Joel Tudor lampoons Kelly Slater over Jiu Jitsu belt

In what is surely the most bizarre surf news story of the year cruisey longboarder turned Jiu Jitsu fanatic Joel Tudour has kicked off at Kelly Slater on instagram over a picture of Kelly posing wearing a blue belt (the one up from white). Basically Joel reckons Kelly hasn’t earned this belt and its an insult to hard working Jiu Jitsuers everywhere that he’s posing wearing it, here’s what he had to say:

“Crock of shit – the guy has been wearing a blue belt for years in pics and always made excuses when I would call him on it!” he wrote in the comments pane. “If he wants his belt , tell him to go sign up and put in the work like everybody else who starts at white and goes through hell to graduate to blue – anybody on here talking shit to me more than likely doesn’t train and has zero clue about Jiu Jitsu.”

Pat Tenore, co-founder of RVCA and another keen jiu jitsu then hit back at Tudor with this comment:

“love this || joel is officially the commissioner of the jiu jitsu police cry baby club || listen grumpy smurf when you call out kelly like this you are basically calling out the mendes brothers and their integrity on who can wear a blue belt or not in their academy || as far as I can see it wasn’t a rainbow belt and blue belts do exist at AoJ and kelly is deemed worthy to represent || go do yoga calm down || love you joel || we all do but chill || don’t be a hater ||”

There was then plenty more back and forth (which you can see here), filled with postulating, bravado and dick measuring as well as lots of people telling each other not to be haters. Eventually Zach Menimsky, the other guy in the photo piped up with the following:

“Why are you even jumping in to this conversation? It’s completely irrelevant to you in every way, shape and form. You are missing message of Jiu Jitsu which should be to try and build the sport worldwide. Bear posted this photo to celebrate the cross over of different communities, not to judge one person by the stripe on their waist. It’s not like it’s a fake black belt like we’ve seen recently. I’m pretty sure, being that I’m the other person in the photo, that Kelly wants to simply understand the sport and has been training for long enough to do so. I trained with him first hand and I can say, he is most definitely a blue belt, formal promotion or not.”

Whilst Kelly declined to add his voice to the torrent of comments on the picture, it has been reported by Beachgrit that his only published reaction has been:

“I didn’t have a belt and that’s all they had handy. Chill out.”

And as usual, we we agree with the ol’ slatemeister on this one.