Is Surfing Hip?

Lisa Andersen Surfs Better Than You

Killer Cute

Kelly Slater is Just Warming Up

Rebel for Hire

I Believe I Can Fly

A Monster in Half Moon Bay

Mark Foo's Last Ride

Open Throttle

Laird Means Lord

Tahitian Scream

A Webcam for Every Wave

Last Call for Print Media

Taylor Steele Likes it Rough

Searching for the Perfect Phrase

Hollywood Tries Again

Thirty is the New Twenty

Andy Irons' Poetic Fury

The Beast and Beyond

A Dance with the Past

Foam is Dead, Long Live Foam

Nature Gets a Makeover

Surf in a Box

The End of History

The Ride of Your Life

Aerial surfing—any move performed in the airspace just above the wave—was introduced in the late 1970s as a low-altitude imitation of what was being done by skateboarders in empty pools and halfpipes. Much of the pioneering work was done by Kevin Reed and Davey Smith of California, Matt Kechele of Florida, Martin Potter of South Africa and aging Hawaiian pro Larry Bertlemann. At first, there wasn’t a whole lot of air involved. In one early aerial photo, Smith puts about six inches between his board and the wave crest. Nobody could pull the move off with any consistency either. Ninety-nine aerial wipeouts might pay off with a single awkwardly stuck landing. But the thrill of levitating above the wave, weightless, even if for just a moment at a time, was enough to point the sport in a new direction.

Potter, the teenage world-tour pro sensation, was the first to recognize that the new moves could be served up with a new attitude. Not only did Potter fly higher and further than any other first-generation aerialist, he talked up the move as a progressive alternative to most of the riding being done at the pro level. In 1983, at age 17, he had the brass to call out fellow world-tour newcomer Tom Curren for having “a conservative approach,” then for good measure said the same about four-time world champ Mark Richards. Potter’s own method was based on “going for big moves and taking risks. I just can’t approach a wave conservatively. It’s just not in me. If I don’t go out and pull off at least one aerial, I’m not happy.”

While Potter was everybody’s pick as the world’s most spontaneous, exciting surfer, the surfing aerial was slow to develop. No suprise there, it was the most difficult move to ever come down the track. Skaters and snowboarders both had the luxury of a stable practice field, and could fine-tune the latest aerial move like a tennis player grooving a groundstroke against a wall. In surfing, each wave is unique, and thus each aerial move felt at least slightly different from the last. At lift-off, the surfer had to “lead” his board ahead of the wave, like a rifleman leading a skeet, so that the two moving objects—board and wave—would reconnect at the exact right moment, in the right place. The airborne surfboard, also, was an especially clumsy piece of equipment. It wasn’t strapped to your feet, like a snowboard. It could be manipulated a little bit, by grabbing a rail with one or both hands, but not like a skateboard. The only plus: aerial-friendly waves—small, broken-up beachbreak surf, with a light onshore breeze—were easy to find.

Meanwhile, practicing your aerial attack often meant 

 working on the standard off-the-top moves. Tom Curren, Tom Carroll, Mark Occhilupo, and just about every other headlining 1980s pro beside Potter didn’t much focus on aerials, working instead on the more standard moves—bottom turn, top turn, cutback, tuberide—which in turn left the aerial as a kind of sideshow attraction. The divide between aerial surfing and competition surfing was made clear in 1989, when Martin Potter at last won an ASP championship by adopting the “conservative approach” he’d once scorned. “I only rode at 75 percent that year,” Potter later said, sounding almost regretful.

Potter spent part of the summer of 1985 at a quiet south Orange County beach town called San Clemente. He was in full-throttle aerial mode then, ready to vault off any likely-looking curl that came his way. Wipeouts didn’t matter. Air time did. Matt Archbold and Christian Fletcher, two local schoolboy groms, age 17 and 15 respectively, watched the South African's every move. In the coming years, as Potter turned the volume down in order to pick up a long-deferred world championship, Archbold and Fletcher took the aerial and expanded it into a loud and slightly delinquent surfing subspecies—the new “sport within the sport,” just as noseriding had been years earlier.

Of the two, Archbold had the greater gift. He didn’t like to compete, steered away from big waves, and was a fledging substance abuser in the bargain, but he had the same natural genius for surfing as Tom Curren and Wayne Lynch. His line, although radical, was smooth as calligraphy. His best aerials were long, beautiful, half-dome arcs. Archbold launched often and aggressively—every few weeks he’d snap a board in two just by landing a bit too far on the flat water ahead of the wave—but he was never an aerial-only fanatic. Good form was too important to him, and air time was second to his desire for a balanced, integrated ride.

Christian Fletcher was another story. Nobody in surfing was as pedigreed. Christian was the son of Herbie Fletcher, a 1966 World Championships semifinalist who led the longboard revival; the grandson of Walter Hoffman, California’s original hardcore big-wave rider; a nephew to two-time world champion Joyce Hoffman; and brother to future big-wave star Nathan Fletcher. In 1983, Christian was a cheerful 13-year-old master of both the longboard and shortboard. He also did a lot of skateboarding, and was fascinated by that sport’s expanding catalogue of aerial tricks, as well as its punk-influenced skate-and-destroy aesthetic.

Fletcher dropped out of high school as a freshman and began to work on transferring his skateboard moves to surfing. By the end of the 1980s he’d become not just another hot surfer who did aerials—next in line after Davey Smith and Martin Potter—but the original full-blown surfing aerialist.

He was a sensation. Magazine photos showed Fletcher levitating four, six, even eight feet above the crest, feet spread wide across his board, arms extended, mouth agape, eyes slightly bugged. Moreover, his strike rate was improving steadily. 

 put Fletcher on the cover twice in the same year. Borrowing terms already invented by skaters, he pumped up the surfing lexicon. “Aerial” and “air” were fine as catch-all terms, but kids in the know were soon deep into the differentia—mostly having to do with hand placement on the board—between slob and boneless airs, between a stalefish, an indy, a mute. The list grew by the month.

Fletcher also turned the aerialist into another type of surfing outlaw. In 1986, he was still a quiet Leif Garrett-like pretty boy. Four years later he was a tattooed and pierced and mo-hawked, with quiver of boards covered in pentagrams, skulls, and daggers—although never in such a way as to obscure his sponsor logos. He obligingly said things that the surf media presented as outrageous. “Fuck the world before it fucks you” was an early, typical effort.

In 1990, Fletcher reaped a PR bonanza after a group of world-tour pros cosigned a letter of grievance, sent to both 

, in protest of the amount of media attention Fletcher had been getting. “False images are being created out of second-rate surfers at the expense of high-ranked professionals . . . It’s quite unfair to dedicate yourself to the sport, train hard and travel around the world, only to pick up a magazine and see a guy [like Fletcher] on the cover.” The letter encouraged editors to cover the sport more like tennis magazines, saying that readers had to be taught to “identify with the champions.”

You didn’t have to be into aerials, or pentagrams, to side with Fletcher on this one. You just had to be put off, as thousands of magazine readers were, by officious, self-important world-tour pros.

As the celebrated young master of air and outrage, Fletcher went all the way to number seven on the 1990 

 Reader’s Poll—unheard of during a time when poll slots were all but reserved for top-ranking world-tour pros.

 legend Shaun Tomson called aerials “the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on modern surfing,” he had a point—nobody had really figured out yet how to consistently land the damn things. With few exceptions, every dramatic image of a surfer taking flight was a wipeout in the making. Fletcher didn’t yet land the really big ones. Archbold didn’t. Potter didn’t. Even at low elevation—three feet or less—the success rate was no better than 50 percent. For good measure, 

pointed out that while surfers labored over their tiddlywinking version of the aerial, skateboarders had long since hit the ten-foot mark, and snowboarders were going double that height.

Even the completed aerial was open to criticism. Surfers as a rule approached the move in a wary crouch, and landings generally inspired a lot of uncontrolled arm movement. A “chop-hop” version of the aerial, done on flat-faced waves, similar to a skateboarding trick called an “ollie,” was maybe the lamest bit of surf performance ever invented. By 1990, the aerial had been around for more than a decade—long enough, in the view of people like Shaun Tomson, for the move to be called a failed experiment and thrown onto the scrap heap of surf tricks, next to the cheater five, the quasimoto, and the flying kickout.

Kelly Slater ended the argument. He quickly and almost singlehandedly validated the aerial, beginning with a convincing win in the 1990 Body Glove Surf Bout, held in beautiful overhead waves at Trestles. Making his California pro debut, Slater—a protégé of original East Coast aerialist Matt Kechele—loosed off an aerial every third or fourth wave. He blew a few, and struggled through a few more. But just as often he feathered the move into place so that it was organic to the ride and not a tacked-on addition.

From the early 1990s onward, thanks to Slater, the aerial became a near-mandatory skill for the pro surfer, and most world-tour heavies learned to land the entire alphabet-soup’s worth of air moves. Credit the VCR for this. The aerial clips that appeared in almost every surf video from the late '80s forward were used as tutorials; moves that had taken Fletcher, Archbold, and Slater months to work out could now be landed—at least in fledgling form—in a matter of weeks, even days. Aerials were still a low-percentage move and weren't yet pulled out too often in competition. But during free surfs, particularly in broken-up shorebreak waves, the top pros gladly, endlessly took to the air.

While Slater and the rest of the new generation pros of the early '90s incorporated aerials into their larger repertoires, two or three dozen surfers from California, Australia, and Hawaii—plenty of them modeling themselves to one degree or another after Christian Fletcher—found a niche as aerial specialists. A big part of the attraction was doing R&D in an area of performance surfing that was still relatively unexplored. Inversions, rotations, flips, legs-extended “Superman” moves; if it was being done in a half-pipe, it was soon exported to the lineup.

Post-Fletcher aerialists were commercially motivated, too. The magazines couldn’t get enough aerial photos—by the mid-'90s, more aerial shots were being published than any other surfing maneuver. This in turn helped create a new stratum of pro who earned money mostly through “photo incentive” contracts with their sponsors. A second revenue stream opened in 1996, when 

 launched the “Airshow” competition series, with entrants judged solely on aerials. Jason “Ratboy” Collins, Joe Crimo, Josh Sleigh, Josh Kerr, Aaron “Gorkin” Cormican, Eric McHenry, and Fletcher himself, were among the first top-ranked aerial event surfers.

Despite the contractual agreements, the arranged photo shoots, and the prize-money checks, everyone involved did their best to ensure that aerial surfing still looked underground and rebellious. Boards were graffitied, world-tour pros were still endlessly trash-talked for their conservative surfing.

It was an odd, high-revving little world the aerialists created for themselves. By specializing, they developed all manner of intricate, near-impossible moves, each of which became less impossible over time. But the narrow focus also stunted their development. Aerialists liked to claim they were riding on a more advanced plane than the world-tour pros, which was absurd, and had been since the Fletcher era. They’d just locked into a very specific, very marketable, usually very short career path.

At the same time, Shaun Tomson was proven wrong. Aerials were not a hoax. In the years to come, the moves just got bigger and cleaner and more spectacular. And, perhaps most importantly, better integrated to the rest of surfing. The age of the aerial specialist didn't last long. By 2005, a friendly 20-year-old regularfooter from Ventura County named Dane Reynolds was spending more time hovering above the lip than any surfer in the world—and was also doing some of the deepest and most critical turns and cutbacks. Aerials didn't define Reynolds any more than the monster jam defined LeBron James.

A few years earlier Christian Fletcher had been a quiet Leif Garrett-like pretty boy. Now he was tattooed, pierced, and mohawked, with a quiver of boards covered in pentagrams, skulls, and daggers—although never in such a way as to obscure his sponsor logos.

Chapter: 8

The Ride of Your Life

I Believe I Can Fly

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