Mick Fanning: as close to superhuman as you can get.
Superhuman in every way, Mick Fanning is going to be unstoppable from here. It looked sped up at times. Mick Fanning hit a new level of relentless power surfing. So fast and so precise, he hooked, wrapped and punched his way to victory at Trestles, claiming the gold leader’s jersey as he did. The 2015 title race now bares all the hallmarks of an unstoppable, era-defining fourth championship for Mick Fanning.
They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and no one is better proof of that than Fanning. Born into the roughest neighbourhood in Australia, Penrith, in western Sydney; a casually violent enclave of public housing estates, unemployment and substance abuse, he grew up barely knowing his father, raised instead by his heroic single mother, Liz, along with his brothers. As a kid he moved to the similarly low-income region of the far NSW north coast where his troubled mind found solace in the ocean. His two brothers, Ed and Sean, paved the way for him, until Sean was tragically killed in a car crash when Mick was a teenager. It crushed him. They were supposed to do the tour together.
“The police took me home, and I had to tell everyone in my family. I ran in, woke Mum and told her. And then I rang Dad. Luckily my two brothers were there that night as well. …It was pretty wild, being 17 and having to break such news,” he recalled in his book, Surf for Your Life.
Mick bounced back with a win in the Rip Curl Pro Bells Beach as a 19-year-old wildcard a few years later. He suffered a near career-ending injury in 2004 when he blew a huge floater in the Mentawais. Ripping his hamstring off the bone, the injury requiring experimental surgery and six months on the couch before he could get back in the water. He claimed victory upon his return to the World Tour, winning the Quiksilver Pro Gold Coast, before claiming his first world title in 2007 and dedicating it to his brother, Sean. Fast forward to this year and he lives the worst nightmare. He feels the coarse skin of a three meter man eater on his hands. He’s forced to punch his way out of an attack from the depths. The strength, optimism and strange God-complex that must result from an incident will never be understood by us mere mortals. Mick Fanning exists on another plane today. Between his round three defeat at the Tahiti Pro and and this week at Trestles, he made a quick run to Shipsterns, a wave he’d never surfed before, and where he would cop the beating of a lifetime after blowing his first wave, quickly followed by a ten footer on the head. Just another small blip in Mick Fanning’s long history of hiccoughs and triumphs over adversity.
And then at Trestles, what can only be described as a super human display of focus, strength and timing. Despite being faced with an onslaught of Brazilians in the kind of crumbly, windblown conditions that would seem to favor their high-powered grovel game, he never looked troubled.
It was his timing that won him the contest, and it was uncanny. It’s one thing to have all the speed in the world, but the ability to store it up in a fade or deep bottom turn so as to allow the wave to catch up before you clobber the lip into the stratosphere is all Fanning. No surfer has ever combined speed, accuracy, power and flow like he does. He is a marvel.
He came up against a steely Adriano De Souza in the final, the Brazilian surfing like a ball of determined energy as he held on for dear life to the yellow leader’s jersey. But he was not in the same league as Fanning. De Souza lacked the greasy transitions and seamless interchange between maneuvers that Fanning possessed. Where De Souza could only bulldog his way down the line, smashing sections to bits when they came, Fanning was surfing it, man, riding foam, gliding lips, and then KAPOW! blasting sections into the sky, or, alternatively, Zoro’ing the shit out of it with top turn hooks. “They don’t call him the surgeon for nothing,” noted commentator Ross Williams. “He just gave that thing a face lift.”
Fanning is as close to superhuman as any athlete you’ll find. The sum of more triumphs over adversity, more tests of will power, and more brushes with Great Whites than any surfer we’ve ever seen on tour. Sit back and watch the juggernaut roll on. He’s in the form of his career this year and he’s got the leader’s jersey in his grip now. From his cold, dead hand you will have to pry it.
