By Derek Rielly
Trouble in paradise!
The former BFF of big-wave honeypot Kai Lenny has come under fire following a series of suits related to his 300-acre property on Kauai or, to quote Chas, “the cocoon wherein the Harvard honorary degree holder entered a worm and exited a butterfly.”
The thirty-eight-year-old Zuckerberg’s transformation from “pale silicon drone” to foil and fight king is the stuff of legend.
Foiling down the Ne Pali coastline with Lenny, choking the hell out of his sparring partners.
However, not all is cool, as the kids say, in Zuckerberg’s bucolic paradise.
After dumping BFF Kai Lenny for MMA expert and UFC debutante Kha “The Shadow” Wu, Zuck has had to fend off claims from the builder of his $2.9 million “Jungle House and Cabin” and “Tree Houses” that he stiffed him of 133k.
Williams Construtions claims it “has not been paid for all of its labor, materials, and equipment as agreed” and “(Zuck’s company) has failed and/or refused to make payment in accordance with Williams’s requests.”
A spokesperson for the Zucks told Kauai Now, “To our knowledge, we have paid all invoices submitted by Williams Construction in full.”
Whether the claim is right or no, why the billionaire don’t just cut a check to get the damn thing off his back remains a mystery.
Meanwhile, the family of a former security guard has filed a wrongful death suit against the Zucks after the seventy-year-old guard, Rodney Medeiros, died of a heart attack shortly after walking up a steep and muddy hill on the property.
Zuckerberg, who is worth sixty-billion dollars, give or take a few bill, offered the fam seven-and-a-half gees to bury ol Rodney.
Either he tight or a believer in fighting for the truth, no matter how minuscule the amount.
By Derek Rielly
A brave and beautiful new world.
One thing I learned having a daughter that surfed was, until a certain age, there wasn’t much that separated the sexes.
Girls, although wildly outnumbered, regularly won contests and demonstrated the same stratospheric improvement in skills groms get from long days spent in the ocean, free of the need to work or tend to kids etc.
Then, around twelve, the girls split into their div and the boys into theirs. And, what happened when the genders were divided was the boys continue to improve, due, largely, to the volume of boys surfing.
Meaning if there’s fifty boys in the boardriders club, a few of ‘em are going to be preternaturally talent, whereas if there’s six or eight girls, it’s way less likely.
Ergo, competition brings out the skill, not a little extra muscle and weight.
If Stephanie Gilmore had gone through the men’s system, boys junior events, the men’s qualifying series, you think she wouldn’t be a level above even what she is now?
Anyway, I ain’t sure about other sports, MMA, boxing, swimming, football and so on, muscle and power count for everything there, but The Atlantic’s Maggie Mertens argues we gotta smash the gender binary in her (guessing the pronoun here) story, “Separating Sports by Sex Doesn’t Make Sense”.
“Gen Zers are more likely than members of previous generations to reject a strict gender binary altogether,” she writes. “Maintaining this binary in youth sports reinforces the idea that boys are inherently bigger, faster, and stronger than girls in a competitive setting—a notion that’s been challenged by scientists for years.”
And,
“Though sex differences in sports show advantages for men, researchers today still don’t know how much of this to attribute to biological difference versus the lack of support provided to women athletes to reach their highest potential.”
Where do you stand?
Binary, non-binary or do you, like I, enjoy any kind of sugar in your bowl?
By Chas Smith
They can take our G-Land but they can never take our Dream Tour.
Ugh. Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch Pro. The mechanical drone guaranteeing top turn, top turn, baby barrel, whack, air. Filipe Toledo for the win. Maybe Gabriel Medina if he can muster the interest. All leading to Lower Trestles where Filipe Toledo or possibly Gabriel Medina, if Rip Curl issues heavy heavy threats, wins it all and another year in the bag.
As it turns out, you actually can script this.
Anyhow, the core surf fan looking for something new, fresh can be inspired by Scotland, home to BeachGrit’s own World Surf League Championship Tour correspondent JP Currie.
Per the Daily Record:
Scotland is rightly considered one of the top countries in the world for outdoor sports, and now it seems even one of the more unlikely hobbies you’d expect to come to Scotland is proving massively popular here.
That’s right, a Scottish location has just been named as one of the best places to surf around the globe. The study by ParkSleepFly analysed various factors such as Google searches, Instagram tags, coastline length, and average sea temperatures to reveal the best surfing spots around the world.
And the coastline at Thurso, on the Caithness coast, has been named as one of the best places to catch a wave, joining locations in places such as Australia, Mexico and Bali.
With Currie already there, and you already sporting a vomit-stained shirt, should we consider Thurso stop one on a long longed for Rebel Tour?
They can take our G-Land but they can never take our Dream Tour?
Think about it.
By Chas Smith
“GO F*CK YOURSELVES!!!”
Now, I don’t know what reaction the World Surf League was expecting with the announcement of its 2023 Championship Tour but if I had to guess, it would be a general vibe of uproarious praise and gratitude. CEO Erik Logan has not been shy about “growing the platform” in order to “bring financial comforts and profound senses of well-being” to all professional surfers while “providing surf fans with a best-in-class entertainment experience” etc.
And so it must have been quite a shock when Logan, Senior Vice-President Jessi Miley-Dyer, owner Dirk Ziff logged on to their very own Instagram account and were met with fire and fury from all sides.
Tatina Weston-Webb, 2022’s runner-up, demanded more lefts, maybe unaware that Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch goes both ways.
Shane Beschen, a usually calm voice, screeched, “From the beginning, the excitement, fun, culture of surfing has grown from the inside out, meaning the infectious spirit of surfing is slowly reaching the masses through the enthusiasm of the core market. Your core market has been speaking loud and clear about the mid year cut, ending at lowers and now this new schedule. As i am now simply observing as a fan, it seems like a good idea to listen to the people who have literally grown the sport to where it is now. The surfers and the fans. I am from San Clemente and love lowers but this years Finals strategy is now even giving one of the most high performance waves in the world a bad name. When the people are used to the consequences of Pipeline to claim the title, most surf spots fall short on delivering that same excitement. Wishing you guys the best as i will always be a fan of surfing and todays surfers are setting new standards that are incredible.”
Cleeds1973, and 1442 others wrote slightly different versions of, “This is what happens when you get kook marketers to run the world tour.”
Owen Wright, victim of the mid-season cut, seemed to be enjoying the assault, penning, “Just here for the comments.”
As a surf journalist, I dug through hundreds upon hundreds of opinions and not one, not even one, remotely kind or thankful.
A post shared by World Surf League (@wsl)
Logan currently in his room, headphones on, Deepak Chopra and Oprah shoring up positive manifestations.
Miley-Dyer currently unaccounted for.
By Matt Warshaw
But likes to fight! “Raging drunk, (he) staggered over to Sam George intending to beat the shit out of him, and had to be pulled away.”
Last week I mentioned Damien Hardman, two-time WCT champ (1987, 1991) from Narrabeen, and Filipe Toledo as the two male title-holders most lacking in big-wave credibility.
At the time I was thinking Hardman and Toledo had been treated more or less equally in terms of attention paid to their deficits.
If anything, I felt we’d been crueler to Toledo.
Boy, was I wrong. Hardman got it so much worse.
The opening of Damien’s first SURFER profile, in 1988, written by Phil Jarratt just after Hardman won his first title, reads as follows:
Never having met Damien Hardman—the man who would soon become world champion—I asked around about him. “He’s kinda like Simon Anderson in his approach to life,” said one person. “It’s that Narrabeen thing, I suppose. But I wouldn’t put Damien in Simon’s class. He hasn’t got the brawn or the brains.” I asked someone else whose opinion I respected if he thought Damien would take the title. He said: “Damien just hasn’t got the balls to go all the way.”
After making the obvious point that Hardman had defied expectations to win the title, and then highlighting the new champ’s grit and tenacity, Jarratt seems to lose interest, with vague praise about Damien’s recent championship death-match heat against Gary Elkerton at Manly Beach, and an exit line in which Hardman promises to be a “good ambassador” for surfing. Jarratt, by nature a playful and engaged writer, was clearly bored.
Ten years later, with Hardman still a world title contender at age 33, pop culture diva Cintra Wilson, in her coverage of the French leg of the 1999 WCT, called him pro surfing’s “Evil Stepdad.”
A two-time former world champion and Occy’s biggest threat to this year’s championship, [Hardman] is monstrously capable but strangely cursed to be the Richard Nixon of the surfing world. He’s rigid with media unlovability, broody, uncute and super ambitious. He also colors inside the lines and racks up the points by being a ruthless and precise techno-surgeon. The Iceman is coldly serious and basically impossible for teenage girls to get a crush on.
Hardman had zero interest in being a surf media personality. Which makes sense, given the way he was treated. It’s a chicken-or-egg question. None of the surf writers of the period looked much past the fact that Damien was from Narrabeen, that he didn’t perform in big surf, and that he was a grim, methodical, merciless competitor. Rarely mentioned was the fact that, on his best days, Hardman was as frictionless in the water as George Gervin was on the hardwood. Maybe we iced him, in other words, not the other way around.
In 2001, the just-retired Damien Hardman was a judge Op Pro Mentawai Islands specialty event, which I covered, and which ended up being my one and only Indo boat trip.
There was a short bus ride at some early point in the gathering, while we were still on Sumantra, and when I was reintroduced to Hardman—we’d met a few times in the 1980s—he just nodded and looked away.
We loaded into a trio of boats, one for the six male competitors, another for the four women competitors, and another for media and judges. Damien, not surprisingly, bailed off our boat and stayed with the surfers.
It was an amazing time.
We floated and lounged and surfed, ate well, ran the event, and stayed out there for a week or so before returning to port. My two most distinct memories of Damien both come from that trip.
First, near the end of an all-hands party one evening on our boat (which was biggest), Damien, raging drunk, staggered over to Sam George intending to beat the shit out of him, and had to be pulled away.
Sam had done nothing to provoke Damien. I don’t think Damien even knew who he was talking to at the moment; Sam was a ranking surf media figure, a stand-in for all of us, and that was enough.
Second, Op had secured some kind of Indonesian governmental permit that allowed us to clear the water at any break we chose. Which sounds incredible, but was in fact weird and wrong and depressing.
A pair of surfers out alone at Bank Vaults when our flotilla pulled up, the first day of our trip, and dropped anchor. They were called in. Twenty years later I remember the looks on their faces—confusion fermenting into anger—and feel ashamed.
But of course it didn’t stop us, we did the same thing day after day, and eventually that was how Damien Hardman and I ended up out alone in perfect overheard surf at Macaronis.
It was the second-to-last day of the trip. The contest had just finished (Mark Occhilupo and Keala Kennelly won), at which point Damien and I, at the exact same moment but from different boats, darted into the lineup.
A decision had already been made to motor north to catch Hollow Trees before dark, and the other surfers from our group were already aboard the boats, which were now idling in the channel.
My thought was to grab a wave or two before we left. I did, but then sneak-paddled back into the lineup because if it wasn’t the absolute best surf I’d ever seen, it was without question the best uncrowded surf I’d ever seen.
Damien was sitting there when I returned.
We looked at each other, and he wasn’t the Iceman or the two-time champ or a media-hating drunk—he was the person who could extend this perfect moment.
Some version of the same thought ran through Damien’s head, “I will if you will,” he said, or some variation thereof, and over the next 20 semi-illicit minutes I caught another three waves, and maybe I am a cheap date but that is how Damien Hardman warmed my heart.
(You like this? Matt Warshaw delivers a surf essay every Sunday, PST. All of ’em a pleasure to read. Maybe time to subscribe to Warshaw’s Encyclopedia of Surfing, yeah? Three bucks a month.)
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