Cory Lopez’s Eight Greatest Mistakes

The Eight Greatest Mistakes Of My Life: With Cory Lopez, 35, Daytona Beach, Florida.

1. Giving my wife a pre-nup: I presented her with a pre-nuptial agreement about a month before we were going to be married and she bailed on me 10 days before the wedding. She was over it. The pre-nup didn’t work for her. She’s my wife now, but it took another five years of work before we got married.

3. Jerky boys: Being such a jerk to my friends when I was young. We used to call my friends from down the road over to play and then we’d hide in the bushes and attack them with paintball guns, just totally obliterate them.

4. No fun: Not partying the year I didn’t re-qualify. It’s easy to look back and say I should done this or I shoulda done that, but if truth be told, I just took it all too seriously that year. I should have partied hard that year, harder than other years. It might have been the key element in re-qualifying.

5. Boats and pals: Lending my boat to my pal Freddy. We were having this massive house party and my mate Freddy was hassling me to use the boat. It was a nice 13-footer moored by the river and Freddy was with a chick and wanted to impress her and take the boat out I was having none of it. It was a big party and I didn’t feel comfortable with anyone on the boat in the river at all. Freddy eventually became just way too much for me to deal with and I told him to just take the boat, but to be careful. So he took the boat with the girl in it and crashed it into a pylon or something and totally destroyed it. I should never have lent my boat to Freddy.

5. Losing a Porsche: … by not being in contact overseas. I was away on the tour and while I was away there was a local giveaway contest and the prize was a Porsche. All the local athletes were entered in it from my area and I was entered automatically. I was away and didn’t have a world phone and couldn’t take the call. The guy phoned me for 10 days and left voice messages every day saying, like, “Dude I really wanna give you this Porsche, but you have to call me.” In the end, they gave the Porsche to some other person. It was this awesome Porsche, all glass on top, I don’t know which one it was, I felt too sick to take a close look at the pictures when I finally picked up his 10 voice messages.

6. Not t-boning Kelly Slater at Teahupoo: It was a quarter-final paddle battle, I forget which year, and I was in front and on the outside. All I had to do was swing left and t-bone him into the reef and I would have had it. If I had pushed him he would have been on the reef and he wouldn’t have been able to get another wave. As it was, I didn’t, he beat me in the paddle battle, and got the next wave. He needed a big score, like an 8.9 or something and he got a 9.2 and advanced and I was left wondering why I didn’t just push him onto the reef. Big mistake.

7. Going to the world amateurs: It was a huge mistake going to the 2004 World Amateur Champs in Brazil. Pink Floyd was playing in Miami while I was going to be away and all my friends were going, but I headed for Brazil. On the night of the final concert Pink Floyd announced that that was their last-ever concert. I missed it. How did I do at the event? I can’t even remember. I think I got a second, or maybe a third, but nobody remembers a second-place finish, let alone a third.

8. Fighting a football team: We were out for the night and the club had just closed and a bunch of football player jerks were causing some nasty shit with this girl, cussing her and stuff, so my mates and I went over to sort it out and to tell these dudes to back off. We all woke up in ambulances, we were black and blue and totally beaten. Looking back, the girl was just getting cussed and we took serious punishment, so we probably should have left well enough alone and just walked away. No one wants to wake up in an ambulance.