Takayuki Wakita, shooting. Photo: Brent Bielmann
You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take. Hockey great Wayne Gretzky said that, and he said it while wearing his hair so confidently in a mullet. The great one netted 894 goals throughout his NHL career. Every one of them were scored using a simple formula: shoot.
Wayne was a shooter. He didn’t let opportunity skate right past him. He had that self-assured butternut beavertail and took chances. He played with risk. He didn’t go to Coachella. He shot.
Pipeline was breaking recently and one day, a wave waltzed right over to Takayuki Wakita. He was deep, the wave was steep and Wakita’s survival instinct probably screamed at him to stay far, far away — which is exactly why Wakita went. He ended up doing the St. Louis starfish, wore the lip on the face and almost certainly made flowers with the reef. He got smoked. But when he laid in bed that night, he went to sleep knowing that he shot.
His back was probably a little bit achey though.