Longboarding was ridiculous in big, hollow surf. It could be done, but it wasn’t pretty. Butch Van Artsdalen rode Pipeline the way you’d imagine Buddy Rich would play drums with a pair of small tree branches.
The shortboard changed that. Tuberiding—like noseriding a few years earlier—became the “sport within the sport,” and Pipeline went from being a “Roman gladiator pit” (as Bruce Brown put it in Endless Summer) to something closer to the Holy See. Riding inside the tube would always remain ...
