Three time champion of the world Andy Irons has appeared on two Stab Style covers, in a feature called Andy Irons is Superb, a cartoon entitled Why The World Is Horny for Andy Irons and has taken two out of three Stab awards. Adam Blakey attempts to explain his choke-hold on our affections (excerpt from issue 24, January/February, 2008).
A few things I learned about Andy Irons in 2007. He leaves the doors of his truck unlocked and the keys in the ignition whenever he’s at home on Kauai. Clay Marzo is his favourite frontside surfer. Dane Reynolds his favourite all rounder. He believes Dane and Jordy Smith are gonna elevate quickly and crush old man dreams on the CT. He rides twinnies and retro boards but only when nobody’s around. He hates it when his steak is under cooked. He’s thinking about growing a beard.
And then there were other things…
Over the year I had three mostly off the record conversations with Andy that canvassed a lot of different shit. Life’s transitions, ups and downs, now, the future and the power of his legacy. Listening to him talk is as entertaining as it is refreshing. He rolls with emotion and is honest to a fault. He has no reason to pour his heart out but he can’t help it. His willingness to share his thoughts and feelings is engaging.
I don’t know how it came to be that I found myself whining to the three-time World Champ about what a cunt of year 2007 had been – for me. That I’d broken up with the mother of my children, that I was unsatisfied with work and that I was sinking into the quicksand of a mid life crisis at the ripe ol age of 30, but it didn’t take long before the he’d heard enough.
“You’re rattled?” he spat. “You think you are? Come on now. I’m as rattled as a five-year-old with his jack in the box broken in half.”
There was no need ask why. For the second year running, Andy was out of the world title race before the European leg had ended. As we talked on the phone, Australia to Kauai, guys were still surfing round three heats of the Billabong Pro at Mundaka. “Mundaka,” he said. “I don’t even know where that is. I mean, I’ve been to the town but I’ve never seen the wave. It’s completely foreign to me.” After losing his second round heat to a wildcard in three-foot Bakio beachies AI hightailed and arrived home before his hair was dry. Mick and Teebs went on to give the patriots their long awaited Aussie Title battle and Kelly kept things intriguing by providing a minor threat from the shadows.
But where were the relentless talk-ups, the classic calls, the mind games, the awkward encounters and the man tears that made the Irons era so damn invigorating? Where were the pump-action shotgun blasts to the head of an opponent after being spat out of the day’s best barrel? The only trace of anything like it was after AI’s win in Chile when he threw down his claim on the crown in classic style. “I didn’t go anywhere. I was always right there in the world title race. I can’t wait. Game on.” But the year fizzled, Andy’s ruthless competitive nature took a hit, and a little less flavour went into the final meltdown. Admit it. You missed him. It’s ok. We all did.
Andy eventually finished sixth without really turning up for the back half of the tour. Throughout the year he got engaged and married and bought himself a princely cabana on his home island. He fit in holiday surf trips to Bali, Fiji and Mexico and of course he starred in Taylor Steele’s Trilogy.
When I suggested 07 might have been a bit of a dud by his own lofty standards he was suddenly and very rightfully pissed? “Hey, competitively I’ve accomplished everything I’ve ever wanted to do. If anyone tries to hang shit on me I’ll tell them straight up, you go try and win a contest. Try and win 12 of the fucken things. My position is I’m having the best time of my life. I’m not worried about nothing. I’m gonna keep on competing and when that’s over I’m gonna surf till I’m 130. Laird says he hit his peak at 50. I’m only 29. I got 21 fucken years to look like a Greek god.”
Rattled but not worried. Shaken but not stirred. We may as well place the order for another 21 AI Stab Awards right now. – Vaughn Blakey.
“Where were the relentless talk-ups, the classic calls, the mind games, the awkward encounters and the man tears that made the Irons era so damn invigorating?” Andy Irons
(excerpt from issue 21, August/September, 2007) Merette Gearin
I’m as underwhelmed as you by the quasi lesbian sub-culture fuelled by Hollywood celebrity. Yet it to continues to so fascinate women – pop culture afficianados convinced they’re riding a new wave of permissiveness, equating the arousal of men with freedom, proudly dancing ass to cunt in a ritual played out every night and in every nightclub and bar throughout the world (except maybe in Kabul).
Therefore, we were pleasantly surprised by the intellectual heft and emotional intelligence of the woman pictured, 22-year-old Merette Gearin from Mona Vale on Sydney’s northern beaches. We scooped Merette up for this photo midway through a Surf Dive N Ski catalogue we were producing, although it was her initial ease on the eye that brought her to our attention and not, as would later find out, the fine mind within polished by the rigours of a university degree.
Let me describe Merette and, along with this image, it might help you understand why we were quick to demand her image for the mag. She is tall without being freakishly so, slim without being thin, bosomy without the overkill of the D-cup and pretty without being off-puttingly perfect. To use a popular phrase, she is the Girl Next Door.
Beneath this glorious veneer is a young women with a Social Science degree – double major in modern history and gender studies – who wrote her major thesis on the Holocaust. Merette picked the Holocaust – Germany’s almost successful push to rid the world of all Jews – because of the belief that we must know history or else be doomed to repeat it. “Even after the Nazis, we still had the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Hutus in Rwanda,” she sighs. “Who must die next?”
Rather than expect Merette to pick over the bones of modern music for her Favourite Playlist, we asked Merette to list her five favourite books.
1. Nineteen Minutes: Jodi Picoult
Bullying ends in a school shooting. “But written from the perspective of the shooter,’ explains Merette.
2. Tully: Paullina Simmons
“A novel about a young girl whose friend commits suicide which leads to the eventual unravelling of her own life.”
3. Aushwitz: Laurence Rees
“A book about the Nazi death camp. Obviously I have an interest because of my thesis on the Holocaust. But what sets this apart from everything else I’ve read is Rees’ unexpected stories about life in the camp, including the one where an inmate falls in love with a Nazi guard. When the war finished and the camp was liberated, the pair fled to Switzerland and got married. As well, the book draws on evidence that shows the Allies were acutely aware of what was happening inside the camp.”
4. Sex and the City: Candace Bushnell
“A girl has to read for pleasure sometimes. But the books and the TV show were the first of a kind. Finally, men were being objectified in the same way as women. And until Candace Bushnell came along, no one had heard women talk so frankly and prosaically about sex before, even though we obviously do.”
5. The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe: Anthony Summers
“I was obsessed with the pop culture of Marilyn Monroe for a time. She was a pathetic victim to the Hollywood system and died, desperate for attention, despite being adored by millions.”
(excerpt from issue 18, February, 2007)
Emily and Rosey, Pipe House, 2007
Hair matted by salt water, skin torched to its underlay, morning light streaming through the light of a bedroom fronting the Banzai Pipeline – if there is a God, he goes by the human form of Erick “Tungsten” Regnard.
Tungsten is the photographer responsible for the creating the image before you, the idealised version of women happily enslaved to the entirely natural desires of men.
The girls, Emily (foreground), 22, and Rosey, 19, have lived on the North Shore for exactly one year. The pair moved from the Big Island (called Hawaii, confusingly) to soak up the pace and fury of surfing’s ground zero. When she’s not surfing Rosey works shifts at Haleiwa Joes; Emily works at Kava Roots (a juice bar) and models for magazines such as Maxim.
They live at Shark’s Cove, just around the corner from Waimea Bay, in a house with one other girl. And, this July, the pair are taking off to Tahiti and Indonesia with a bunch of friends for the surf trip of a lifetime.
This photo is part of a series that will form a coffee-table book with the working title: Hawaii, Locals Only. Other notable subjects include Buttons Montgomery Kaluhiokalani, Marvin Foster and Larry Bertlemann, though photographed in a far more modest fashion.
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