Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2016 i Surfing World Magazine

It’s been a strange road the past couple of years. In my World Title years I was really agro and had a win-at-all-costs mentality. I wanted to kill my opponents and drink their blood. I think you could see that in my surfing. I still hate losing but my attitude has changed. For the first time in quite a while I feel completely in the groove with my surfing. I’m focusing on going as fast as I can and laying it down in the steepest parts of the wave. Looking back I can see I’d fallen out of love with surfing. Now I’m out there every day, surfing in shit and loving it. I’m blessed to have fallen back in love with surfing. – Andy Irons, Bali, June, 2010 Five…

The first interview was done on the evening of August 27, 2011, in Tahiti, over beers. It was a crazy night after an even crazier day. We were perched on plastic chairs in the middle of a yard-party on the point at Teahupoo, buzzed by mosquitoes and boozed partygoers, the whole joint positively alive after the waves that had been surfed earlier that day on the fabled Code Red swell. It was almost a year since Bruce had lost his brother, and it seemed like he was on a mission. Earlier that day he’d taken one of the biggest waves ever ridden at Teahupoo. Earlier that month he’d taken one of the biggest waves ever ridden at Cloudbreak. Both times he’d gone within a whisker of joining his brother in…

It would have been so much more amazing to have him there when I won the World Title. I was feeling it because I was staying in his old room and channelling so much of his spirit through that. Over the years, being in Hawaii was about being there with him. But I don’t know… I had a feeling that he was there with me, watching over me that day. I know his spirit was there. Monica lit a little candle and said a prayer to him at the start of the day, but it went out with just a few minutes left in Kelly’s semi. I freaked out, but figured that was Andy’s way of saying, “You got this.” Kelly didn’t get another wave and, yeah… I won. I…

In 2005, Red Bull had a specialty surf event in Fiji called the Red Bull Five Times. I was on it with Andy and Bruce, Mick Fanning, Ben Dunn, Jamie O’Brien, Ian Walsh, Alex Gray and Keala Kennelly, just a really good crew on this huge yacht floating around in the South Pacific. We were sailing around some outer islands in the southern Lau Group and had some fun waves, one pretty good day, but nothing epic. The yacht was pretty amazing – fully-crewed luxury, 177 feet long with a stocked bar, great food, a massive dining room, wave runners, and we each had our own cabins, so it was a pretty cruisy time on the boat. We’d surf during the day, filming for the event and at night we’d…

It was Super Bowl Sunday. I was over there camping up in the hills in Kauai for a Billabong winter shoot and it was freezing. Freezing. It was so cold, it was like winter in Canada. We had these log cabins, the campfire, the full deal. Sleeping in big jackets. It was some of the most beautiful countryside I’ve ever seen. Shano bought his bow and arrow and we went pig hunting. We were eating whatever we could. It was me, Andy, Shano and a couple of other crew. There were chickens everywhere and I thought if I shot a chicken with the bow and arrow I’d pluck and cook it – the mighty hunter. So I got his bow and arrow, this huge hunting bow Shano kills pigs with,…

In my whole life I think Andy called me by my real name about ten times. Most of the time he and Bruce called me Stinky. I got the nickname when I was super young and I was staying with Andy and Bruce in California. They were a bit older than me and I was just the full grom to them. I remember this one time I was on a plane and Bruce was laying into me, punching me in the arm, making me cry, and Andy stood up for me. It’s such a small moment but it meant a lot to me. Anyway Andy had a heat early one morning and I wanted to go and watch it but all the guys in the house were telling me to…

I’ve been asked for many opinions and interviews about Andy Irons and the situations and decisions that lead to his early departure from our world. It’s not something I take lightly. I have my own opinions about not only Andy’s choices and how he ultimately got to the place he did, but also about the way these things are handled from all sides of the story. But what is right? And whose opinions actually matter other than those of his family and closest friends about who they knew and how they feel inside? What is it that each of us hopes to take away from the Andy Irons story? And what is it that we want to give to the story of his life? I dealt, in a strange way,…

I can remember first meeting him. At the time he didn’t show his full potential as a future three-time World Champion. He was a bit of a loose cannon, to be honest. A great surfer, without a doubt, but a little too raw as a kid. Once he started travelling he learned the intensity that you need to keep up that level of performance all that time. You’ve done your best to get there: now you need to deliver it all the time. It didn’t take Andy long to figure that out – he turned it around pretty quick. By the end of his MCD days he was showing the real potential. He always looked up to Occy, and what Occy had done for Billabong and he felt blessed to…

The final day of the 2003 Sunset Cup was maybe the best Sunset I have ever surfed. It was eight-to-ten feet and pretty much perfect, northwest swell, light trade winds with some huge barrels on the inside bowl. I arrived early in the morning, pulled up in the car park and the first thing I see is Andy standing tall in a crazy barrel. I was freaking out over how good it was but I didn’t go for a free surf. It was hard not to paddle out, but we were only up to round three and I knew if I was to make the final that day I’d have to surf four times, so I wanted to keep my energy levels up. The World Cup was a ’CT back…

Andy’s intensity in the water was pretty amazing. I experienced it very early at the World Juniors at Haleiwa in 1997. I got in as an alternate and we both made the final and I ended up winning it. As you can imagine, Andy wasn’t happy about this. He wanted to fight me in the car park afterwards. That was the first time I encountered just how competitive he was. He had that ferocious need to win. You had to be so on your game when surfing against Andy. One year in Tahiti we had a first round heat and it was solid, about eight feet. I thought I was sitting pretty deep, in the right spot, but then this set comes and Andy just paddles right around the back…

Andy and I became friends when we were both sponsored by More Core Division in the mid to late 90s. MCD was a great company and along with Peterson Rosa from Brazil we were the top riders, so they’d fly us down to hang out with Peterson in South America for contests and Carnivale and stuff like that. We got on really well because had the same mentality. He was pretty loose and ran with a pretty hard crew and that was pretty much the same story as mine. By 1998 Andy and I were really good mates and we both ended up in Tahiti for the Gotcha Tahiti Pro. Nobody really knew what Chopes was in those days. Andy had won the contest the year before but in 98…

On behalf of the entire SurfAid team and the communities that we work alongside, we would like to thank Billabong, their Board, staff and customers for their support of SurfAid. Because of your help, more families will sleep under treated mosquito nets, more children will be immunized, more mothers will breastfeed their babies, and more people will have access to clean water. In remote villages in Indonesia, where we all love to surf, you have saved lives. Thank you!…

You probably remember exactly where you were when you heard. I was in Borinquen, Puerto Rico, sitting by the hotel pool, chugging a Modelo when I got the text telling me Andy Irons had just died. I put the beer down slowly and drew a deep breath, a tornado of emotions, thoughts and questions roaring through my head. Hell, I thought he was still in Puerto Rico, staying just up the road. Beyond the suddenness, the twin notions of Andy and death just didn’t reconcile. Andy didn’t just die. While Andy had lived like a rock star, surfed like a rock star, and had even riffed about the “rock star ending” in interviews, few imagined it would actually end this way, the most incandescent surfer of his generation found dead…

I first met Andy when we were pretty young and I was staying with him and Jamie O’Brien at Andrew Murphy’s house on the Northern Beaches. We were all sponsored by Quiksilver and in the Pro Junior at Narrabeen and Andrew was the Quiksilver team manager so we were staying at Andrew’s house. I remember how intense Andy was off the bat. He was absolutely drilling Jamie. Jamie was younger and it was the most intense grommet abuse I’ve ever seen. I was like, “Whoa, this is heavy; thank god I’m not Jamie O’Brien.” He just used to hammer him. It was kind of funny at the time, but I thought, “Wow, this guy is pretty serious.” And then he was pretty dominant in the water as well. We’re both…

My first experience of Andy was before I even knew him, I think it was the ISA games at Huntington in 96 or 97. We just tried to vibe each other out, and didn’t even talk the whole time. Obviously we’d heard of Andy and knew how good he was, but as a cocky young Aussie going to the ISA games, you’ve got your barrier up, focussed on yourself – much like Andy was at the time with us. We were pretty stubborn with each other; it was like throwing vibes and self-confidence. For my generation of surfers, Andy was the one to beat, always, him and Taj probably. So I was kind of the underdog but I liked playing the game a little bit. It was full stare-offs. It…

The whole time Andy was on tour, regardless of results or what he felt, he was never one of those guys to come up and say something and complain about results. Well, once. The only time he ever did was at J-Bay in 2005, a final with Kelly where the question was about Kelly’s finishing turn on his last wave that got him the score he needed. I guess it was one that was really debatable, even with the judges. We replayed it and a few of us disagreed strongly on whether he made his last turn as he fell in the foam and even whether he should have gone for the last turn. Andy was coming up the pathway and semi watched the wave, but he didn’t get to…

I have a thousand memories of time spent with Andy ranging from terrifying to hilarious, but my favorite would probably rank as many of his friends’ favorite. I was booked on a trip with the Volcom team to Tavarua, it was already a dream trip with some of my favorite surfers and Volcom family taking over the entire island, and at the last minute a few spots opened up and Andy was invited, he brought Lyndie, his long time girlfriend and obviously the love of his life. At the time, my love life was crumbling; I was separated from my wife and spiralling out of control living a productive, but self-destructive lifestyle. I was going on this trip as an escape from reality, a perfect excuse for a bender, oh,…

Surfing doesn’t spawn great rivalries, not in the way, say, boxing does. The goal of surfing isn’t to loosen the other guy’s teeth and turn his porch lights out. With surfing the real opponent is the ocean. You beat the ocean; you beat the other guy anyway. Surfing mightn’t spawn great rivalries, but for three years it had Andy Irons and Kelly Slater, which was something far deeper, psychologically layered, and altogether more combustible. Early in the new millennium, Andy and Kelly, the two greatest surfers of the modern era, went toe-to-toe from Tahiti to Pipeline, punching each other in the face one minute then professing their love for each other the next. Their rivalry was white hot, pathological, and it took the sport of surfing somewhere it had never…