“So, Lupita Nyong’o was dating this guy…I forget his name…Sal…Mas…Mas…this dude…”
While war rages hither and yon and pro surfing stubbornly refuses to climb out of its WSL-dug grave and the Pipe Masters runs as a B-grade exhibition event, you should be pleased your reporters at at BeachGrit are here to cover the important and profound, in this case the love games of broadcaster Sal Masekela and Black Panther star Lupita Nyong’o.
As I may’ve mentioned four or five times in the past few months, and which I’ll cut and paste for your enjoyment below, I met the extreme sports identity at Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch in 2017.
This was before Lupita Nyong’o and therefore Sal Masekela was, ostensibly, single.
Occupying one of the bench seats in the Surf Ranch’s heated jacuzzi aprés our allotted waves was Sal, he was Sal back then, and just as I was about to enter the swirling maelstrom, heated to one hundred degrees and offering needed respite from the winter cold and a possible cure for a dreadful hangover, his telephone rang.
Sal asked me to rummage through his colourful outfit which was bundled on a barrel, enough clothes to suggest, or was I hoping, he was nude in the tank, and to pick it up.
It was Kelly Slater.
“Answer it,” he commanded, which I did.
Kelly Slater remained silent when he heard my voice, an early portent of the blood feud that would simmer for the following six years.
After a howl of laughter and some chortling Sal hung up.
Despite an expanded adiposity, he gobbled protein bar after protein bar, informing me of the health-giving properties of the foil-wrapped chocolate chip treats. Privately, I questioned the wisdom of these calorie-dense treats and made a mental note to avoid once they arrived in Australia.
Stories flowed like a river of honey, however, and I left, like everyone who spun in his orbit that day, a fan for life.
I didn’t heard from Sal again and only knew in passing that he’d transitioned to Selema.
In January this year, Chas wrote that Selema and Lupita Nyong’o, who is forty, had not only made public their declaration of love but had spent four million dollars on a a sprawling $4 million Los Angeles home together.
Nine months later, the relationship was in ruins, with Lupita Nyong’o publishing an unflattering picture of their affair on Instagram.
“At this moment, it is necessary for me to share a personal truth and publicly dissociate myself from someone I can no longer trust,” writes Lupita Nyong’o, who won an Oscar for her performance in 12 Years a Slave. “I find myself in a season of heartbreak because of a love suddenly and devastatingly extinguished by deception… I am reminded that the magnitude of the pain I am feeling is equal to the measure of my capacity for love. And so, I am choosing to face the pain, cultivating the courage to meet my life exactly as it is, and trusting that this too shall pass.”
Lupita Nyong’o subsequently erased all mention of Sal Masekela from her Instagram, ghosted as they say, following her suddenly high profile affair with Dawson’s Creek star Joshua Jackson.
Worse, for Sal Masekela, however, after TMZ, the BeachGrit of important celebrity news, called surfing’s beloved broadcaster and star a nobody, while discussing Lupita Nyong’o annihilation of any mention of Sal on socials as she pivoted to the, let’s be frank, wildly inferior Josh Jackson.
Thoughts, prayers, so on.
