
On President’s Day morning, a middle-aged, white surfer hassled two 24-year-old Black surfers in the line-up at the Manhattan Beach Pier. He told them to go surf in El Porto. Then, more pointedly, he told them to go surf Bruce’s Beach, a Blacks only beach in the 1920s and more recently, the site of Black Lives Matter protests

Nick “Flinch” Padilla claims to have never put on a dry wetsuit, a testament to being in the ocean just about every day since he learned to surf.
That is not to say he’s had a healthy life.
He smoked pot for the first time at age nine. By high school he was drinking heavily and taking speed, two drugs that seemed to go well with his two other obsessions: music and surfing.
When he was 14, he and his friends founded STDs, a punk band that was still performing locally, prior to the pandemic.
Continued…


