“Bruce is back! Bruce is back at Pipe and Backdoor!”

One week ago, the too-good-to-be-true rumour that Bruce Irons was the mystery surfer making a return to surfing at the highest level turned out to be, yeah, way too be good to be true.

Irons, who is forty-five, “burst onto the scene in the late 1990s with thrilling performances at Pipe, taking it to the greatest athlete to ever live twice (Pipeline and France), and, once, Freddy Patacchia for the 2008 Rip Curl Search event in Uluwatu. He also took the 2004 Eddie with one of the better rides in the Super Bowl of Surfing’s proud history.”

Last year, Bruce Irons delivered a profoundly sad confessional from a psychedelic assisted rehab joint in Cancun, Mexico. 

My name is Bruce Irons. I’m a 44 year old professional surfer. My brother was world champion He’s the baddest motherfucker that ever lived and I’m doing this for him and all my other fallen brothers and fucking friends who died who’ve had a fair shares of ups and downs and losses and mental health problems, you know depression and drugs came to this place in Mexico.

The mystery surfer, as was subsequently revealed by the World Surf League, was not Bruce Irons, Matt Wilkinson or Kelly Slater but Julian Wilson, who pivoted off the tour five years ago and into hard-edged multi-functional fashion with his brand Rivvia Projects.

But while surf fans were left disappointed with the reveal, Bruce has made a rare cameo in a YouTube short by Koa Rothman, joining the Jewish-Hawaiian champ in a late-afternoon session at pumping Pipeline. 

The camera lingers on Bruce preparing his surfboard, which features the imperial Japanese flag, the same World War II graphic his brother Andy famous on his best-selling Billabong board short.

(The Japanese Imperial Flag, aka the Rising Sun Flag, which was proudly flown by the Japanese military during its failed attempt to own the Pacific, sits alongside other controversial flags as the Soviet Hammer and Sickle, the Nazi Swastika and, ooh-wee-ooo, the US’s own Confederate Flag. Jackie Robinson got into a little strife at the Olympics over it.) 

Bruce is still movie star handsome and with that classic elevated pompadour reminiscent of a nineteen-fifties gang leader he fizzes with a deep-seated cool. 

There is a lot of board preparation by Bruce Irons. 

He meticulously waxes his surfboard, including the tailpad, running his hands across the surface to ensure maximum grip, although after his affixes his leash to the tail-string, Koa discreetly examines the job to ensure Bruce completed the task correctly. 

The session is short, one wave apiece, but to see Bruce, in the water, on a wave, however briefly, is worth the time spent glaring at a screen.

Essential.

A shot in the arm for all middle-aged surfers!

The surfer, musician and artist Ozzie Wright, the model for a thousand imitators, has stunned surf fans with the release of an epic short that proves age is just a number and that fifty years old is the new fifteen.

Ozzie Wright, who turns fifty in just seventeen months, is “a straw-haired aerial specialist from Narrabeen, Sydney, Australia… his quirky pen-and-ink sketches of thin sad-eyed hipsters were used in Volcom surfwear ads, and Australia’s FHM magazine named Wright the country’s fifth best-dressed man in 2002 in an ironic nod to the shabby-chic trend he helped popularize. Wright is the lead singer of the Goons of Doom, a tongue-in-cheek semi-punk band formed in 2004.”

The last time we saw Oz on these pages he’d listed his Suffolk Park spread, seven-thousand square feet of wildly fertile volcanic dirt one hundred footsteps from oft-times epic beachbreaks.

In 2018, Oz sold his two-storey Narrabeen house built in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright with its notes of Japanese Imperial Hotel, and which he’d owned since 2003 before moving out in 2013 and buying a house in Newport, a few suburbs north. (Later sold for 2.3 million.)

It was in the Narrabeen house, one hundred metres from the famous sandbottom left at 5 Loftus Street, that the surf movie classic Doped Youth was filmed in the summer of 2003-4. The movie, which was conceived and made by Ozzie and Waves editor Adam Blakey, starred Kelly Slater, Tom Carroll, Ozzie, Mick Fanning and Joel Parkinson and was released as a DVD with the magazine Waves.

Where were we?

Oh yeah, this short film. It’s the Ozzy part from the surf doc Riding the Wind by Zack Balang and filmed during those wild COVID years, 2020 through 2023.

He loose and sharp.

Essential.