The history of surfing is full of great champions, surfers who have marked a before and after and who everyone will remember for their sporting successes or their great deeds.
The list is endless, and names like Duke Kahanamoku, Tom Curren, Kelly Slater, Andy Irons, and Gerry Lopez will always be remembered. But today it is about remembering those who marked a milestone for their way of understanding surfing, the surfers who will go down in history for their progressive and innovative surfing and who were undoubtedly the beginning of modern surfing. You know, they’re not all who are, and they’re not all who are, but these are, to our humble understanding, the most innovative and most famous surfers in history.
- Montgomery Ernest Thomas Kaluhiokalani “Buttons”
The cartwheels, croquettes, pirouettes, three hundred and sixty degrees and their ambiguity on the board put on the table the before and after postmodern surfing.
- Christian Fletcher
Nothing is wrong. The master of modern surfing and driver of the first commercial airs he retained in his retina after growing up in San Clemente surrounded by innovation and avocado chicken sandwiches. Herbie’s son and Archy’s friend.
- Rick Rasmussen
The most significant competitive talent fell on drugs, so deep that he forged his legend among the mediocre waves, trophies, women, and prisons of Southeast Asia. Nicky Wood tried to imitate him, and Woody Allen wanted to take him to the movies. Now it’s too late; Trump doesn’t accept married men in Sin.
- Micky Dora
The unstoppable genius. Always live, it’s timeless as Elvis. Several lives in a single wave, beyond the limits of the law until it is related to terrorism. A sucks cowgirl with polka white south of L. A smell of its ashes.
- Westerly Windina
Sexy and successful. First famous surfer to become a transsexual and a myth in Australia. A lifetime of antenna film three after eating. Today it’s me; tomorrow I’ll be here.
- Laird Hamilton
All that was rare and innovative in the 1990s passed through the body of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s son (that is to say). From foot moorings, flying boards, spaceships, aerial submarines, and Malaysian Tiger diets. One day he went to Tahiti, and the rest is history.
- Rodman Bostik crazy fisher white shark that never had to exist.
His fame as a half-whale man led him to cinema B. He loved the declinable waves and breaking the rocks with his municipal excavators. An icon beyond his hometown Gossip Bay.
- Adolph “Bunker” Spreckels
The most famous of the famous. Hollywood understood surfing thanks to its extravagant shortboards and its forbidden vices. All you know is little, Never Before has “Surf and Destroy” made sense.
- Simon Anderson
A keel in the middle and changed the story. For everything else, Google. “Good morning,” he said to the ancient gurus that morning at the door of his house.
- Shawn “Barney” Barron
Creativity in person with or without disguise. Artist from head to toe, a leader with a bicycle helmet as a child and a garden full of dead robots and pictures of underground fire. In Santa Cruz, we will not forget, and we less.