Jamie O’Brien and the big night, Hawaii

Please, Time, put an end to our misery. The anticipation is killing us. Tomorrow, at The Banzai Pipeline on the northern shore of Oahu, in Hawaii, Mick Fanning and Kelly Slater will surf 12 foot barrels to decide who is the 2013 ASP World Champion. Them’s the facts. Then, there’s all those beautiful peripherals around it, like the fact that if Kelly does pull this off it’ll surely be the greatest sporting feat in history (age, etc considered), or that this could be Mick’s chance to show his true grit, or that maybe it’s time for John John Florence to become an official goddamn Pipe Master, and cease just being the unofficial Pipe Master, and so on. More pertinently, this is Jamie O’Brien, standing in a Pipeline barrel at 4:20 this afternoon. In typical Hawaiian fashion, the surf did not look like this in the morning. “Today at 10am I took my four-year-old daughter surfing at Pipe,” says our photographer on this occasion, Ryan Miller. “At 4:20pm this happened.” Hawaiian surf don’t care for rules. And everybody loves a bad boy.