But it wasn’t until that strikingly influential winter of 75-76 that Shaun Tomson, riding backside this time on an over-rockered Spider Murphy pintail, led the paradigm shift at Pipeline, stalling off the bottom and pulling up into the barrel, as opposed to spearing straight through it. Yes, back in 1963 teenaged John Peck grabbed a rail and backed up under the shadow line at Pipeline, and sure, Roger Yates was depicted backside barrel flirting at Tamarin Bay in 1972’s Forgotten Island of Santosha. This was the first shot in the “Shortboard Revolution,” and certainly the most impactful. But on a beautiful, super-clean day at Maui’s Honolua Bay the surfing world got a glimpse of the future, as under the talented feet of McTavish and ultra-Aussie Nat Young, the weirdly shaped boards with their knifed rails, grotesque vee-panels and flexy fins, visibly sprung out of turns, vaulting their riders to places on the wave previously only imagined.

Message received: virtually every other skilled surfer Shaun’s age or younger immediately followed his lead.Īustralian shaper/designer Bob McTavish’s deep vee, transom-tailed “Fantastic Plastic Machines” may not have worked very well at other Hawaiian spots during the winter of 1967 – disastrously, in some cases.

Depending on your point of view, the maneuver either ushered in the era of modern surfing (it’s still how we all surf today)…or ruined it (and just like that, you needed to have the wave all to yourself.)Įffective tube riding had only been around a few years when during the North Shore winter season of 1975-76, a young South African named Shaun Tomson became the sport’s “Anti-Lopez.” With all due respect, of course, Tomson nevertheless deliberately eschewed the Pipe Master’s Zen-like, minimal effort approach to the steep and hollow, choosing, when surfing frontside, to carve his board up and down the face in the barrel, driving, rather than simply flowing through the wave’s deepest sections.

With a nod to Hawaiian legend Rabbit Kekai, who with the ability to whip his finless Hot Curl out of straight-line trim was the wonder of 1940s Waikiki, credit for the move traditionally goes to Malibu regular Les Williams, who in the early 1950s slashed his way through the status quo on one of proto-designer Joe Quigg’s lightweight balsa “girls boards,” actually re-directing his board back into, and then out of, the curl.

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