The Aerial Generation

Dana Point local Josh Sleigh pumps his board down the line on a 3-foot wave, looking for his “ramp,” the spot where his left-peeling wave crashes into a right-hander peeling toward him. Crouching down, he sees the wedge of water and foam approaching. Just as his wave breaks, where most rides would ordinarily end, he carves straight up the face of the wave and launches off his “ramp” 4 feet into the air.

He grabs the nose of his board with both hands and pulls it straight out in front of him as though he were holding an open book, then slips the board back underneath his feet as he falls onto what’s left of the wave and surfs away.

The announcer for this surf contest at Dana Point’s Salt Creek Beach scrambles excitedly for a way to describe this variation on the “double grab,” finally calling it a “massive tombstone air!” That’s what it would be called in skateboarding, where this is an aerial done off the top of a half-pipe. But the couple hundred people cheering from the beach this day are especially stoked because this isn’t skateboarding. Rather, it’s a whole new way to surf.

Sleigh, 25, and the other three dozen competitors on Stop No. 5 of the Vans Surfing Magazine Airshow Series represent surfing’s new school. They’re not looking for the great cutback or the perfect tube. They’re thinking about stale fish. Or slobs, mutes and liens. What really blows their minds are gorkin flips or big spins. In fact, they’re not thinking about being in the water at all. These are all names for tricks that happen up in the air, or what they call Above the Lip. They are the aerial generation.

This early August day at Salt Creek, Sleigh comes down with a win, his first on the 4-year-old air-show series tour. Besides garnering $3,000 in first-place prize money, photos in magazines and exposure for his sponsors, the young aerialist now enjoys a new status. Among the 50 to 200 regular competitors on the tour, he becomes the man to beat on what many consider surfing’s cutting edge.

With his round face, buzzcut and muscular build, Sleigh doesn’t look noticeably different from any other surfer. He doesn’t flash any giant tattoes or piercings, like some of the aerialists who’ve come before him. But his aerial skills set him apart.

“From the crowd response, air shows seem to be the real progressive movement,” Sleigh says. On a recent trip to Australia with 1983 and ’84 world surfing champion Tom Carroll and his brother, surf journalist Nick Carroll, he found out that old-schoolers are also looking into it. “It’s definitely getting some respect. Tom was asking me, ‘Hey, mate, how do you do an air?”’

Aerials, in which a surfer rides his board into the air to spin, does complicated grabbing or “manual” maneuvers or even goes completely inverted, were once just a way to get off a wave that was closing out. Now they are the entire “ raison de surf” of a new generation. The tricks, most of them borrowed from other board sports such as skating or snowboarding, are making new stars out of aerialists like Sleigh, inspiring their own contest tour and feature events worldwide, attracting sponsors and specialized equipment. Most important, they are changing the way the world surfs.

Even on surfing’s big-time World Championship Tour, where the top 10 surfers took home an average of $69,987 in prize money in 2000 and make even more in endorsements driving a $5-billion global surf-gear industry, air shows are getting attention. The Vans series tour and its $80,000 total purse are popular with younger crowds. In a sport that has always measured itself in terms of big wave bravado aerials are causing the world’s best surfers to reevaluate what it means to have “soul.”

Surfers saw the writing on the wall in 1999, when six-time world champion Kelly Slater attempted a type of board-grabbing back flip called a “rodeo flip” coming out of a tube in the Pipe Masters. This classic event, held on the north shore of Oahu, is one of old-school surfing’s most hallowed and “soulful” events. Most kids surfing junky 2-foot beachbreak every day could only dream of mastering Pipeline’s one-of-a-kind tubes, but anyone could try that flip at their beach. And if the best surfer in the world was doing it, it must be legit.

According to Peter “P.T.” Townend, 1976 world surfing champion and now publisher of Surfing magazine, one of the principle organizers of the air-show series tour, the allure of doing tricks at your home beach has made aerials the rage of an entire generation.

“We just got our readership study back, for Surfing Magazine 2001,” says Townend. “We asked the question, ‘If you wanted a contest to come to your town, what would you like to see: a SMAS air show, the National Scholastic Surfing Assn., meaning amateur competition, or the World Championship Tour?’ Airshow was No. 1.”

“Aerial surfing is much more about the urban root of surfing, which hasn’t been expressed as much,” says Jamie Brisick, an editor-at-large at Surfing magazine. By urban, he means the influence of hugely popular street skateboarding culture, which values technical flip tricks on street obstacles such as curbs and handrails rather than specially built half-pipes or clean downhills. Likewise, aerials are great fun for those with short attention spans and access to poor surf, shortcutting the Zen nature cult of waiting for the perfect wave.

Young aerialists, Brisick says, tend to be a little more gritty and street-wise, a holdover from the progenitors of the form--Southern California’s Christian Fletcher and Matt Archbold and Santa Cruz locals Shawn “Barney” Barron and Jason “Ratboy” Collins, all now in their 30s. Tattooed and skate-influenced, all four were doing aerials in the 1980s when everyone else thought they were kooks, and Fletcher, Barron and Collins are still at it, competing at Salt Creek.

That image has been somewhat daunting for women competitors. At this point, there are no women aerialists, and it remains very much a boy’s club.

Fletcher gets out of the water, the “Godfather of Air” at 30 years old, and lights up a cigarette.

“I started learning these tricks in like ‘82,” says Fletcher in his laconic cadence. “I grew up on a skateboard; [‘80s vert skater superstar] Christian Hosoi was my best friend, so we’d always discuss different tricks on a skateboard and a surfboard and how you could adapt them to the different terrain.”

He sits down to chat with his dad, surfer and filmmaker Herbie Fletcher, maker of the five “Wave Warriors” surf films that brought Christian Fletcher and aerial surfing to the masses in the mid-’80s and early ‘90s. Greyson, Christian Fletcher’s towheaded 10-year-old son, also a skater sponsored by skateboard makers World Industries, shows off his hand-painted standard three-fin thruster--the boards favored by aerialists. That makes three generations of Fletchers in the water. And, as it turns out, in the air. Christian Fletcher takes seventh at Salt Creek, and though most of the younger surfers have taken tricks he originated to new heights, he demonstrates that school’s still in session. The judges give him a special award for doing a motocross move called a “Superman air.” Fletcher makes it look simple by essentially repeating Josh Sleigh’s double-grab but taking his feet off the board and laying his body out horizontally in the air. He wins a second award for doing a “floater,” a standard move in which the surfer rides up on top of the curling wave, but switch-stance, standing backward on the board.

Wearing a knee brace because of tendinitis, Christian Fletcher sees his role now not as the dominator but as the innovator.

“I’m doing ‘judo airs,”’ he says. “That’s when, on a backside wave, you do a backside air and grab your rail, then take your front foot off your toe edge rail. You used to see Hosoi doing them a lot.” Translated, that means: Surfing with your back to the wave, you surf up the face of the wave and into the air, still facing the beach, grab the edge (rail) of the board with either hand, then push your front foot out in the air like a judo kick. Then undo all that while falling, land on the wave, and surf away.

Is all this air good for surfing? “For a lot of the kids, the aerial surfing has kind of messed them up, because they don’t really want to learn how to surf,” Fletcher says. “All they want to do is aerials. But it’s made the guys who really do surf well even better. You have to get the basics down.”

While Herbie is out on the point with his longboard, Greyson says he, too, is learning to do aerials, and he has plenty of company among youths his age. On this day at Salt Creek, even though the U.S. Open pro surfing event has drawn an estimated 200,000 spectators to Huntington Beach an hour north, several hundred young people still turn up to watch the SMAS event.

Skateboarding is the primary source of most aerial surfing maneuvers, but it’s certainly not the only one. Aerialists are mining all sports for adaptable tricks, including snowboarding, wakeboarding, BMX, motocross, skimboarding and windsurfing. Many even credit innovation to the Flow Rider, a fiberglass form over which water is pumped to create an artificial wave indoors and which draws together competitors from all board sports. Legend has it Slater learned his rodeo flip while riding the Flow Rider.

“The sport of surfing was the first extreme sport,” Townend says. “It invented all these other extreme sports. And what’s happened is that those sports have come back to influence it.”

Sleigh, for instance, cross-trains for surfing by skating, snowboarding and riding BMX and motocross.

Shawn Barron and former Surfing Magazine editor Skip Snead came up with the idea for the air-show series tour in 1998 in order to capitalize on this energy. “What I thought of the whole event is that everyone’s going to come together and push each other to do these new, radical maneuvers,” Barron says. “It’s going to change the direction of surfing and what you can do on a wave.”

It has already changed the nature of the World Championship Tour. A few years back, aerials were not scored in these contests. Instead, standard moves like cutbacks, off-the-lips and tube rides got the points. Now, the sanctioning body of the World Championship Tour, the Assn. of Surfing Professionals, has started scoring them. The air-show series tour is also sanctioned by the association.

Each stop on the air-show series tour has a purse totaling up to $8,000. Not great money, but the top competitors can live on it with the help of sponsors.

In October, the winners from the air-show series tour will be invited to the first World Championships of Air in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. They’ll be joined by two top qualifiers from the NSSA tour and several top-44 pros from the World Championship Tour in a kind of air summit, with a $20,000 total purse.

“People have been doing airs a long time, but it wasn’t cool back in the day,” says Eric McHenry, 25, a top aerialist from Poway who took third at Salt Creek. “Now, even these freakin’ rollerbladers are doing flips and are way more technical than our sport. Our sport could be more technical, with all the advances in the surfboards and the fin systems. It makes me really want to push it.”

Everyone agrees that the air-show format has its limitations, because most of the wave is sacrificed in order to do one big trick. Instead of the classic surfing contest strategy of “three turns to the beach,” most aerialists will go straight down the wave just waiting for their moment to launch into the air. The big draw, though, is focusing on what’s next. You can be sure Christian Fletcher will always have a few ideas.

“What I’d really like to see at these contests is some kind of street course type of deal,” says Fletcher, musing on the future, “where they set up some buoys and some rails and stuff in the water. You get a board with some sort of extra hard bottom on it, high-density foam. That’s the next step.