pig dog."

The retired mixed martial artist Luke Rockhold, a six-foot three man chiselled out of stone and who FISHER once nominated as the man he’d slaughter in a game of Fuck, Marry, Kill, has stunned surf fans by expertly threading a backside tube at Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch in Lemoore, California. 

Cut to Ice Cube’s It Was a Good Day, Luke Rockhold writes, “Still got that pig dog.” 

A who’s who of surfing, including Gary “Kong” Elkerton, Rizal Tandjung, Bete Merta, Mitch Crews, John Gannon, Jackson Dorian and Damien Hobgood, all punched like on the post.

 

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A post shared by Luke Rockhold (@lukerockhold)

Rockhold, who is forty and a former middleweight champ, is the bro of the former Santa Cruz pro surfer Matt Rockhold. A highlight of his storied career, at least for me came when he smeared his own blood over the face of Brazilian Paulo Costa at UFC277, earning him a Fight of the Night bonus. 

Luke Rockhold may be the best of the fighters in the surf but he has some relatively strong competition from Hawaiian Max Holloway, who once said “surfing is crazier than fighting” and another Hawaiian champ who nearly became surfing’s first pool fatality three years back when he was sucked outta the tank and into the engine room.

Let’s remember. 

“Last year when I got sucked into a wave pool engine room and thought I was going to die… I kept thinking “don’t die for your kids” I was surfing for a about an hour and the line started getting longer to catch the wave. I was sitting next to the owner of the wave pool by the “wall” where the waves come from. The first wave it shoots out is a dud to get everyone ready for the next wave. The dud wave came back and because I was so close to the wall the wave swallowed me and pushed me and my surfboard underneath a huge cement wall. I remember feeling like I was getting sucked in a pipe and at that moment I got scared. It ended up pushing me into a big dark cement room that fills up with water to push the next wave for the wave pool. It felt like I was in the movie SAW or Final destination. The room would fill up with water to the top and I would hold my breath and then it would push the water out to make the wave and it was really rough inside there. Everything I bumped up against in the room that hurt me got infected. I got a bad sinus infection and a couple facial fractures from getting knocked around the cement walls and from the fractures the dirty water got in my face and infected my whole sinus. I was on antibiotics for three weeks for my face. While I was in the wave pool engine room I knew that one of my friends outside from big island is a legendary surfer and I knew he would come in there to rescue me so I stayed calm. A lot of other people might have panicked and maybe gave up but I just stayed strong for my kids. Anyway to make a long story short I survived that mother fucker !! The name of the people and water park have been left out. I not the kine guy shows up to your house to play and gets hurt and tries to sue you so all love ❤️ to everyone who helped me get there and helped me survive Maybe I was the first guy in history to get sucked into a wave pool engine room while it is in operation but no matter what happens in life and no matter how scary it is if I can offer you any advice I would just say to “stay calm”. If I didn’t fight tough cunts my whole life I might have panicked, but it was just another day in the office.”

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Beef & Beer (left) and Dogsnuts (center) share a wave with Blaze.
Beef & Beer (left) and Dogsnuts (center) share a wave with Blaze.

Quirky surf play based on lives of BeachGrit commenters hits Washington D.C. stage!

Chas Smith

By Chas Smith

"The golden girls seeking hang-ten instruction in this scenario are old friends and contrasting personalities..."

If you happen to find yourself on America’s east coast, this summer, and are looking for some entertainment, it would be both cruel and rude to miss a night of arts. There are, of course, many options. Moulin Rouge: The Musical on New York’s Broadway, rock band Creed playing in Philadelphia or, best, a night at the theater in Washington D.C. for a staging of “Wipeout.”

The surf-based play, which premiered last year in Sacramento, explores themes of aging, death and trauma along with love and healing.

According to a review in Kelp Magazine:

Three retired life-long female friends (Claudia, Wynn, and Gary) are out on the water for their very first surf lesson from Blaze, their young hot surf instructor. As you can imagine, the play is hilarious and goofy in all the best ways, especially being set entirely in the open water. The “surfing” was ingenuously captured by placing the actors on surfboard-shaped boards on wheels, allowing the actors to move up and down the stage and into each other just as one would do in the ocean.

Jeff Bezos organ The Washington Post, which reminds you that “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” further explains:

The golden girls seeking hang-ten instruction in this scenario are old friends and contrasting personalities whose reunion in Santa Cruz, California, simmers with charged memories and barbed banter. Gary (Katherine Cortez) is a firecracker of energy and enthusiasm. The oft-married Wynn (Delissa Reynolds) is prickly in a way that obviously masks inner pain. Claudia (Naomi Jacobson) is a high-strung and anxious type quick to see a shark in a piece of kelp. As 19-year-old surfer dude Blaze (Alec Ludacka) attempts to teach them how to shred, the trio contemplates aging, grapples with old hurt and memories, and experiences the bittersweet glories of friendship.

Characters pulled straight from below the line at BeachGrit (except for Blaze).

So, are you a Gary a Wynn or a Claudia?

Which one is Otto?

Discuss.

Wipeout is running through July 27. Buy tickets here.

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Griffin Colapinto (left) and a Brazilian reborn doll.
Griffin Colapinto (left) and a Brazilian reborn doll.

WSL “sad” and “hurt” as hyper-realistic baby dolls pull focus from professional surfers in Brazil

Chas Smith

By Chas Smith

Moral panic.

You may, or may not, know, but the World Surf League’s professional championship tour is currently in Brazil for the Rio Pro. Now, the Brazilian stop is not known for quality waves, a friendly time zone or generating interest outside Brazil and yet the WSL would never dare consider to scrub because Brazilian fans are that uniquely frothy. They pack the beach in droves, playing gold and green drums, puffing on gold and green horns, hooting, hollering, waving gold and green flags and making professional surfing appear, for the briefest of moments, as if it’s a real sport.

Or rather did pack the beach in droves.

Tuning in yesterday, the surf fan at home couldn’t help but be… underwhelmed. The Rio Pro kick-off seemed to be… lightly attended with a less-than-enthusiastic crowd. Most appeared to be staring into phones instead of the garbage waves on offer.

And now it has been revealed why.

Hyper-realistic baby dolls, known as “reborn dolls” have sparked moral panic in the country according to local media, sucking all the oxygen out of the room, leaving no time for interest in professional surfing. The life-like figurines have dominated the national conversation with the pro-reborn and anti-reborn communities clashing. Around 30 bills have been introduced for legislation, including “proposals to ban the dolls from receiving public healthcare or to prohibit collectors from using them to claim priority in queues for public services.”

The Guardian adds:

Videos of collectors bathing their dolls, tucking them into bed or pushing them in prams spread widely across social media – often accompanied by critical commentary or ridicule, such as a satirical rap song encouraging people to kick the dolls in the street.

The controversy reached a disturbing peak on 6 June, when a man slapped a four-month-old baby on the head, claiming he had mistaken the infant for one of the dolls. He is out on bail, and the baby is reportedly doing well.

And, again, it is all anyone in the land of order and progress is talking about. Not Griffin Colapinto, not Crosby Colapinto, not even Italo Ferreira and li’l Martin.

The reborn doll brouhaha shows no sign of dying down soon, certainly not during the Rio Pro waiting period, leaving the World Surf League sad and hurt.

Light a candle, please.

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Sly Stone, more surf than Brian Wilson.
Sly Stone, more surf than Brian Wilson.

Surf music has nothing to do with Brian Wilson and everything to do with Sly Stone

Matt Warshaw

By Matt Warshaw

Sly Stone was transcendently hip and cool—in a way not wholly unlike surfing in its peak moments. 

Sly Stone and Brian Wilson were born just a few weeks apart, and departed in similar one-two fashion, earlier this month, at age 82.

For boomer-age music lovers, it felt like a death in the family. The double blow in fact made the loss feel greater than the sum of the two parts—never mind the fact that both beat long odds to even reach seniority. Unless you’re Paul McCartney, it is just about impossible to burn as brightly as Stone and Wilson did without veering into some kind of implosive black-star coda. The New York Times would have had fill-in-the-blanks obits filed for both men, I’m guessing, as far back as the late 1970s. 

Anyway, the algorithm sized me up right away, the online barrage began, and as of this afternoon, nearly two weeks after the fact, my feeds are still delivering Brian Wilson clips from across the decades—none of which I’ve lingered over; Wilson as a public figure is as flat and immaterial as his music is ravishing. The algorithm is not fully wrong. I am a South Bay Surfer after all, and my ascension to Valhalla, if the gods know their business, will be scored by side two of the Beach Boys’ Today LP.

But surf music, to me—meaning songs to which my formative surfing life was not just soundtracked but shaped, glazed and forged—has nothing to do with the Beach Boys or Brian Wilson and everything to do with Sly and the Family Stone. “I Want to Take You Higher” was on the radio and turntables everywhere in Venice in 1969 and ’70, just as I was going full immersion into the sport, and 50-plus-years later the song continues fissioning in my head, there when needed, a command not only to turn the knobs up but to try and do it all—surfing, skating, dancing, walking from one end of the room to another—with flair and style and joy. It must have been the same for Larry Bertlemann, multiplied by 100. Bertlemann was always going to find a place at the top of our sport, but there is no doubt in my mind that he became the exalted and electrified Pope of high-performance surfing in 1972 only because we’d been prepared for such a figure by Sly Stone. 

It means a lot to me here in 2025, too, that the Family Stone was mixed-race and mixed-gender, and that the band, before Sly buried the project under a skip-loader-worth of PCP, was transcendently hip and cool—in a way not wholly unlike surfing in its peak moments. 

Which gives us a nice redirect back to Brian Wilson, because the peak moment in the peak surf film of the 1970s—Gerry Lopez in Five Summer Stories, slouching out of a Pipeline tube while a monsoon of spit blows past his head and shoulders—is scored to “Feel Flows,” a Beach Boys album cut from Surf’s Up, their 1971 comeback LP.  (The title track is also featured in Five Summer Stories, and I’ll say here that while I feel nothing but scorn for all the best-ever ranking of Beach Boys songs, I nonethelsss click on every list, and “Surf’s Up” is the consensus #1. No argument here—if anything ever had a chance at turning me religious it was this song, you could build a cathedral around it.)

One final thought.

Wilson and Sly Stone both, during their most productive and creative years, were always and without fail looking forward and above, and the message there I think is that us listeners should do the same. Nothing grounds me like hearing old favorite songs, especially if they come at me unexpectedly, from somebody else’s car speakers or in a movie soundtrack—the notes hit and lock in and I am flooded with gratitude. But the real thrill, just like when I was a kid, still comes from finding something new. There is an added bonus now, in fact, because I can often tease out a link between the old and new songs and, and when this happens I experience a kind of MDMA-like swoon of connectivity to people, genres, eras. Caroline Polachek’s “New Normal,” for example, is a knockout full-stop and no assistance required, but to my ear it also attaches itself like a strange spiky new molecule to “God Only Knows” and “If You Want Me to Stay.” Something to do with mid-verse tone shifts and the deleted chorus—Brian Wilson could explain it, I won’t even try. 

(Editor’s note: Yeah, this is the fine work of ol Matty Warshaw, keeper of the surf culture flame over at the Encylopedia of Surfing. Warshaw delivers these sexy-as-anything, tough guy prose hit-outs every Sunday afternoon and if you want ’em, and if you want to access the keys to his entire archive, toss a few peanuts his way. Five bucks a month.)

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Live Chat Day One of Rio Pro!

Chas Smith

By Chas Smith

Oops. Forgot about this thing.

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Photo: Justin Jay/@justinjayphoto
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