Sunny was a master of the art of the hissy fit, and he took it seriously as an effective strategic manoeuvre; alongside his devastating power turns and tube-riding mastery, the tantrum was a key weapon in the Hawaiian’s arsenal. “It’s not a personal thing,” he said in an interview a few years ago. “You know, if they’re fucking up and I think they’re giving someone a low score or giving me a low score, yeah I’m gonna say something. It’s definitely made a difference in my career…. Like Pat O’Connell, for instance, Pat never really snapped about anything. I’ve seen them rob Pat quite a bit of times, but you rarely see me get robbed, ‘cos they know if they don’t give me that 8.5 that I deserve I’m gonna be up in that tower saying something — or possibly doing something. There’ve been quite a bit of times they’ve locked the doors.”

When the judges gave Sunny’s opponent the nod in a heat back in ’95, “doing something” meant picking up a muffin he found lying on a spectator’s towel and hurling it at the judging panel in the absence of anything better to throw. Could there possibly be a more comically apt example of petulance in defeat? And yet for Garcia, the tantrum is a basic competitive right, even a point of principle: “How does that hurt them? It hurts their feelings? Ooh I’m sorry. But when they give you a bad score, and you don’t make that heat because you lost by two tenths of a point, that costs you money — it could cost you your career. So I look at it differently, you know?” Muffins, it’s true, generally don’t hurt when they hit you in the face; and it’s worth noting that at the end of that same year, the world’s top three were miles ahead at the top of the rankings, and separated by just 120 points — Sunny finishing in 3rd behind Rob Machado and Kelly Slater. Perhaps he’ll reflect that he should have thrown a few more.

https://vimeo.com/63827861