"Just before I gave up shooting surfing, a pale-faced Andy Irons took a month-long sabbatical in a rented property next door to my brother's place in Angourie."
A month ago, I saw an online post commemorating the passing of Andy Irons. It’s been 15 years since the world lost the best surfer I’ve ever seen surfing in real life.
This includes watching Michael Peterson winning the Coke contest at Fairy Bower in 1974. Cheyne Horan and Richard Cram shredding Bondi when we were in our teens and twenties. Surfing alone with Ronnie Burns at Outside Corner and Padang in 8 to 10 foot waves in ‘85. Shane Herring’s first surf on a Banana Board at South Avalon in ‘92. Kelly Slater coming first in the inaugural G-Land Pro in 1995. Mick Fanning free-surfing at Lennox Head in 2003. And 40 years of surfing Angourie with locals like Nat Young and regular visitors Joel Parkinson and Trent Munro.
These were the best ten surfing performances I had seen in the flesh. That is, until I shared the inside section at Hanalei Bay with Andy in December 2004. At which time they were relegated from 2nd to 11th.
The first wave I saw him on was like watching Nadia Comăneci get her first perfect ten at the Montreal Olympics on TV in 1976.
Never had I seen someone treat solid waves with such a combination of style, grace, and brazen contempt. Like a kid showing off at the top of his game on the monkey bars at his local park. Something akin to an overconfident male chimpanzee in the canopy of the jungle he grew up in.
Andy Irons swung around late and took off under the lip of a big one, got spat from the pit, jammed a fade, and then slammed into a violent bottom turn, and slashed away at the face like Zorro, passing by me smiling as he pulled into another tube. The look in his eyes was one of pure exhilaration. I felt like I had seen God.
We got about eight waves each before a few others, sitting and chatting outside, realised what the changing tide was doing and imposed themselves upon the most spiritual surfing experience of my life.
The scorching and searing gouges Andy Irons did under the lip, his concentrated faultless weaving inside the tube, way back in the belly of the beast, and his bizarre floaters over super long sections, during which he gyrated like he was on a disco dance floor, looked more like he was surfing the beach break, Pine Trees, at four foot, than those grinding eight foot barrels.
No words were spoken. It was perfect. Not a drop of water out of place.
When I occasionally tell my Australian friends this, I think that the reason they take it seriously isn’t that I’d seen and filmed so many great surfers. It’s because I’m an Australian, and they could only imagine how well he must have been surfing for me to concede that he was, for me, the best surfer of all time.
One asked me what I loved most about Andy’s surfing. That was simple. His style.
Not long after, I saw him on land on the North Shore of Oahu a few times and noticed he was struggling. Gone was the street kid at home, unselfconsciously enjoying his village life. He was being pestered by photographers and cameramen. Fans asked him to autograph T-shirts, strange objects, and risqué body parts. It looked like it was too much for him. He seemed like a small-town boy who’d made it big, and far from being bedazzled, he was completely overwhelmed. He looked distressed. Not that that stopped people from relentlessly pursuing and badgering him.
I had seen that very look before. Three acquaintances in the 80s. Jeremy Oxley, the lead vocalist from the band The Sunnyboys; a painter called Dale Frank, who went to art school at the same time as me, whose works went on to sell for tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars; and Jamie Packer, the son of the billionaire media mogul Kerry.
It was the confused look that asked, “Who are you? Do we know each other? Why do you like me so much if you don’t know me?” And the most tragic of all: “If you really knew me, you might not like me at all.”
It is the face of the irreparably broken-hearted.
Either they were genetically predisposed to it, like a kind of hereditary mental illness, or something truly tragic had happened when they were young, like childhood abuse, neglect, or rejection. Or all these things. They are constantly at risk of being triggered by something, or someone, even a misunderstanding.
Humiliation and fear of abandonment stalk them like a patient, maleficent shadow-self. Some can overcome this identity crisis; most can’t.
Beneath their glowing performances of confidence is a tragic insecurity. It’s the very fuel that drives them to stand out as such high achievers. It’s as if they’re screaming out: “I understand that I’m unlovable, but you can’t deny that what I am doing here and now is somehow worthwhile. Surely something that should be kept instead of thrown out. Like me.”
In short, they are broken. In psychological jargon, they don’t think they have made mistakes in their lives; they believe they are a mistake. They don’t think that they have done bad things in their lives; they believe they are intrinsically and irredeemably bad.
Just before I gave up shooting surfing, a pale-faced and washed-up-looking Andy took a sabbatical, without a photographer or camera crew, and stayed for a month in a rented property next door to my brother John’s place in Angourie. I was living down the road and still had all my camera gear and was tempted to introduce myself and ask him if I could follow him around and film him free-surfing.
I knew I was about to give up making surfing films, as I had just got married and started having children, and after a few good surfs together, I saw that the look in his eye from Hanalei Bay had returned. But I didn’t want to risk nudging him from that childlike unselfconsciousness into its jaded adult opposite.
What followed was far more thrilling than making my swansong surf film. I got to see Andy having fun as he discovered a whole new coastline, from popular to remote surf breaks. Obviously, his surfing was brilliant.
With joyful abandon he eviscerated and excoriated unsuspecting northern NSW surf spots like Jack the Ripper disemboweling East End Ladies of the Night.
But it was far more enjoyable for us that he was enjoying himself. It was like he was a kid again, laughing and joking around and having fun.
In short, he remembered who he was.
During all those surfs we had together, I never introduced myself. He looked like he was having too much fun to be interrupted by someone from the dreaded surfing industry he appeared to be escaping from. Not that he would have had any idea who I was. I was just another Australian bloke in the water, happily sharing waves while watching him come back to life.
He became more animated on land. The colour returned to his face, like vibrant coral, that, although life had almost been completely sucked and then bleached out of it, had come back from the brink, and was enjoying its time in the sun.
For me, it was like deciding not to video Mozart on my iPhone from the front row, and instead to drink in the live experience. Intoxicating.
RIP AI