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I’ll admit this wouldn’t really feel worth sharing if it happened at any other surf contest. Or, maybe it would be shocking enough to share if it did happen somewhere else. But it went down on the south side of the Huntington Beach pier over the weekend at the US Open of Surfing and somehow it feels about par for the course nowadays: two guys squared up MMA-style and the crowd oooh’d, ahhh’d, and eventually cheered through headbutts, crosses, and a takedown.
Sadly, stuff like this is spectator fodder in Huntington Beach, a place that declares itself Surf City USA and endured a long legal battle with Santa Cruz in order to have the distinction all to itself. Riots have broken out in events surrounding surf contests in the city more than once. Tragically, a man was shot and killed by police on the sand in 2021 after the Open heats had ended for the day.
Of course, none of this has anything to do with surfing and the men fighting on the beach this weekend are clearly not surfers. They look more like the kind of guys you’d run into at a Main Street bar Saturday night rocking Tap Out tees in Anytown, America. But then again, it has everything to do with surfing when you can’t go to a contest without at least expecting to run into a bit of depravity.
