Todd Kline’s face says almost as much as Bobby’s mouth. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
When Bobby Martinez quit the Tour, he did in a pretty memorable way. So memorable, in fact, we’re still talking about it almost 13 years later.
“I don’t want to be a part of this dumb fucking wannabe tennis tour,” he said on September 7, 2011. “I ain’t going to these stupid contests no more.”
Those now-famous words were spoken after the second round of the Quiksilver Pro in Long Beach, New York, and it was not exactly a great event for Martinez. Typical onshore slop was made worse — in Bobby’s mind, at least — by the controversial grading scale of the ASP judges. He did win his heat, which made his outburst all the more surprising. But it was likely a few years of pent-up anger that all came spilling out at once.
It was shocking because Bobby was somewhere neat the peak of his competitive career, but Bobby was never one who stuck to the norms for sticking to the norms’ sake.
Real Surf Stories sat down with Bobby Martinez to get the story from the horse’s mouth, and it’s a fascinating tale. It was easy at the time to look at Bobby’s departure as career suicide, but it was far from it. It might have been the best decision he ever made.
