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Surfing at Snapper is a unique experience. The waves are world-class, as you know, but the crowds? Oh, they’re the crowdiest, to coin a phrase. All etiquette is out the window. If you’re not behind someone on a wave, you’re likely in front of someone. Drop-ins are common. It’s frustrating to watch wave after wave unfold, perfect as perfect can be, but always marred by a teeming crowd of everyone else wanting the exact same thing you’re wanting. Tempers must run high, and frankly, it’s somewhat surprising that dust-ups like the one you see above don’t happen more frequently, although it’s nice to know that cooler heads generally prevail.
Although I was not in the lineup when this little scuffle occurred (I’m very far away from Australia), if we’re only using the scant few seconds of video from the Instagram page 18 Seconds to figure out what happened, it sure looks like a fully-grown adult male surfer basically back paddled a kid on a boog, got pissed when the kid on the boog was kind of forced into burning him, then proceeded to lay multiple fists into the boog kid’s face. He stopped very quickly, though, when another fully-grown man dressed his face with a heavy fist.
Kelly Slater weighed in in the comments section. “There’s a lot to decipher here,” he said. “There is no order at Snapper which sucks. Sounds like he snaked the sponger who was a kid and then hit him. A lot of bad in this whole thing. Bummer. Maybe waves should be difficulty rated and surfers should have a belt system. ? That should go over well.”
Whatever the case may be; whatever happened in the moments leading up to this; punching a kid in the face a whole bunch of times was definitely not the right course of action. “He’s a kid, dude!” someone can be heard yelling near the end of the video. “He’s just a kid!”
