You put your phone down for one minute these days and the world just passes you by.

So it was when I re-acquainted myself with the rabbit den that is Instagram only to find Brock Little has cancer. A scroll through the feed revealed the man who once called Kenny Bradshaw off the wave of a lifetime is now a battling a life-threatening illness.

“I have cancer. It sucks, but I taking chemo,” he states on the post, accompanied by a picture of himself, looking all too similar to many others dealing with the insidious disease.

“You do what you can. Can’t believe the person in that picture is me. I look in the mirror and I feel like it’s not me.”

Tracks last spoke to the man himself as the sparks flew around the decision over whether to permit Bruce Irons to surf in the contest named in honour of his brother.

“For Christ’s sake,” Little told Tracks at the time.

“The competition is named in his brother’s honour. It’d be like Clyde not being invited to The Eddie.”

The conversation veered somewhat after that, towards the ongoing career of Ross Clarke-Jones.

“The only guy I really looked up to when it came to big waves,” Little said of the man who this year notched up his 30th straight winter on The Rock.

“If I saw him out on a big day, I knew it was game on.”

And on and on it went, the glory days, the big waves, the crowds in Hawaii and then a brief pause.

“I could if I wanted,” he said, perhaps leaving open a segue I failed to detect.

“But I’m good, you know, I’ve got nothing to prove.”

All with that distinctly clipped Hawaiian twang but with no hint of what may have been simmering away.