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.
