Watch and be transfixed!

In this nine-minute short from the studio of Riordan Pringle, the viewer is gifted Kelly Slater and Mason Ho, as well as Mason’s daddy Mike and guy-pal the Baby Bear, manipulating waves, one after the other, at a chip-shot reef east of Sunset Beach.

Kelly Slater, who recently turned fifty-nine, and Mason, thirty-six, both sport healthy bronze glows on that their famous faces making you feel as if you’re looking at the world through spun sugar. Both surf with a dazzling jitterbug.

Slater can sometimes appears as empty as the emptiest bottle, and as lonely as a radio tube when the batteries are dead and there’s no current to plug into, but here he is alive, kicking waves in the shins. Mason, as well as Mike and the Baby Bear, surf with a highbrow compositional style reflective of their island upbringings.

I watched this video and was transfixed.

Essential.

“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.