My mate Tom has this thing where when he gets pissed off in the surf — which is fairly often, ’cause he’s a miserable bastard — he headbutts his surfboard. Have a look at one of Tom’s boards and you can guarantee it will have several forehead-shaped craters about a foot from the nose. It all started several years ago and has gotten progressively worse, to the point where he’s now writing off boards on a monthly basis. At work they grew worried about the cuts and bruises on his brow. I say to him: “Tom, don’t you care about your surfboards? About your face? Don’t you realize you’re chucking half your salary down the drain on new boards?” But he does care, he does realize, and that’s the tragedy of it. He just can’t help himself; it’s become a sinister compulsion. He asked his shaper to give him an extra layer of glass around the chest area, but then he started knocking himself out in the surf. He almost drowned a couple of times; the lifeguards were getting a bit tired of the whole thing. Now he’s back to headbutting normal boards. He says he prefers a bit of give anyway, likes to be able to hear the crunch of fibreglass against foam.
Anyhows, here’s a GoPro video of Sunny Garcia headbutting his board – accidentally, I hasten to add. Kelly posted it on his instagram.
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