The G-Land event in 1997 is one of the most important chapters in the surf contest history book. Kelly Slater, a man who has seen more surf contests than most, spoke of it with reverence.
“No other event has changed the vision of the tour so much,” he said. “G-Land made the world tour an adventure and started the ‘Dream Tour’ as it were. The excitement of going there for the first time for an event in the middle of nowhere with all that history of surfers past like Gerry and crew made it that much more exciting… None of us knew what we were getting into and figuring the wave out as we went was an amazing part of the process.”
The fabled wave, at the time, was still a little less touched by the hands of the tourism and surfing industries, and although the waves certainly showed up, there were some moments surrounding them that stuck out in Slater’s mind.
“Someone found a floating skull on the shoreline,” he remembered of the first event in ’95, which Slater won. “Kalani Robb got malaria, I touched a green mamba in a tree, rats were stealing all of our snacks and dragging them to the sides of our huts. It was adventure and competition all wrapped up into one.”
Hell, Mr. Pipeline himself, Gerry Lopez, once noted that he preferred G-Land to Pipeline. “It was our surfing monastery,” he said.
After the first Quik Pro G-Land happened 1995, the event ran for two more years, then was slashed from the schedule for a pile of social and political issues that, for the sake of time, we’re not going to get into. But now, all these years later, it’s back on the Tour. It’s just around the corner, in fact, with the horn sounding on May 28. With that in mind, we thought you might be interested in having a look back at the 1997 Quiksilver Pro G-Land.
Lucky for us (and you), Tim Bonython has a raft of footage from throughout the years, that particular event included. Behind the scenes, in front of them, and everywhere in between, Bonython was there for all of it. And the video you see above is his gift to all of us.
Back in the nineties, I worked a lot with Quiksilver working on all their ASP events both in Fiji/Cloudbreak and Indonesia’s Grajagan off the eastern end of the island of Java,” he wrote on Surfing Visions. G-Land is a world class left hand point break set in Purwo National Park. Back then things were a bit rough, but one thing was assured and that was constant ,pumping waves. This edit includes interviews from contest director Rod Brooks, surfers Ross Williams, Sunny Garcia, Michael Lowe, Pat O’Connell, Kelly Slater, as well as from surf photographers Jason Childs and Maurice Rebeix, lifeguards/Hawaiian Water Security Terry Ahue and Melvin Pu’u.”
And if this doesn’t get you excited for the upcoming event, we’re not sure anything will.
