You have to begrudgingly love the absolute chaos of the ASP WCT point system. Even Kelly Slater, with all of his twenty-some-odd years of tour experience, had no idea where he stood after his early exit in Portugal. He genuinely thought he was out of the title hunt. So much so that he did what one of his rock star friends told him to do: broke his board into three pieces and gave each away to a fan.
The best part? The way his face lights up when he realizes he has yet another opportunity to claim the title at Pipe — he has a Cheshire cat smile starting around the 0:35 mark, a grin that only widens when he also realizes his exhaustion from surfing “perfect barrels” for three hours wasn’t a mis-allocated end of the line. Basically, Kelly got to have his cake and now might get to eat it, too.
Hawaii is going to be awesome…
