Watch: Kelly Slater’s outrageous switch-hitting shaper!

Meet a man who never rides backside…

It is a winter’s day in Lemoore, California. The day after Kelly Slater’s forty-seventh birthday, if you want specifics, which makes it February 12, 2019.

It’s cold. The air and the water is 48 (nine degrees celsius).

There is quite the pack at Surf Ranch, including Momentum-era vets Kalani Robb and the Weatherley brothers Jason and Benji, commentator and steroidal-tit owner Strider Wasilewski, the photographer Todd Glaser (whose wife will ride a “hot left” from launch to evacuation), a crew filming for Outside magazine and Dan Mann, the head shaper for Slater Designs.

Mann, who is forty-six years old (“Nine months younger than Kelly,” he says), thrills the crowd when he rides a right as a regular footer and, on the return leg, takes it as a goofy.

“The frontside warrior,” says Kelly.

As it transpires, Mann doesn’t know how to ride a wave backside. He became a switch-hitter when he was a kid learning to surf in Hawaii. His pal was a goofyfooter; his dad was regular.

He copied ’em both.

“That was the late seventies, early eighties when Jeff Hakman and co were doing that thing. It was cool. One of the tricks,” says Dan. “And, then, where I live now in south San Diego, the left barrels kinda bend so it’s easier to pull in frontside. When I hit twenty-five I think I realised I’d actually been a regular-footer the whole time. Ever since then I lost my goofyfoot comfort but I can’t go backside. I’m more comfortable frontside both ways.”

Does he identify as a regular-footer now?

“Yeah, that’s what I identify as and that’s what got Kelly all mad at me. He said, ‘You’re missing half the excitement of what it’s like to go backhand!’ I didn’t know what to say. Now I’m old and you can’t teach an old dog a new trick.”

I ask, how many waves have you caught backside in your life?

“Probably a dozen, if that. I would never even think to go backside, especially on a barrel. The only reason I would go backside would be to cutback and go right.”

Can he describe, as a switch-hitter, the feeling of riding backside?

“It’s awkward. Probably how a normal person switching stance would feel. But in that clip, I was faking it on the left. If you watch it again, I’m not that comfortable in that little carve but pulling in, barrel riding, I’m comfortable as a goofy.”

Over the course of the day, Mann was there at the pool’s seven-thirty opening, rode it for five hours until it shut for one hour for lunch, and was still riding waves at five pm, when it was just he and Kelly trading waves.

“I got a ton in that last hour,” he says.

Watch!