A Lonely Game

Andy x Kelly - The Photo

December 2003, Red Bull House, Off the Wall. This photograph represents the transitional phenomenon that was Andy Irons. For the previous decade, Kelly Slater had owned professional surfing. Then, while Kelly was on a Three-year hiatus, the man who would eventually become Hawaii’s greatest-ever surfed arrived back on the WCT with a new sponsor and a new attitude. The results were almost immediate with a world title in 2002. In 2003, however, Kelly was on the hustle for a seventh world title. In the penultimate event in Brazil, tour leader and reigning champ Andy lost his quarter-final to Taylor Knox because he was so homesick he wanted to go home. Kelly won the event and came into Hawaii, which had two WCT events, 300 points clear. History tells us that Andy would place second at Sunset and beats Kelly, head-to-head in the final of the X-Box Pipe Masters in four-to-six-foot imperfect peaks. This photo was taken 10 days before their Pipe showdown. Kelly says he was looking for Damien Hobgood (At the Red Bull House?). Andy stared, the house went silent, and when the screen door slammed shut, Andy looked up and said: "What the fuck was that?" Photographer Steve Sherman had a 35mm camera loaded and sitting on the kitchen bench and shot two frames. Sherman says the Andy was, "seriously, seriously wigged out." It rattled him. At the shoreline before their final, Kelly even told Andy he loved him. Andy was feeling a little different. He didn’t hate Kelly, but, "I wanted to punch him a couple of times...deep down, there is an essence of hate. Deep down, human emotion, raw emotion is weird. Get a human down to his rawest form and he’ll do whatever it takes to survive. And, competition’s the essence of being a human."

The surfing magazine plays a dishonest hand. We present the pro surfer’s life as the greatest aspiration but for so much it’s a life spent in pressurised aluminum tubes and at airports, feet folded under chairs, food served in foil-wrapped rectangles, headphones over ears, with backpacks as pillows. It ain’t biz class, either. You’re cattle all the way. Who talks of this loneliness? Who tells you when you’re 12 years old and ruling the beach and all you want to be is an ASP professional? Who tells you that when you make it, in just nine months you’ll travel from Australia to Brazil to South Africa to Tahiti to California to Europe to Puerto Rico to Hawaii and home again just in time for Christmas? That you’ll probably never earn enough to bring along your family or gal? That your life will be defined by solitary moments; that no one will understand how important home and the friends you grew up with become?

Who tells you of the overnight layovers in anonymous airport hotels? Another check-in, another wake-up call, another mini-bar, another phone call to the woman you love. And, then, when you get to the other side of the world, you wait around in more hotel rooms for two weeks for a contest to run. Dream Tour? Yeah, it is. But it ain’t always dreamy. You want to kill something you love? Do it as a job.
Three weeks ago, Andy Irons died in a Texas hotel room, bed sheets pulled to his neck, an empty Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup on the floor beside him, six thousand clicks from a wife pregnant with his son Axel and a home gilded by the rays of a Hanalei sun.
Stab spoke to AI before he flew to Puerto Rico about his fears, his loves, about recurring dreams and about a comeback year punctuated by the exclamation mark of a surprise win at Teahupoo. Surprising because after a year-and-a-half on the sidelines, The Champ was a long way off his peak. In this issue’s cartoon, I wrote Andy into a cartoon about Kelly Slater, the two greats musing on the loneliness of competition.
The week before I spoke to Andy, Stab’d been in the Canary Islands with his little brother, Bruce, and we’d recorded an unusually thoughtful late-night conversation.
In both interviews both men said the same thing.
Andy: “If I ever lost my brother, I don’t know what I’d do. I couldn’t live without him.”
Bruce: “Andy’s my brother and I don’t know what I’d do if he weren’t around.”
Andy Irons was full of hope, he was frank, he was friendly and his gift for surfing was innate. And now? Now? The party’s over, the chairs are upside down on tables and the lights are off. The fat lady has, to quote AI, honked her horn.

Derek Rielly

source: Stab Mag