Surfing is in a weird place right now. An awesome place, to be sure, but a weird place nonetheless. Boundaries are being pushed harder and harder. With each mega-swell, the level of what’s “big” gets a little higher. That’s why it’s nice to look back every now and again.
The clip above, for instance, if from Greg MacGillivray’s Free and Easy. It features some of history’s greatest surfers, like David Nuuhiwa, Jock Sutherland, and Greg Noll. They’re at Pipeline when it was just becoming the world’s most well-known wave. Only a handful of people ever surfed it, and they were largely considered to be wild men. Now, of course, most of the waves in this clip wouldn’t even make it past the cutting room floor, but that doesn’t mean they’re not still great to watch.
