Sports fans left gobsmacked after Kelly Slater reveals golf great Ben Hogan helped him create miracle technique that allowed thirty years of surfing dominance!

“I stumbled onto a lot of things people didn’t understand."

In this thirty-four minute interview, overly long in my opinion, although the sweetest meat is always carved last from the bone, Kelly Slater plays eighteen holes with the golf presenter Iona Stephen.

It is a gentle and mature interview drawn out on the links of Kingsbarns, six miles or so from St Andrews in Scotland, although few stories the surf fan hasn’t heard before are shared.

Until the fifteen-ish minute mark, that is, when Slater reveals it was Ben Hogan’s seminal golf technique book from 1985, “Ben Hogan’s Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf”, that gave him the impetus to re-examine his approach to riding waves.

“I read Ben Hogan’s Five Lessons and it got me visualising the plane of the swing and I started thinking, well, there’s mechanics in surfing, the body has to work with the board and the wave in a certain way and so I started to relate where my shoulders were and my stance was and the sequencing of my body as I rotated or compressed or pushed with my legs. And I started to envision it in a different way and so I came up with some theories of how the body relates to the board and the wave.

“I could always find what I call a neutral position no matter what part of the wave I was on, and from there I could go right or left really easily or I could stall and increase my speed. I really got it down to the basics., There was a really basic move that I used to get myself in the right position. Basically, I trained myself by grabbing the rail of my board when I turned to the left…”

Here, interviewer Stephens looses a sleepy, “mmmmm”, the encouraging sound a homely girl will use when she doesn’t want to lose her grip on the hot but boring guy.

Slater continues,

“And what that did was drop my back shoulder, push my hip, forward and compress me down its the board and kept me in a really stable position. A lot of surfers will turn and drop their front shoulders and put their weight on their front heel and it’s easy to fall. So it really centred my weight to my feet. It became my neutral stance. I’d relate to golf, a strong grip, a neutral grip, a weak grip. “

Stephens, “Whoa.”

Slater, “I stumbled onto a lot of things people didn’t understand in surfing… because of golf.”

Essential.


“Movie-star handsome” surf icon hospitalised following horror wipeout at notoriously dangerous novelty wave, “I never saw this coming… I’m baffled, I’m confused!”

Eight years almost to the day since the Woody Harrelson lookalike destroyed knee in similar circumstances!

The world-champion vlogger and high-end intermediate surfer from New Jersey, Ben Gravy, has shocked his almost two hundred thousand subscribers after a horror wipeout put the Woody Harrelson lookalike in hospital.

“I shattered my collarbone in four places…surfing!” explains the thirty-four-year-old reformed boozehound. “It’s been almost eight years since I destroyed my knee. Since that day my life has changed drastically. I went from spending a lot of my time at bars, parties & asleep at my spiritual wheel to being completely awake & in tune with the world around me. I never saw this coming. I went for a casual surf this morning & never, ever thought that I would end up with a shattered collarbone. I’m surprised, I’m baffled, I’m disappointed & I’m confused.”

After the wipeout, Gravy repeats, “I broke my collarbone” four times.

Watch the merry episode here.


Hawaii’s queen of shlock surf Mason Ho is nothing short of remarkable in unmissable new film, “Multiple Maniacs!”

“Look at me! I’m the most famous person you’ve ever met!”

When Mason Ho, the mid-thirties surfer from Sunset Beach, Hawaii, hits his stride it’s with the force of a terrifying gale that strikes in the middle of an otherwise placid summer.

“With a baby pulse of swell showing and some sunlight left, Mason Ho and Adam “Dome” Crawford decide to take a stroll down to the Pile,” says Rory Pringle, who directs and shoots this beautiful almost-seven minute short.

A riveting homage to an extraordinary force as dynamic as he is unique.


Fallen surf giant Billabong releases full-length film on the same day #1 rider Griffin Colapinto defects to arch-rival Quiksilver!

Joel Parkinson may be the commercial lure, but although he infuses the narrative with a certain glamor, he is only one cog in a perfect wheel.

The surfing company Billabong has loosed a meticulously directed and gorgeously photographed full-length surf film on the very same day their number one team rider announced he’d signed with one-time arch rival Quiksilver.

“When you evolve your personality, you evolve your reality and Quiksilver is now a part of my personality,” said the bewitching natural-footer from San Clemente.

Readers will know, of course, that both companies fell on their swords years ago after flying too close to the sun, and are now the playthings of Oaktree Capital, an American global asset management firm or were until their rumoured recent sale to Authentic Brands Group.

The movie, which you can watch below, stars the remnants of the Billabong surf team, Joel Parkinson, Creed McTaggart, Eithan Osborne, Jai Glindeman, Dakoda Walters and Kian Martin.

Joel Parkinson may be the commercial lure, but although he infuses the narrative with a certain glamor, he is only one cog in a perfect wheel.

Essential.


Grave fears held for brother of US Surf Olympian Nathan Florence and teenage boy after attempted paddle-out in conditions that killed five Dutch surfers! “Rescue would have been near impossible!”

"Stuck in down-drafts of boils in the water felt like it wanted to pull you down below!"

Four months ago, Nathan Florence, a man previously described as “extremely intelligent and extremely capable”, scored the wave of the year at a remote Sumatran reef, making the point there’s more than one star in the Florence family.

 

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In the latest instalment of his excellent YouTube series, however, Florence had spectators fearing the worst after he and his seventeen-year-old Scottish pal paddled out a wave Florence himself describes as “very, very sketchy… (Because of) foam couldn’t sense direction or see if sets were approaching and just hearing five surfers died in Netherlands last year getting stuck in foam! What a spookfest! Stuck in down-drafts of boils in the water felt like it wanted to pull you down below while you paddled, meanwhile large sets approaching. All in all not a safe session …rescue would have been near impossible if injury was sustained.”

Harrowing!