Renegades Of Punts

Over 10 years after the original air-based competition series faded away, the WSL is breathing new life into the concept with today’s most radical aerialists. But will the outcome be any different this time around?

- Todd Prodanovich

On a November day on the North Shore of Oahu in 1995, two bleary-eyed surfers walked into Storto’s Deli in Haleiwa looking to eat just about everything in sight. While this may be a common, longstanding post-surf ritual on the North Shore, the conversation that transpired between eccentric aerialist Shawn “Barney” Barron and Surfing magazine editor Skip Snead, and its implications in the surf world, was anything but ordinary.

“I remember us talking about how there wasn’t a platform for what Barney and all the Santa Cruz guys were doing,” recalls Snead. “At the time, Barney, Ratboy [Jason Collins], Flea [Darryl Virostko] and their friends were consistently doing these incredible airs—probably the best in the world then. But airs were still really frowned upon by judges in most traditional contests. Barney and I thought, ‘What if we made a contest just for the air guys?’”

At the time, aerial surfing was progressing in quantum leaps and capturing the imaginations of surfers worldwide through surf films and magazine spreads, but it hadn’t been adopted by the World Tour surfers of the time and was still considered a fringe subculture. In fact, 5 years earlier, a group of World Tour surfers went so far as to pen a letter to SURFER complaining about the amount of coverage aerial pioneer and punk provocateur Christian Fletcher had been getting in the magazine

“False images are being created out of second-rate surfers at the expense of high-ranked professionals,” said the letter, signed by JeffBooth, Barton Lynch, Damien Hardman and a host of other top-tier pros, which ran in a 1990 issue of SURFER. “It’s quite unfair to dedicate yourself to the sport, train hard and travel around the world, only to pick up a magazine and see a guy who spent his summer at Trestles on the cover and centerspread.”