Dane Reynolds Reluctantly Gives Up Paper Run To Concentrate On Surfing Career

By Nick Carroll

California: In a heart-wrenching statement to friends, family and the global surf media, Dane Reynolds has announced he will be giving up his twice weekly paper run.

The run, which Reynolds first took on at the age of nine, covers a number of streets near his childhood home, and involves riding around with a basket of local free newspapers and tossing them into the front yards of various residents.

Giving up hand delivery of the Ventura Guardian will allow Reynolds to focus all his attention on his pro surfing career, which he said had suffered in prior seasons from broken concentration. “I was always stressing … I’d be sitting in the lineup at Teahupo’o or Hossegor, and thinking about getting back home in time for next Tuesday’s delivery.”

The $25 per month paycheque funded the purchase of his first very own surfboard. Confessed Reynolds: “At first I was worried I wouldn’t be able to find the money for my next quiver, but then I recalled I was being paid a million dollars a year by various sponsors and got my surfboards free from the world’s highest profile board designer.”

Nonetheless, admitted Reynolds, the decision to abandon the paper run has caused him considerable angst. “I’ve got nothing to fall back on now,” he told reporters, brushing away tears. “Apart from a paper run, and colossal stardom in the undeniably hip global surf culture, what else am I qualified for? I feel as if my youth is slipping away.”

Reynolds also plans to sell his specially modified bike, which allowed him to carry up to 100 newspapers at a time. But, he said, “I won’t just sell it to anyone. That bike meant the world to me.”

Local grandmother Lupe Gonzales said the whole neighbourhood would miss Reynolds. “We always knew when the paper had arrived by his raucous bellowing. ‘Read all about it!’ Dane really knew how to wake people up.”

She said the neighbourhood was planning a party to celebrate Reynolds’s long paperboy career, but she expected only a few people to show up, since the party would be on a Sunday morning when all decent Americans went to church.

New area paper boy, Bobby Martinez, says he is hoping to follow in Reynolds’s footsteps. “Boy, would I love it if a major surf corporation threw that kind of money at me!” said Martinez. “Then I wouldn’t have to win ultra prestigious ASP world tour events just to keep myself in airfares.”