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

After three years of voluntary semi-retirement, Kelly Slater found that life outside the pro tour could be a little rough. His band recorded a CD with T-Bone Burnett as producer, but the album bombed. Pamela Andersen dumped him for ex-husband Tommy Lee, then came back for Round Two, and dumped him again for a Calvin Klein underwear model—with Slater himself getting the news, along with everybody else, from the tabloids. By the end of 2001, surfing better than ever, he was ready to get back on tour.

Sunny Garcia wasn’t going to much get in the way of Slater’s comeback bid. Neither was Mark Occhilupo or any of the Clinton-era pros Slater had already dispatched, including all his New School cohorts. No, the real challengers now were all younger. Slater was 30 at the beginning of the 2002 season, and in the three years he’d been gone, the next generation had arrived. Each of the top newcomers was fast and versatile, able to crease a wave with a power turn or flare up into any one of a dozen or more twisting aerial variations. They were also eight, ten, even 12 years younger than Slater and determined to prove that his time had come and gone.

Australia, as ever, was producing world championship contenders in bulk. Mick Fanning and Joel Parkinson of Queensland grew up in the blue see-through barrels of Kirra and had been drafting off each other’s talent for over a decade. Both arrived on the pro scene just after Taj Burrow, a dazzling welterweight from Yallingup, Western Australia, who’d finished second to Mark Occhilupo in the 1999 world-title chase.

Andy and Bruce Irons of Kauai were the teen wonders from Hawaii. Bruce, the younger one, was the smoothest and most naturally gifted of the new pros, but his interest in competition came and went. He finished runner-up in the 1998 Pipeline Masters, right out of high school, and won the event three years later, but wouldn’t qualify for the WCT tour until 2004. Andy didn’t have Bruce’s faultless style, but he threaded moves together with more drive and imagination than any surfer of his era.

The Irons' sibling relationship was as volatile as it was close. Even into adulthood, they sniped at each other in print and got into backyard wrestling matches that blew up into fist fights. One brawl took place during the North Shore contest season, and Bruce paddled out for his Pipeline Masters heat with a swollen black eye. Andy also had a tendency for self-destruction. He made his WCT debut in 1998 while still a teenager, then drank and drugged his way into a two-year rut and briefly dropped back to the minor leagues. Refocused and mostly sober by 2001, he again qualified for the WCT, grateful for a second chance.

The California pros, meanwhile, were barely in the game. Easy access to all that Orange County surf industry wealth, the theory went, made the West Coasters lazy, and their world tour results seemed to bear this out. It was a different story in Florida: Cory and Shea Lopez of Indian Rocks both made the Top 16, with Cory going all the way to number three. CJ and Damien Hobgood of Satellite Beach did even better, and CJ won it all in 2001—although the season that year was shortened to just five events after 9/11. Brazil didn’t yet have any durable replacements for Flavio Padaratz and Fabio Gouveia, but a small-wave dervish from Rio named Victor Ribas hit number three in 1999, and Sao Paulo’s Adriano de Souza won the world junior title in 2004. (In years to come, the WCT roster would become more cosmopolitan, with newcomers from France, Tahiti, Portugal, and Spain. Best of the lot was a grim powerhouse regularfooter from Durban named Jordy Smith—the hottest thing out of South African since Shaun Tomson.)

To nobody’s surprise, Andy Irons was the one who stepped up to Slater in 2002. In fact, Irons owned the season beginning to end and took his first world title in a walk; Slater failed to win an event and finished the year ranked ninth. In 2003, it was a different story. If anything, Irons was even sharper, but Slater was now fully back into the rhythm of full-time competition, and thrilled to at last have a rival worthy of the name. "Slater is responsible for more wave-riding miracles than anyone in the sport’s history," SURFER Magazine later wrote, making a stylistic comparison of the two, "but now and then you still catch glimpses in his surfing of the nut-brown Floridian preteen from years ago, wiggling and pumping his way across a knee-high Cocoa Beach dribbler. Andy Irons? He was born in that cool gunslinger crouch, with a massive cloud of spit blowing past his head and shoulders."

Heading into 2003 Pipeline Masters, the last event of the year, Slater and Irons each had four wins and were virtually tied for the ratings' lead. Advancing from opposite sides of the heat draw, both made the four-man final. Here was the world tour showdown fans had been waiting on for years. Whoever came out ahead would win the title.

Slater owned these kinds of do-or-die situations. Not this time. In crumbly D-grade rights just up the beach from Pipeline, it was Irons who turned on at the crucial moments, while Slater never really got started. Irons won the event and the title, while Slater finished 4th in the final and runner-up in the ratings.

Not only had Irons won a second world title, he'd finally shut the book on the Slater era. That's how it looked, anyway. Irons was still just 25, after all. Slater was nearly 32. Just to make sure, Irons won a third title in 2004, while Slater failed to win a single event. 

 magazine at that point ran a cover story titled “Generation Now,” illustrated with a portrait of Irons and seven other top pros—with Slater conspicuously missing.

At that point, Slater somehow found a new gear. He utterly dominated 2005, winning won four of six contests during the middle of the season, and pulling down a seventh world championship title before the tour even got to Hawaii. Slater scared off any challengers in 2006 by winning the first two events of the year, and added world title number eight. Then things got bizarre. After a pause—Mick Fanning darted in for the 2007 championship—Slater, in 2008, at age 36, became virtually unbeatable, winning fully 90 percent of his heats, and six of 11 contests, including the Pipeline Masters. Fanning again took it all in 2009 (and won a third and final title in 2014), but Slater picked up #10 in 2010 and #11 in 2011, and was utterly dominate both years. In the last five events of '11, he finished 3rd, 1st, 2nd, 1st, 1st, 3rd. For good measure, he was runner-up to the world championship in '12 and '13, and after a slow-healing foot injury finally mended, was still a threat at certain events into . . . right this moment (2019).

Irons stayed in the hunt for a while during Slater's competitive rebirth, finishing runner-up in 2005 and 2006. By the time Slater won his ninth championship, however, the Hawaiian was off the tour, back on drugs, and struggling with an as-yet-undiagnosed bipolar disorder. He rehabbed and returned to compete full-time in 2010, and even won a contest, but didn't have the old fire, and was in fact using again.

At an event in Puerto Rico, Irons pulled out of the contest early and began to make his way back to Hawaii. He died in a Dallas hotel room on November 2, during a layover; cocaine and methamphetamine were found in his system. Four days later, in Puerto Rico, Slater won his 10th world title.

Two things were now clear. First, in terms of individual athletic achievement, Slater had pretty much detached himself from his own sport. Comparing him to Mick Fanning, or Andy Irons, or Mark Richards was close to pointless. He’d moved up to some unquantifiable realm of super-champions, along with people like Tiger Woods, Michael Phelps, and Bill Russell.

The next point was less dramatic: surfing’s high-performance standard was advancing at a much slower rate than it ever had. Beginning in the late 1940s, the sport’s generational changes had always been obvious, sometimes even abrupt, and that continued up until the early '90s, when Slater and his teenaged New School friends launched themselves into the vanguard. Progress after that came at a smoother, more incremental pace. (Tow surfing was in a separate category, and didn’t count.) Sure, the aerials would keep getting higher and more intricate, and the barrels would get longer and deeper. But there were no sudden breakthroughs—nothing like Shaun Tomson’s 

 tube-weaving, or the 1956 American lifeguard team exploding Australia’s whole concept of surfing with an impromptu Malibu demonstration in the Sydney shorebreak.

Nobody got to reinvent high-performance surfing more than once, Kelly Slater included. His later world titles were all spectacular for one reason or another. Simply keeping up, and keeping ahead, at his age was in itself a singular achievement. But technically, what Slater did in his 30s and 40s was simply an improved version of what he’d done at age 20, to win his first title.

Irons won a third title in 2004, while Slater failed to win a single event. 

 magazine at that point ran a cover story titled “Generation Now,” illustrated with a portrait of Irons and seven other top pros—with Slater conspicuously missing. It was exactly what Kelly needed.

Chapter: 8

The Ride of Your Life

Andy Irons' Poetic Fury

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