HBO’s Real Sports
HBO announced Tuesday that correspondent Jon Frankel will feature the North Shore lifeguards on an episode of the Emmy-winning, Real Sports. The investigative show has shined a spotlight on surfing in the past, from visiting Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch in Lemoore to examining big wave surfing and asking, “is it worth it?” The new feature, they say, will touch on the dangers of surfing on the North Shore in the winter and profile the watermen who “regularly dive into massive waves to rescue bloodied and injured surfers.”
The show should have plenty to discuss and share when it airs on February 21. North Shore lifeguards have had an eventful 2023 already, just six weeks into the year. In early January it was reported that high surf had led to at least 40 lifeguard rescues on the North and West shores alone with one swell. Hawaii News Now reported at the time that water safety had performed at least “3,000 island-wide preventative measures.”
And then the big story of the winter, of course, has been celebrating a North Shore lifeguard as champion of this year’s Eddie Aikau Invitational while on duty at the bay. The event ran for just the tenth time in its long history and the first time since 2016, and The Inertia’s Sam George called the accomplishment “the most amazing thing that happened during the most incredible three weeks of big wave action the sport has ever seen.”
“Waimea was his beach, his bay,” says Linda Ipson of her then-husband Eddie Aikau in the 2014 documentary Hawaiian: The Legend of Eddie Aikau. “And it was so dangerous at times that it was like his goal in life to make sure that everybody who came to this beach went home safely to their families.”
