Dan Mann Won Stab In The Dark X — Now What?

The envelope has been proverbially opened, and Dan Mann is your Stab In The Dark X winner.

Now, before the pitchforks get sharpened any further, a small statistical offering: in our Premium poll, 87% of members believed Kelly Slater knew which board had come from Dan Mann’s hands.

This season’s result had most people suspiciously squinting at the format, but those who squinted still couldn’t quite bring themselves to dislike the guy who won.

Because it’s impossible to dislike a guy who shapes the world’s winningest surfer’s boards inside a shipping container in a nondescript parking lot. This is a man who splits his time between living in a van somewhere in California and a home in Costa Rica and refuses to go full corpo. On the tired trope of throwing the word “core” around, his dedication to the sport is as core as core can be without having to resort to ciggies on the beach or bell-bottomed boardshorts. We suspect he stands up both ways — goofy and reg — out of pure love and dedication to surfing. Maybe a little indecisiveness.

Mann grew up in Maui, where he lived until he was 10, before moving to Coronado, California, where he actually learned to surf. The son of a Navy SEAL, he didn’t set out to become a professional shaper so much as slowly drift into it. Fixing his own boards inevitably led to building them. Building them became a side obsession while he worked as a lifeguard and waited tables. He managed to get an English degree at San Diego State along the way, and somewhere in there he also won the Catalina Classic after paddling 32 miles across open ocean on a board he built himself.

In 2001 he bought an existing glassing company and then plugged his own brand, Mannkine, into the larger operation. From there he began designing surfboards for Firewire, and eventually for Kelly’s label, Slater Designs.

The two have been working together for something like a decade, continuously refining performance shortboards for the man who has spent his adult life turning small differences into large victories.

Strip away the format, the conspiracy theories, and the internet comment sections and the result confirms something fairly obvious: Kelly Slater likes the way Dan Mann’s boards feel under his feet. To the dismay of many armchair critics, this isn’t breaking news.

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Interestingly, two of the “losers” — Britt Merrick and Matt Biolos — said that if they couldn’t win it themselves, Dan Mann would be their second-best outcome. A less-than-subtle act of spitting into the wind? Could Mann become direct competition? Today a SITD win. Tomorrow an unexpected rival?

Which brings us back to the question that’s been humming through the comments section like a fridge left open overnight:

Did Kelly know?

In 1985, the NBA held its first ever draft lottery. Commissioner David Stern reached into a rotating drum and pulled out an envelope belonging to the New York Knicks, giving them the chance to draft Patrick Ewing, the most coveted prospect in college basketball at the time.

Some believed the envelope had been frozen beforehand, so Stern could feel it with his fingertips. Others swore it had been bent slightly, giving it away in the pile. A conspiracy theory was born.

Nothing was ever proven. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes, they say.

If there’s one thing the last thirty years have taught us, it’s that Kelly possesses a strange gravitational pull over outcomes. He’s spent a career bending timing and narrative in his direction.

Remember when he unveiled Surf Ranch the day after Adriano won his first world title? A perfectly timed act that, for better or worse, redirected the spotlight before the Brazilian’s champagne had lost its bubbles. The Machado high-five? And of course, an entire era filled with curtain-call excellent rides to turn heats, win contests, and decide World Titles at the eleventh hour.

Kelly might play aloof at times, but he is fully aware of the narrative and understands story arcs. This is someone who studied, collected, and archived heat sheets from early-career Round of 96 matchups.

When a decade-long collaborator wins a blind surfboard test judged by the most meticulous surfer in history, people will start looking for fingerprints.

After clocking countless hours on Mann’s boards, does this outcome make Kelly clueless or a liar?

Did Dan hide a clue somewhere in the rails, a familiar curve in the rocker, a secret handshake disguised as a concave?

We’ll probably never know, but from what this series has shown us, Slater and Mann couldn’t come across as more different from one another. It’s hard to imagine the self-proclaimed corporate hippie being involved in that flavour of match-fixing.

But the funny thing is, the speculation might be the most Kelly Slater outcome possible. Kelly has become a master of living in the culture collective mind. Even now, when he’s no longer keeping pace with the current CT crop, and with an Olympic medal permanently out of reach, he still manages to bend the conversation back toward himself.

Here we are, still trying to decode whether he recognised a surfboard. This should be a post about our winner, and yet the conversation drifted somewhere else entirely.

Meanwhile, somewhere between California and Costa Rica, Dan Mann is probably back in his container shaping bay, planer humming, foam dust floating through the sunlight like artificial snow. Or surfing, swimming, bodysurfing…

We’ll probably never really know if Kelly knew, but we won’t be letting go anytime soon.