When 20-year-old Kelly Slater arrived in Hawaii in 1992, he had already secured the title race and become the youngest ever world champion. However, Kelly knew that obtaining true validation for his title and the respect of his peers hinged on a good result at Pipeline. That meant weaving his way through a draw riddled with pitfalls and rife with aggro. The kid from Florida might have already been a world champ’ but no one was going to just hand him a Pipe trophy as a bonus prize.
We pick up the story mid-way through Gary Dunne’s take on the 1992 Pipe Masters
From the pages of Tracks: February 1993.
…The event started with so much promise – sun shining, wind offshore, the swell an inconsistent but solid six foot plus. At least the 21 locals selected to compete in the only trials contest for a WCT event in ’92 were reasonably happy. After years of complaining that the trials for the Pipe Masters were always held in shitty conditions, they finally got a half-decent day of waves to decide who’d fill the three available spots in the 48-man main event draw.
Having six blokes in the trials final was not a great idea. It was more of a hassling contest than anything else, though the efforts of Liam McNamara, Larry Rios and Johnny Boy Gomes to thread their way into and out of the best waves and progress to the main event was a fair result.
The effort of 17-year-old Pipe local and natural-footer Jack Johnson to make the trials final is worth remarking on for the sole reason that he finished ahead of other Pipe “names” like Marvin Foster, Gerry Lopez and Tony Moniz on the day. Young Jack was understandably stoked with his performance because he’d competed with and beaten a few of his surfing idols. But he wasn’t so happy a couple of weeks later when he snaked his mate Kelly Slater for a wave at Pipe and headbutted the reef – resulting in a broken nose, cuts that required multiple stitches on his forehead and through his top lip, two chipped front teeth and a few weeks out of the water.
Back to the contest. The trials were all over by early afternoon on that first day, which meant seven heats of top 44 pros got to put on their own show. The majority of them performed at least as well as the locals had earlier, but it was really just another chapter in the on-going argument book about the respective abilities of the pros and the locals in Hawaii.
The ten best rides and the ten highest heat scores in the event (see page 37) are a fairly accurate indication of those who stood out at different stages, except for the absence of four of the eventual top eight – Kelly Slater, Gary Elkerton, Simon Law and Tony Ray. They didn’t score highly enough at any stage to make either of the lists, but they deserve more than a passing mention and their prize money for the quality of their overall performances. Elko, Law and T-Ray will just have to accept the passing mention though, because I vowed not to write this much about the event, and I haven’t even talked about the Liam McNamara/Jeff Booth “Biffo Incident”, or the final yet, which warrant a few more words.
Day two ended with the main event round three heat involving Slater, McNamara, Booth and Shane Powell. It’d been a pretty ugly day at Pipe – the surf was only three to six foot with an occasional bigger set and the skies had pissed rain on the contest repeatedly through the day – and then the ugliest incident this little black duck has seen at a pro event erupted.
There were only a few hundred hardy fans left on the beach when Boothy punched a helmeted McNamara in the face a couple of times after a paddling hassle between them in the final few minutes of the heat. The pair were contending for second place at the time, with Liam ahead, and both had plenty at stake in the heat – Booth was in line for a top 16 spot if he progressed, while McNamara was determined to competitively prove his self-proclaimed Pipe Master status this year.
After he was biffed, McNamara paddled to the beach and made a frightful scene -yelling that he was going to sue Booth for assault, that he wanted him arrested by a policeman who happened to be on the beach and that he’d done nothing to provoke being punched.
Surprise, surprise: Booth told a different story. Without yelling it to everyone on the beach, he said that McNamara had speared the nose of his board into his (Booth’s) back and that he’d sue for assault too if pressed. The policeman told them both to go home and calm down, and that only the lawyers would win if they took the incident to court.
The ASP fined Booth $200 for “assaulting a fellow competitor” while McNamara was not penalised, and the pair later apologised to each other over what happened, agreeing to leave it at that. Having listened to both their accounts of what happened and having watched McNamara prove himself an extremely annoying competitor in earlier heats, though at all times within ASP rules, I don’t mind saying he provoked the drama. Boothy’s response, while excessive in his own eyes later, was widely considered to have been “what Liam deserved” for his earlier antics – an opinion I’d find it difficult to argue with.
Now to the final. Before the foursome paddled out, they were assembled on the presentation stage and said a few words each. Liam laid down the challenge when he ended his spiel about reaching the final with: “May the best surfer win.” Sunny and Barton reminded Liam and the crowd the very best Pipe surfers were not in the final, and that the waves were so flukey that luck more than ability would decide the winner. Chalk one up for humility over bravado.
Sunny was actually lucky to even be paddling out after wrenching his already injured left arm in his quarterfinal. A quick trip to hospital cleared him of what he thought was a broken arm, but about 20 minutes into the final Sunny was on his way back to the hospital with concussion after hitting his head on the bottom in a wipeout.
In the 15 minutes he’d been in the water he’d been lucky enough to catch six waves, one of which proved to be the second highest scoring ride of the final – a Backdoor barrel. When Sunny left the water Slater had already notched the highest scoring ride but very little else and for the remaining 30 minutes he, Barton and Liam waited and paddled and waited and paddled in the hope of finding makeable waves and catching Sunny.
Incredibly, with less than five minutes to go Sunny was still leading, but then Slater snuck himself into and out of a smaller Backdoor tube to take a lead of less than a point.
And that was it. Not a great event, not even close. But as Slater put it later: ”That’s part of competition.”
