The Drop

After two decades in the game, there are a few commonalities you can always rely on when dealing with a-grade talent: the first is that you need to be prepared to do plenty of waiting. Once a time and day were set for the interview, both surfers committed to a firm time date: 8am Tuesday in Australia and 12pm, in Hawaii. It was 7.53am and my laptop wouldn’t kick over. Frozen. A few resets and it whirred to life. It was 7.57am when I finally tuned into Zoom. There, both Mick and John were in full swing. I’m not sure what was more disarming, that these guys were so punctual or the fact that they’d already dived into the joys of cycling, and the fact that John needs to embrace lycra because it’s a “game-changer.” The goal of this call was simple: two see what can be distilled when two surfing world champs riff about life at the top. This is our second iteration of the series. We had some feedback from the first episode with Ronnie Blakey and it was that we lacked a clear explanation of what was actually g