“The not knowing is the hardest part. Is he going to pass away today? Is he going to make it through tonight?”

Real hard to believe its been three years since the world champ and six-time Triple Crown winner Sunny Garcia was found near death after a suicide attempt by hanging at his Oregon home.

The forty nine year old had posted this shortly before he was found.

Sunny was subsequently put into an induced coma, sent to a hospital in California for lung surgery before being transported to a Texas facility to undergo treatment paid for by his wealthy Harvard-educated girlfriend Lori Park, one of the first software engineers at Google.

In the third episode of Kelly Slater’s Lost Tapes, an eleven-part series that follows Slater’s travails on the 2019 tour, we find the out-of-form champ in Bali where he must process the terrible news.

“I found out this morning they’re going to turn off the machine on Sunny tonight so he won’t be with us tomorrow… The not knowing is the hardest part. Is he going to pass away today? Is he going to make it through tonight?” 

Slater eventually channels the spirit of Sunny into a shock win over Filipe Toledo who tells Slater after their quarter-final, “You know you got lucky.”

Slater laughs, “I gotta beat him once in my fucking career.”

Essential.

Episode two in 11-part series, redemption of sorts…

Over the next nine weeks, the 2019 WCT season, as viewed through the strikingly pretty eyes of a then forty-seven-year-old Kelly Slater, will unfurl.

Episode one, A New Year, and we find Slater posted up at his Palm Beach apartment on the Gold Coast, current value around three mill, as he prepares for the opening event of the season.

A pre-contest session is shown in all its horror, drop-ins, mistakes, a white-water takeoff any surfer shucked of confidence will relate to.

“Fuck, sometimes I just don’t have the patience,” he says.

A sharp and candid and surprisingly filmic opening gambit from creator and long-time Slater collaborator Alek Parker.

In this episode, Kelly, begrudgingly I think it’s fair to suggest, arrives in the little holiday hamlet of Jan Juc, where he stays with Quiksilver founder Alan Green and his wife Barb.

This is 2019, the year of the biggest waves at Bells since 1981, and it’s difficult to say what happens but…y’don’t see Kelly get near a wave over five foot.

“I’ve never seen Bells that big! It was bigger than ’81 maybe,” Slater says following footage of him on a head-high fatty.

The episode reflects the often gloomy nature of a Bells campaign, the electricity only fizzing into life briefly at a taping of Ain’t That Swell.

Again, as we don’t see Slater on any waves of note, his stunning performance alongside Jed Smith and Vaughan Blakey is edited of colour and verve.

Next week, Slater in Bali, y’know, the year he smoked Filipe Toledo at four-foot Keramas.

I predict a quickening of the heart rate.

"I'm really frustrated right now."

It would be churlish, I think, to criticise this window into the last days of a remarkable sportsman’s career.

Kelly Slater: Lost Tapes is an eleven-part series, each episode twenty minutes long, that follows Slater, then forty-seven, gliding his Caddie around the 2019 world tour.

Episode one, A New Year, and we find Slater posted up at his Palm Beach apartment on the Gold Coast, current value around three mill, as he prepares for the opening event of the season.

A pre-contest session is shown in all its horror, drop-ins, mistakes, a white-water takeoff any surfer shucked of confidence will relate to.

“I just had the worst surf in a long time,” he tells a fan on the beach, “and I’m really frustrated right now.”

The fan asks, “Why are you really frustrated?”

“Why? I couldn’t get a wave.”

A moment later, “Fuck, sometimes I just don’t have the patience.”

Episode two, Bells.

Essential.

"A 16min long surf film featuring an eclectic soundtrack matched with eclectic surfing."

In this compelling film edited by the former world number four Dane Reynolds, we bounce on the knee of Craig Anderson, a former superstar long disappeared.

Craig is one of the the most alluring and memorable characters in surf of the last twenty-five years. I once watched a Jew supplicate himself before Craig at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem; the day before at the Jaffa Gate, American girls had swooned as Craig roared past on a Segway, your reporter in the hottest pursuit!

There are other surfers in this film, Benny Howard, Kaito Ohashi, Andrew ‘Driod” Doheny and Dane Reynolds, of course.

The highlight, for many, will be the use of Karen Dalton’s classic from 1966, Little Bit of Rain.