Flashback: To The Incredible Mick Fanning Vs Kelly Slater Bells Final, 2012

Mick has surfed the perfect contest, almost. Now, eleven years and two world professional surfing championships since his first Bell, he is sitting in the Bowl, hoping for his first tour win in years.

Next to him is the reigning world champion, Kelly Slater, and Kelly has surfed anything but the perfect contest. He scraped together a nothing win over Davey Cathels and Brett Simpson in round one, and was given a win against Nic Muscroft when the Southern Ocean provided a 15-wave set in the last three minutes, after Mushy had scored a 9.5 and paddled in, thinking it was done. One of those heats you win and forget, you lose and don’t forget.

Mick and Kelly. Two years after Andy. Two days after Mick Peterson’s funeral back at Tweed Heads. The crowd bends its collective head for a minute’s silence.

There are seven thousand people there on the cliffs and lining the beach. There would be more, but the parking has run out. Many more are watching online. The surf is failing — six foot in the morning, four foot now and inconsistent, the wind switching devil to offshore and back again.

Kelly is Kelly. He’s had two gimmes at this event, he’s never needed three. Mick has been working on something. Since his last world title back in 2009, his surfing has kinda seized up — like an engine overheating. It’s probably why he’s been winning heats but not contests. He’ll come out hard and early, get to the quarters, and the gears will begin to grind. It all feels too hard, too much like work. Over-thinking, he suspects. Maybe over-surfing too.

So he has been working on this, changing his heat prep to shorter simpler stuff, wanting to develop an ability to rise quickly to the moment when required, rather than going at an event like every day is a final. He’s done that stuff, he’s done a decade of it. Now he learns to conserve energy, in order to expend more of it in the moment. A great athlete’s key lesson, a warrior’s lesson.

The heat begins. Another lesson of battle, this one from the almost too famous Sun-Tzu: do not oppose an enemy on open ground. Your forces will be scattered. Bells Bowl right now is open ground. There can be no direct opposition, only a score, then another score. The scores do the opposing, yet they are given by a judging panel hundreds of metres away. Where will the judges go? What will move them?

Kelly starts quick, Mick starts solid. Kelly is surfing short, close to the pocket, snapping his little round pin through the curve under the lip, finessing floaters and airs, getting sevens. Mick gets the first good score, a 9.1, and waits.

The Devil wind kicks. Kelly tries to rattle Mick, going under his priority. He picks off what for a moment looks like something good, but it stands up across the Bowl too far ahead for him to make anything conventional. This is no longer open ground. In Sun Tzu’s lexicon, it is disputed ground. It’s time to fight. Kelly goes for broke, punts off the lip and the wind into one of the biggest moves ever to be seen in professional surfing competition, a fully laid out 360 alley oop. He lands it and plays with the foam to make it look hard, even though it’s well nigh impossible. The panel’s given him a 10 even before he bows to the crowd.

Mick just sits.

He sits. He lets the ground open again.

The best wave of the heat comes to him, and he brings 100% of himself to bear on it. Rides it from the furthest base to the top edge of the lip. Moves through the wind and into a world of edgework that Kelly himself cannot inhabit, not today, not despite that air or anything else his genius and his little round pin can produce.

It’s not a 10, it’s a 9.7. It’s the lead. It’s the win.

The arguments raged for days. People in Kelly’s camp, people in Mick’s. Later I thought, the people arguing for KS were really arguing for their sense of KS — the surfer they’d attached themselves to, by patriotic or generational or corporate means — and maybe they were also sensing the fact that this was the last time he’d defend a world title. But if so, they were missing the point. Mick rode two waves in that final and two waves only. He exerted himself exactly when needed and only as much as was needed. The score was 18.80, but it might as well have been perfect.