Church bells tolled, and Roger Leahy, the pipe master for the Sanitation Department Emerald Society Pipe and Drum Band, led his group in a funeral dirge.
The Pipe Masters is the last stop on the world professional surfing tour.
In fact, surfing would fit nicely in the Olympics – if it were presented as this week's Pipe Masters is.
The Australian Taj Burrow defeated Kelly Slater of Florida to win the Pipe Masters at the Banzai Pipeline in Hawaii.
Despite his emotions, a focused Fanning delivered a stunning performance in his round-three Pipe Masters heat against local wildcard Jamie O'Brien, scoring 8.47 on his first wave.
Mick Fanning has made the semi-finals of the Pipe Masters competition in Hawaii, defeating Kelly Slater just a day after learning of his eldest brother's death.
In the end, Slater took a seventh Pipe Masters win, but it wasn't enough to stop Fanning, who remains winless at Pipe, but did enough to clinch the crown.
With Punk recently departing the WWE "forever", this retelling of the legendary rivalry between the master of the pipe-bomb and Super-Cena should hopefully be the bittersweet send off the straight edge superstar deserves.
Fanning won his third- and fourth-round heats at the season-ending Pipe Masters competition on Thursday morning (AEDT) just hours after being told of the death of his brother Peter, 43, on the Gold Coast.
Fanning said his decision to take some time out was in part influenced by those traumatic events at J-Bay, but also by the death of his brother Peter when Fanning was in competition at Hawaii's Pipe Masters in December.
Carroll won the Pipe Masters in a haze of emotion after learning of his sister Josephine's death back in Australia the night before, explaining in his biography "I've never experienced anything like it….the trivial things completely dropped away.
