On December 7th, 2001 — 10 years ago to the day — Joel Taylor, Unite Clothing Company founder, owner, and Managing Director, slammed the reef at Pipeline; the resulting injury left him paralysed from the waist down with a spinal cord injury. To commemorate the 10 year anniversary of his accident, we convinced Joel to release his last Sponsor Me Tape from back in early 2001. “I was apprehensive at first, then I figured it might be cool for people to be able to put a face to the name behind Unite,” Joel admitted. “I was a bit worried how it would be received, only a handful of my friends — and a couple of potential sponsors back in the day — had ever seen it.” In a time before High Definition cameras and readily available editing software, Joel — armed with his do-it-yourself attitude — pieced together his Sponsor Me Tape the old fashioned way. “The footage was shot on first generation digital camcorders; I edited it at a friends house with two VCR’s connected together,” he laughed. “The clip is less than two minutes long, but I remember it taking forever to get it to look how I wanted. It was such a nightmare.” He continued, “Then in 2003 I remastered it exactly as it was on VHS — same cut, same music, same shitty quality — so that I had a copy on my computer for memories sake. I’m glad that I did ’cause who the hell has a VCR these days? If I hadn’t, I probably would have lost the footage forever.” The clip features mostly unseen footage of Joel shot over six …