“I will f%#king kill you! You just f#%ked up big time!” were among the threats that Lennix Smith says a fellow surfer levied at him during a localism incident in an Indonesian lineup. Smith, a 21-year-old Billabong-sponsored Australian pro surfer, says he continued getting berated by a Spanish surfer who had “lived in Indonesia for the last 25 years.”
He says the aggressive surfer made a throat-slitting gesture toward him, grabbed his board, and screamed in his face.
But the curious part of the altercation is that, in the video Lennix posted, it was the angry surfer who dropped in.
“For about 10 minutes straight, he continuously told me that he was going to kill me, smash my knee, and ruin my surf career — and that he doesn’t give a f#%k,” Lennix said.
“I just find it honestly crazy that these guys come over here for five minutes and think that they’re locals and start carrying on,” Lennix added. “They just don’t realize they’re the ones that are ruining it for everyone. They kill the vibe so hard, and surfing’s meant to be fun, and these guys are so aggressive, and they don’t even realize it.”
Lennix asked his followers to tag the guy if they knew who he was, and, lo and behold, the internet sleuths identified him as Edoardo Puddu (who it appears is actually Italian), the owner of a pizzeria, homestay, and surf shop in Sumbawa.
Puddu even replied to comments on the post, doubling down on claims that Lennix had been snaking him, but he later deleted the comment and made his profile private.
Lennix’s story went viral, getting attention from other pro surfers like Shane Dorian, Moana Jones Wong, and Julian Wilson.
“There are Indonesians and then there are foreigners. There is no in-between,” Dorian wrote. “Living there does not make someone a local.”
There’s no context for what happened before the wave that triggered the localism altercation. But as a local business owner who knows there are cameras on the beach, Puddu’s actions are quite brazen. His tirade evokes memories of the viral surf fight in Bali two years ago where a Brazilian man, believing himself to be a local, punched a woman in the lineup.
