Take a swing back to 2005 when there wasn't a surfer on earth like Bruce Irons…
I love to interview Bruce Irons, the almost forty-year-old from Kauai. Dial his digits, throw a starter question and drown in quotes.
He’ll talk to anybody and his censor button don’t work. A rare commodity. Like a city restaurant that serves an old-fashioned roast beef dinner.
Recent highlights.
On missing the Maldives Invitational: “It was a string of fucking…okay…it’s partially my fault. I was moving out of my place, I was hotel hopping, I had all my fucking stuff in storage, a car full of shit, and I got my boards sent to a friend’s place in Venice. As I was driving up there, I grabbed all my stuff. And I open it all up and I’ve only got a double board bag. It was, like, shit, crunch time. Plane to catch. I needed to open up the bag, go boom, boom, boom. Oh my fucking god. This is not going to work.
“I get a taxi to the airport, my luggage is in the back. The driver gets into me for going so short a distance. A twenty-buck fare. He’s mumbling shit. Want me to get out? Right before we get out he tells me he’s from Ethiopia da da da. Whatever, all good, he’s talking, talking as I get out and then he takes off with all my luggage. Are you fucking kidding me? So I Uber back to the taxi bull pen. Eight lines. Fifty cars. They’re all yelling at each other. And I tell ’em, one of your taxi guys has my shit, the Ethiopian dude. The guy there says there’s so many cars and so many different races and I’m standing there going fuck, fuck, fuck. Then, because my iPad was in one of the bags, I tracked it to Hollywood. I go to my car and I’m flying towards Hollywood where this fucker is and then he comes back to the bull pen, turns off my iPad, but I’m already back there. I’ve fucking got him. The motherfucker. I tell him, what’s up motherfucker! You turned off my iPad! He said he didn’t know whose it was. (The trip) just wasn’t meant to be. It sucked. Those stories seem outrageous don’t they? I wouldn’t believe it if someone told me.”
On a hypothetical death row scenario: “This is a fucking great topic. How’d I get caught? I wouldn’t. If you know you’re going to end up on death row, you’re fucked, so you might as well go on a killing spree, killing your estranged wife’s lover first. So you kill him, chop him up, pack up all your ammo and guns and go down the street and take the bank down, take down the squadron of police and go until you get killed so you don’t make it to death row. You go out in a blaze of glory, chopping down fucking everybody in your sight.”
On joining the WQS at thirty five: “I definitely want to win something. Oh fuck yeah.”
Bruce Irons was the best free surfer in the world between 2004 and 2005, just before Dane Reynolds stepped out from behind the Rincon curtain.
This movie, which was made at Bruce’s peak by his then “lifetime” sponsor Volcom, is instructive ’cause no one under twenty-five knows who Bruce Irons is anymore.
And people should talk about Bruce. He’s a gas.