The Scuttlefish

If you’re not a surfer, champion Andy Irons–who unexpectedly died of Dengue Fever at the young age of 32 yesterday–was the greatest modern wave rider you may have never heard of. Ask Kelly Slater, his childhood hero, who lost to Irons the first time they surfed against each other at Pipeline.

Irons was recognized in the New York Times as Slater’s greatest competitor, in a 2006 feature entitled “When a Man Loves a Rival”, even though Slater was retiring for the first time right as Andy Irons was joining the world tour.  While the two men were both world champions, they were very much opposites. Slater was wily, calculating, polite. Irons, grew up surfing with his little brother Bruce in the bay of Hannalei on the quiet Hawaiian Isle of Kauai, and was hot-headed, raw and powerful in his movements on the water. And out of it. The Irons brothers would brawl in their backyards. Andy was almost blown up by Bruce’s fireworks once; Andy knocked out Bruce with a kick to the head. Later, on Oahu, Irons was part of the infamous Wolf Pack surf crew known for violently protecting their breaks.

From the NYTimes piece, describing a faceoff at Pipeline:

When there’s no contest running, Pipeline has some of the most territorial locals anywhere. Surf culture has a universally accepted priority system for claiming waves — a function both of your positioning relative to a given wave and of your place in the local pecking order — and at Pipeline, Irons’s Wolf Pack dominates. On the day before the 2003 Pipeline Masters, while many of the contestants warmed up in the water, Slater claimed wave after wave for himself, behaving like the undisputed king of the beach. Nobody cares more about good manners than Slater, so he was clearly taunting Irons, trying to unhinge him in advance of the contest.

“Kelly Slater will do everything he can to get in your head,” Phil Irons says. “That’s his character. He’s in there to get under your skin.

“What Slater does best is intimidate,” he continued, adding: “My boys are born and raised Hawaiian, their clout and presence locally is way higher than Slater’s. And in that pre-event surf session, his arrogance got to the whole crew that was in the water.”

He concluded, “Their gist to Slater was ‘Go back to Cocoa Beach.”’

Although there is some dispute about exactly what happened in the water that day, at least one account has Irons screaming vulgarities at Slater, who infuriated Irons further by telling him to calm down and get a grip on himself. Slater’s psych-out didn’t work: throughout the contest, Irons dispatched one opponent after another, surfing with such wild abandon in the semifinals that his board buckled near the nose. At last, it came down to him and Slater in the final heat. As Irons stretched on the beach, Slater sidled up next to him and wrapped an arm around his shoulders. “I love you, man,” he whispered.

An entire generation of professional surfers had lost its focus as a result of such Slater antics, but Irons couldn’t be bothered. When the judges gave him the contest — and the world title — Irons became the first man ever to face Slater one on one and just plain beat him. After the heat, Slater stayed in the water alone for half an hour as the crowd carried Irons on their shoulders. He then ran up the beach to the home of his rock-star friend Jack Johnson and wept under the outdoor shower.

But Andy didn’t always dominate. Even though he clinched the triple crown–winning the highest scores in three Hawaiian events in Haleiwa, Sunset and Pipeline–two years in a row, he lost afterwars, many times, plummeting in the ranks in following years.

This was no Tiger-Woodsian champ who had victory a given part of his life, as any other facet; rather he seemed like a normal guy with normal problems who had the heart and talent to reach for the perfect rides on perfect waves when his spirit was so moved to do so, and he wasn’t distracted from, or disheartened by, competition. It seemed like he fought for everything and felt everything keenly, almost if it was all too much for him. (Indeed, the first contest he ever entered, he “lost to a girl” and didn’t compete again for a year.)

Irons was often on the edge of burnout, being engulfed in the parties and groupies at the start of his career, pulling things back together countless times. “I have a lot of inner demons, if I didn’t have surfing to work those out, I’d self destruct.”

But things were going so well for Irons, recently. He just won the Billabong Pro Tahiti in early September, beating Slater. And in his death he’s leaving behind his wife, Lyndie, who is due in a little over a month with their first child.

Update: Irons’ death is being investigated as a drug overdose now.

Updated: a tribute video by tracks magazine, with interviews of friends, including Kelly Slater

Additional information gathered from Matt Warshaw’s Encyclopedia of Surfing and The History of Surfing