Watch: Kelly Slater // Momentum II
From when the closing section of surf films mattered. Hell, from when films mattered.
Taylor Steele has begun uploading all his films and outtakes, thirty years worth of footage, onto a new YouTube channel - The Momentum Files. Today's release is from 1993, the closing section of Momentum II.
When the original Momentum came out in '92, The Surfers Journal opined: "Most surfers over 25 found it to be crude and exhausting. Most surfers under 20 took to it like a new religion."
25 years on it makes for a curious artifact. There's not a shred of style or grace on display here, it's nothing at all like watching surfing from, say, the 60s or 70s. And the moves Slater and co invented are still in their embryonic stage, there's little linkage between turns and many an aerial ends in a layback. Sub 18 inch widths on six-plus lengths do little for the aesthetics.
Also, compared to the surfing done even just a few years later it's slow. Like listening to a 45 played at 33. Most of this footage was shot at the beginning of the concave era, which Maurice Cole set in motion with his Reverse Vee in '91, reached its peak with Greg Webber and Shane Herring in late '92/early '93, and perfected by Merrick shortly thereafter. It'd be worth comparing the surfing in this film to Steele's next one, when the shapers dialled the concaves and turbocharged the steeds.
All of which means the Momentum films have to be viewed in context, especially if you're seeing them for the first time.
The music, however, needs no strategem for enjoyment. Bring on ye olde distortion with 'The Malachi Crunch' by NOFX. Did the rounds of every surf, skate, snowboard, and moto video in the early-90s.
Comments
He does look like he is surfing slow and i remember at this stage he was surfing faster and better than anyone in these vids and way ahead of the old school guard still on tour.
Boards look so long too.
Pretty crazy to think at almost 50 he is surfing better than this.
Edit: rewatching it, i think i was being to harsh not really that slow at all...boards just look too long
Rod Machado also was at his best in momentum he was right on Kelly,s Level
Wow! Got to love the flow of a longer rail and fixed fins. Wow!
Really? That longer board looks like a complete dog. So slow. Slater did his best surfing on 5'9 - 5'10 CI round pins (Slater being about 5'9 in height)
Agree. Flow isn't a word I'd use to describe that surfing. Reckon he didn't hit his first peak until 94 and held it until 97.
Agree mate. I love seeing the lines he takes on the longer board....surfing doesn't seem that much slower,...just more drawn out lines.
Harsh crowd, I thought he was ripping!
I think they lengthened the boards a lot for Hawaii. The rest of the fillum in other locations - the boards didn't look as obviously long - everyone was riding 6'2s and 6'3s at the time - that looks like a 6'10 (to my untrained eye). I think he just overcooked his Hawaii quiver. There's some big pipe with Dorian and Williams on some pretty long boards also. Maybe the volume required predicated a very, very long board.
I went and bought NOFX 'Ribbed' just for this song when the vid came out. Still love it. Other notable tracks include 'New Boobs', 'Food, Sex and Ewe' and 'Gonoherpasyphilaids'. Cheers for the trip back in time
I count two nosewipe claims.
yep the nose wipe claim started quite young..
I thought that segment aged very poorly.
My pick of Slater's peak is 2010-2014.
His Final Day performance on a 5'9" roundtail quad at 10ft Cloudbreak in 2013.
that was the one.
Agreed
Whatever I thought it was sick
Begs the question what are the average joe’s riding in relation to their height these days?
Me, I’m about 6’0, my standard boards are around 6’0 / 6’1
I'm 5'11. My smaller wave shorty is 5'9, standard shorty 5'11 1/2 and slight step up is 6'2
I'm a bit under 5'10 and surf a 5'10.
I think I need a shorter board @Solitude.
Well worth a look at what you're talking about @freeride76.
Excellent footage in this vid from the 2013 comp.
KS has his front foot barely a foot from the front on the backhand bazzas.
Watching the pros surf Cloudbreak make it look less heavy than everyone tells me it is, but that wave at the 58 second mark helps me understand how terrifying it must be to be in the trough of a wave and see a big section about to throw, knowing that you're in not very deep water.
At 4-6 foot I just surf my standard shorty a cloudbreak. Paddle hard and it is a surprisingly easy take off. 6 foot plus it gets scary with wides ones and wash throughs and you need a step up
thanks west. the wave beginning at 3:00 - slow it down and zoom in enough and it’s like the now famous shot of john john coming out over the foam ball in his latest film. except the goat is backhand
Fiji needs to be back as a tour event.
Thanks so much for that clip Westy. Such amazing waves and reminded me Kelly is a insane surfer if not a bit of a wanker in recent years.
YEs YEs YEs bring back Fiji please !
The boards were longer but what was the width and thickness? Probably less than today. Style of surfing was different back then, as were the boards. Boards now have progressed to where surfing has progressed and most of it is because of a Smelly Skater
True.
It wasn’t about length, it was volume. No projection on those paddle pop sticks.
If you ever have a chance to jump on one of those early 90s boards it's worth a try; just to get an appreciation of how far in one direction board design went. Basically they're thin, narrow and long with quite a bit of rocker. You feel like you're pushing water. Very difficult to surf.
My goodness these comments - I'm pretty sure all of you critics would be falling in the 'Most surfers over 25 found it to be crude and exhausting' category. This is ground breaking stuff and you all want to knock it. Please give examples in the vid of lack of flow and lack of speed - I don't see any - and remember this is high performance surfing, not Joel Tudor.
I’ve had my chance .
Fuck that.
Too bad I thought my salvation lay in the surfing of Shane Herring and his section in the Monty Webber films of the day. I had a bit of a peripheral friendship with a proper Seppophile of the day , we swapped movies and opinions....Momentum 2 vs O ‘Neill vid . Not to say I wasn’t enamoured with the Momentum gear- I loved the music . ,it’s just that I’d just seen Herring in person and was sold.
Too bad that the alternative to the too thin Seppo boards was a too rockered Aussie spaceship.
For the average bonged out Aussie surfer it was all too much .....caught between a rock and a hard place.
Modern surfers have it soooo good.
Yeah it was groundbreaking, no doubt about it, the biggest revolution in surfing since Simon whacked three fins on a board, but if you're young and watching this for the first time you'd wonder what the hell the fuss was about. So many incomplete moves, weird wheely airs, overcooked/undercooked turns, and the boards look like they have sea anchors thrown out.
So for the discerning viewer a bit of context is required.
Oddly I've got about ten fair dinkum banana boards out in the shed, really dig the concept, yet at the time my equipment had more in common with Vetea David. In fact I've still got a few of my boards from that time in the shed too. The contrast is incredible.
Not sure about crew blaming Slater or Webber or Merrick for pushing early 90s surfers onto overly thin equipment. Revisionist history owing to their own gullibility? No-one was forced to ride thin and rockered boards.
Good comments/points, Stu. A Ghost would have looked like an alien craft in the early 90s. A full 2 1/2" less nose rocker? Not far off.
Always knew that I needed volume, and would twist shapers' arms to give me 2 1/2 instead of 2 1/4, but the blanks were mostly so rockered, that it was hard to get board with sensible nose rocker. In that sense, we were somewhat forced to conform to the madness.
So many good boards today. Lucky us!
Hey Island Bay, the blanks in the early 90s didn't actually have much different nose rocker to what you'd find today. The shapers were just taking the nose thickness out of the bottom of blank rather than the top to give the boards such dramatic nose lift. I know this from my re-shaping adventures of recent years. Put a modern rocker template on a 90's board and you'll find there isn't actually a lot of difference through the engine room of the board. Apart from the savagely rockered banana boards most boards were fairly similar to today in regards to rocker. The difference was that they were too thin, too long and too narrow. That was the real problem.
Only if you shape them shorter, either when (as you do) re shaping them, or cutting a healthy bit off the nose.
Oh mate , I ( we ) were gullible as fuck.
Those movies ruled our decision making process and our board choices.
But let’s face it , there weren’t too many options on the racks at the local board shops in the day. I , for one , had no idea what I needed or what I wanted .
Kudos to you for getting your VD boards that I now choose to ride - just like Gabriel Medina.
Like many people , I believe that era of board design heavily compromised my enjoyment of surfing . But I didn’t realise it at the time ! All I know is that I rode so e seriously undervolumned boards for far too long.
Slater fucking me over at the start and the finish of his career !
You’ve honestly got to way up Kelly’s contribution to surfing .....milestones of progression vs the ultimate enabling of the commodification of surfing , the overcrowding and belittling of the hardcore culture , the wavepools and future ludicrousness.
Kelly - No god is pure good.
Is Kelly a God ?
Well, surfing is about enjoyment. Are people enjoying surfing more since Kelly made himself rich at surfing’s expense?
No.
Hey Blowin, I'm actually riding lower volume boards now than I was in the 90's. In the 90's I was riding around 25ltrs, and now I'm down to about 23. You'd be surprised at how much volume some of those 90's boards had. (I know this since I built an immersion tank last year and tested a whole lot of boards)
The problem was that the 90's boards were too thin in relation to their length and width. The difference with modern boards is the amount of thickness and planing area directly under your chest, this is where it really counts for paddling.
I made a fish a year or so ago that is 21.5 litres. It is 2 inches thick. I weigh 67kg. The thing is seriously underwater when I'm sitting on it, but it catches waves better than just about any shortboard I've ever ridden. This is because there's basically a 20 inch wide "skim-board" directly under my chest. I do find it a bit tiring to paddle on a point break so I have some thicker boards for that, but for actual catching waves and riding them it's magic.
Finally, I think the super short, wide board thing is actually adversely affecting some people's surfing now. Like all design movements it's reaching its extreme now. A lot of guys don't really put their boards on rail and their surfing is suffering. It's not as bad as the 90s when we were all having a super bad time, but I think some guys could consider trying slightly longer and narrower equipment. Case in point is how awesome it looked to see JJF doing those power carves at Margs in 2017. It's very hard to put a 5'4" X 21 inch wide board on rail like that.
Got to agree with just about all those comments above.
Stu, pretty heavy pressure from mags, movies, what was available at the time etc etc.
I swallowed it hook line and sinker.
Thankfully, not for too long.
I remember around 93-94 watching Stormriders while whacked and getting on the phone to Thornton Fallander the next day and ordering a quiver of single fins.
Fuck, that felt good.
Few observations:
- I recently dug through mags from the era and a caption in an ASL issue struck me. Photo of Herring and Rommelse with "rocker ships" - perhaps the first time that term was used? - but warning they could only be ridden by elite pros.
- They featured a lot in the media because the best surfers of the day rode them. But I'm yet to read any text anywhere advocating for thin, rockered out boards for Joe Regular.
- There's an argument that Joe Regular is today shepparded more towards inappropriate equipment by way of 'model talk'. None of that existed in 1992.
- Perhaps there was less to choose from, though Jackson Surfboards always stocked a full range, same with Force 9, where I got Stuart Paterson to shape my boards during that era, and on the Coal Coast Paul Nichol deliberately bucked the trend with his flat rocker, flip tail biscuits shaped for Big Unit Jason Gava that also sold off the rack and were advertised in Tracks every month.
I've read it too many times that Slater is to blame for putting a generation of surfers on bad equipment, as if in his quest for world titles he cared about what us plebs rode.
Excellent point , totally accurate.
Fortunately, due to my current mental state I’m externalising my locus of control and therefore don’t have to accept responsibility for any of my actions past or present.
So I think you’ll find that it’s still Kelly’s fault.
IMHO he looks heaps better in his lowers section on Black and White.
Remember this is from 1990 almost 30 years ago, at the time this was so far ahead of anyone else.
Doesn't look slow, heaps of flow, power but still loose, boards look fine, even today this surfing would get decent scores. (2:10 onwards)
Would love to know the dims etc of the board he was riding to compare, maybe there is an article in this?
Fascinating discussion.
From my viewpoint surfing in South Oz the early 90's (in my late teens.. i.e. at a time when I was absorbing anything and everything), my recollection is that these thin, highly rockered banana boards were almost non-existant in the lineup.
Every now and then someone would come home from a couple of months on the Goldy with a banana board under their arm, but they never seemed to work in South Oz.
Despite personally having very little knowledge about board design, I remember many conversations with other surfers along the lines of "they're East Coast boards, meant for East Coast waves". And local shapers had the viewpoint that their shapes were better for local waves (at the time I was riding boards from Andy Inkster and Shane Ellis).
Most of the East Coast boards ridden in SA at the seemed to be Pipedream and Shaping Co (via OceanGraffix), or the odd Hot Buttered or Nev, but they were a small percentage overall - most crew I knew were riding local designs.
Would love to hear from some of the local shapers whether my memory is correct or not!
I was thinking the same when i think back to this time in SA too Ben. Indeed it's an epic convo. Loving hearing crew's perspectives on design.
@Ben. I got couple of custom boards from Weasel Bedford around that time and I remember asking him for more rocker than the previous ones because that seemed to be the design flavour at the time. Weasel of coarse talked me out of it and made me boards with rocker that worked for me and waves I was surfing. Good boards those two[both pintails,one 6'7" the other 7'1"], I surfed a lot of good waves on those boards. Looking at them now they both have little less volume than I'm riding now, but of coarse i'm now old and slow. I got Weasel to shape me one last year just for Dribs. This one is wide and thick with little less nose rocker and it goes unreal at 4ft plus Dribs but I can't make it fit into real waves[KI and out west], so I ride my normal boards in those waves.Horses for courses ay. Trust your local shaper.
Occy was never under volumed his whole career was he?
Yeah he is riding 35lt plus these days
.
Think it's also worth noting that US manufactured boards come from a whole other supply chain.
Anyone who has shaped a Buford vs Clark knows there was definitely a big difference in density of foam.
It just most shapers at the time were all about reducing the(meat) from the nose of the board. Something about swing weight.....
Just destroying the ability of the board to plane in the process.
Throw in a heinous amount of nose rocker and hey presto....
The worst era of board design period.........
I remember getting a custom around that time and talking to the shaper about lack of drive on the board. Rather than talk about the rocker or volume, he suggested the fins should be further forward on my next one to improve it.
Easilly worst board I ever owned, so hard to get a good board that could be surfed by the non pro in the mid 90’s.
Here is an interesting thought the very next year in 94 Tom Curren rode a 5,7 fireball fish at very solid Bawa
From long and thin and curved the pendulum swung towards short and thick and flat. Well, maybe not the pros but fireballs and fish took off.
The nineties may have had some dubious design moments but it was always interesting.
Are we going to talk about this maybe ? Searching for ? 5' 5"×19'×2' 1/4"?.....
That's the best of the nineties imho...
There's a bit about it here, LD: https://www.swellnet.com/news/surfpolitik/2013/09/20/revolution-undermine
Curren, Biolos, and Hynd.
Nick Blair knocks out a nice Fireball Fish.
Gdday to all,
thank you again for very interesting comments re design.
I know I am stating the obvious, but just thought it appropriate for the discussion to outline the sales process that usually seems to unfold for our industry. Of course there are exceptions, those individuals who actually know what works for them.
People who sell stuff tend to make things that people want to buy.
I find that surfers place a great deal of importance on credibility when it comes to choosing a surfboard. Its always been that way and I think this makes us a bit like herd of sheep. That influence comes from either seeing the success of a design being used by someone they know and respect,(more design related) or seeing the use of a product by a successful surfer in media or on tour for instance. (more brand related)
So average dude surfer walks into a shop and looks at the gear on offer, the sales guy at the particular point in the conversation simply says such and such rides this and may show a few photos or video of someone ripping in perfect clean waves to nudge the sale...................OR the guy has already seen the media and just goes looking for the product. Either way what the leaders ride has massive influence on everything. Always has and certainly did in the 90s as much as any other era. The truth is that most people are riding something roughly similar to whats being ridden in the circus, whether they actively sort that or that influence filtered down to their local shaper.
@The Shaper.
The 90's were also a really weird time for small time shapers also.
At least in my area very few surfers were allowed into the shapers bays .(
The shops/ retailers in my area, had store fronts with little to No manufacturing being shown to most consumers...(first of the imports)
A big change from say the late mid 80s.
I really respect the average surfer though, and I think its a bad thing to generalize people (surfers) as "sheep".
Its such a ......misused generalization.
So in the nineties the media fractured also Quik started paying Kelly top dollar (also signed him exclusively re no other sponsors).
They media promoted him and machado and a hand full of other ie (momentum generation).
They shaped them radical equipment . it ushered in a new generation of surfers who figured that this was the best form of surfing .
The shops then stocked the shelves with similar or replica product. Momentum ushered in the era of the ghost shaper and the shaping machine.
Lets not forget get Greg Webber though.+ shaping machine + baked bean.
Globalisation crept into surfing......
Reckon the trajectory of shaping machines was set before the Momentum generation came into being. Nev had his first pantograph in '88.
Enterprising individuals such as Nev were looking for ways to give a more consistent product with less labour input and open up the supply chain with a global perspective.
The first big step in this direction was the revamped fin systems in 1991/2 I think it was. People don't understand the true impact that this has had on the supply chain. Very significant indeed.
You could also add the Byrne brothers to that list because they were really the first to sell the "protec" finish, which was of course a less labour intensive finish than the full gloss polish. The catch phrase was that it was faster in the water..........in truth it was faster to make.....but we all loved it.........its still in all the shops today.
Re Byrne.
I am forever grateful for that revolution.
I can not stand hot coats on boards unless it's an 80's 70's original.
It's a waste of material , that in my opinion makes the board too stiff.
Cal marketing gimmick to hide a bad glass job.....
I might go in and have a chat to Phil about that.
yea that pretty much sums up my point Lanky. You can use any term you wish to describe the mob. Its quite a bit more fragmented now of course. People are much more open to alternatives if they see them working of course. I was a grom working in factory shop enterprise when Simon won Bells and then PIpe. The shop was full of twin fins. Overnight they became worthless. We were pulling them off the rack and glassing a third fin on them just to sell them. lol! That in its self tells you something. No way would those boards have worked, but they eventually all sold because they had the latest thing that people were seeing in the media.
True, but it was Kelly and that whole New School push that brought it on strong.
Remember those days were pre-internet so movies and mags were close to all powerful.....what they put out and covered was what mattered.
Go look at US mags from that time, particularly Surfing when Nick Carroll was editor.
The coverage of Slater and the new school was almost total.
It's like nothing else existed.
I think now, in the age of the internet, the non pro rec surfers would have called bullshitt on that equipment very, very quickly.
As it was it took Curren at Bawa, Litmus and the Biolos fish to really get the backlash going.
I will be honest I had a couple of "slim" egan 6'0" ×18" ×2' 1/8" rounded pins in the early mid 90's
Some of the best boards I ever owned. I just had to surf them in decent waves.
Sam didn't go overboard with the rocker though.
Man those boards worked though...........absolutely magic.
It wasn't all bad back then.
And what about the sound tracks from those surf flicks?? Bands like Pennywise, Sprung Monkey, Offspring naming just a few all that I'd never heard of before... they turned in to instant favourites the sound track of grommethood surfing in the 90s!
What is that weird slide thingy at :26? I dig it.
Fascinating,
After watching some clips from those times it seems to me that the guy that stands as a bridge in surfing progression between Tom Carroll and Kelly Slater was Martin Potter. When you watch his surfing from around 1989, you can see the similarity with Kelly Slater's style a couple of years later.