Hard luck kid and blue-collar surfing hero
Mike Wright stars in “Rock!”
By Derek Rielly
Who don't love a little rock?
Michael Wright, aka Mike, is a twenty-four-year-old
surfer from Culburra Beach in Australia, brother to world champion
Tyler, tour journeyman Owen and couple of others, Kirby
and Tim, I think.
He is, according to the WSL, one of the “planet’s premier
freesurfers.”
This edit, which is seven minutes long, employs excellent music
and a full-frame perspective which allows examination of the
current world number thirty-two’s fantastic technique.
An adventure as timely as today’s headlines.
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From left, pretty blonde T-Girl, Curren, Ho,
on the streets of San Francisco.
Tom Curren, Mason Ho and pretty blonde
T-Girl combine homemade jams and action in “This is the death of
western civilisation!”
By Derek Rielly
"You can almost assume what you think you know
about him,” Mason says of Tom Curren, “but don’t even think you
know.”
Tom Curren is an almost sixty-year-old three-time world
surfing champion with eyes as blue as robin’s eggs whose abilities
on guitar are as unorthodox as his manner of living.
Mason Ho, you know from his daily North Shore films, is
thirty-two and fond of delivering rough loads.
In this sixteen-minute film by Joe Alani, the pair, along with a
pretty blonde T-Girl, make music and garrotte the waves around San
Francisco with ropes of come.
Essential.
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As the camera swept over the crowd, the
viewer's attention was drawn to the heroic profile on Vaughan
Blakey, brother of commentator Ronnie, and one half of the
long-running Ain't That Swell broadcast team squawking
ecstatically, as if he wanted to seize Ryan in his arms and pull
him down between his thighs.
Ain’t That Swell’s Vaughan Blakey and Jed
Smith dagger fingernails down Newcastle surfing’s spine in stunning
new documentary!
By Derek Rielly
"A glorious madhouse full of absolute
lunatics… "
An oddly electric moment yesterday during Newcastle
surfer Ryan Callinan’s post-heat presser.
As the camera swept over the crowd, the viewer’s attention was
drawn to the heroic profile of Vaughan Blakey, brother of
commentator Ronnie and one half of the long-running Ain’t That
Swell broadcast team, squawking ecstatically, as if he wanted
to seize Ryan in his arms and pull him down between his thighs.
This documentary by Vaughan and his ATS co-host Jed Smith
celebrates what Vaughan describes as “the skitz energy of this town
and why people from here are legends. It’s a glorious madhouse full
of absolute lunatics but they’re all down to earth, really good
people. Nowhere like it.”
Plenty of whiz and fluff and bludgeon strokes of Vaughan’s
sucker ding dong.
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Mason Ho at Newport Beach's The Wedge.
Newport beachgoers flabbergasted at
legendary Hawaiian aristocrat cavorting in fat cones!
By Derek Rielly
Classic supersonic Mason Ho…
In this, the two hundred and seventy-fifth instalment of
Mason Ho’s winter and spring, our innards are yanked out by Mason’s
capacity to sit cosily inside Newport’s The Wedge as if it
was a luxurious lodge and he was warming himself in front of a
fireplace.
“The thing with style,” says Mason, “is that style truly does
come out when you don’t give a fuck. Right when you truly don’t
give a shit what your surfing looks like, that’s when some sort of
style comes out. As soon as you let go of everything, you’re
styling. When I was growing up, I copied all of my favourite guys
but I was never as good as them. Once I got the theory down and
stripped it back…boom…finally…something came out. There was some
style. Finally…”
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Cowboy Kemper, back in the saddle.
Big-wave world champ Billy Kemper finds
absolution after the multiple tragedies, Erik Logan’s tears and a
busted pelvis in final episode of ‘Billy’!
By Derek Rielly
The tear-jerking conclusion of a wonderful six-part
series…
In the struggle and turmoil that agitate the USA today,
Billy Kemper seems to belong to a remote and silent
past.
Kemper, almost thirty-one, a four-time Jaws winner and the 2015
Big-Wave world champion, is a nobleman of the old school where
struggle is hidden in some remote world of quiet contemplation.
You know the story, of course, or you should by now.
Billy is belted to within an inch of his life at a
Moroccan ledge right at the start of the COVID pandemic, the
hospital there don’t know what they’re doing, wrong drugs are
administered, humiliating episodes of diarrhoea and so on, and so
WSL Erik Logan moves heaven and hell to get him back to the US.
