Andy Irons

Kauai is The Garden Isle and one of the things that flourishes there are surfers who are as comfortable in two-foot mush as they are in 12-foot barrels. Kauai was the Silent Planet up until the 80s, kept quiet with a stern hand by surfers who didn’t want to see the North Shore of Kauai become the North Shore of Oahu. It wasn’t cool to claim Kauai or even mention it, but out of the 80s and into the 90s, Kauai began sprouting redhot surfers from Rochelle Ballard to Laird Hamilton who put that Kauai style on display for the world.

Andy Irons is one of the most exciting surfers to come along since Kelly Slater changed everything in the early 1990s. Taller and a little heavier than the average pro surfer – who are closer to jockeys and gymnasts these days - Irons, “Has the miraculous combination of big-wave craziness and small wave ripping down better than any surfer in the world right now,” Surfing Magazine said. “It’s a horrifying skill range.”

Horrifying to competitors, thrilling to anyone watching. During a time when even the best pro surfers have become a little homogenous, Andy Irons surfs like Andy Irons and no one else: Aggressive, fast and always going huge – at sea and on land - sometimes to his own detriment.

A Kauai boy by birth, Andy was brought up learning the three R’s: Reefbreaks, Radicalness and Roundhouse Kicks. Irons got a complete education on Kauai, from junk at Pinecones to the kind of gnarly left reefs that he would encounter at Pipeline, Teahupoo and Fiji. Competing with his younger brother Bruce – also a naturally gifted surfer - Andy was a top amateur through the 90s and gave notice on what was coming when he won the HIC Pipeline Pro in 1996 at 18 years old, and won the 1997 Tahiti Pro at Teahupoo a few years later.

He turned pro in 1998 and went through a four-year apprenticeship in which partying too hard put him on the verge of career flameout: He was #21 in 1998, down to #34 in 1999, up to #16 in 2000 and #10 with a bullet the following year. Irons accomplished a lot in those four years, including one of the most difficult feats in surfing: Beating Kelly Slater at Pipeline. It was Andy Irons essentially singing “Goodbye Old School” to Slater that brought Kelly out of retirement and the two have been tussling ever since.

In 2002 Irons won the Pipeline Masters and the Triple Crown and his first ASP World Title. He seemed to like being Champ so he won again in 2003 and 2004. The 2005 season was a non-stop joust with Kelly Slater and at the end, Irons finished just 45 points short as Slater won his seventh World Title.

Andy Irons came straight outta Kauai with that fiery Polynesian temper and he has been known to engage in a bit of the old ultra violent from time to time. In 2000 he was fined $1500 for an après-heat brawl with Mick Campbell in France, and his shouting match with Slater before the Pipe Masters in 2001 is the stuff of ASP legend. But now that Irons has proven himself and done it again, he is mellower but no less wild in the surf. To see AI standing tall in the eye of the storm at Teahupoo or ravaging a lip backside in France is to see Kauai Pride at its finest, and one of the most exciting surfers to come along in the last 20 years.