During one of those COVID summers, John John Florence asked a favor of Jon Pyzel. He wanted five surfboards. Normally, that wouldn’t be a strange request, but this time, John John wanted them to be different from his usual boards.
“Just five fun boards for small waves,” John said during the explanatory sit-down in the video above.
“You never ride weird boards, basically,” Pyzel said. “So we were like, ‘let’s do something… fun.'”
One of those boards ended up being what they would eventually call The White Tiger. It was one of John John’s favorite surfboards — which is saying a lot, since he rides a lot of surfboards — but it took him a year or so to actually ride. Once he did, though, he became a little obsessed with it.
“I just like the speed and the looseness of it for small waves,” Florence explained. “For me in small waves, if you’re going fast and having fun, I feel like that’s the ultimate board. I was doing that on this board, but as you can see, it’s very much a fun shape.”
But a fun shape isn’t exactly something a surfer can ride on tour, so when he returned from a trip to Fiji (a trip in which one of these boards was blown overboard, so find it if you can), he asked Pyzel to make him something that worked the same, but was more of a regular shortboard.
Pyzel, being the shaper that he is, of course said… no. Eventually, however, he came around. They got to work making a 5’10”. It was basically the same shape, but stretched out. A little more refined. Something that would handle a little bit of oomph if it needed to. And that board? Well, that was the Red Tiger.
John John has a recommendation if you were to decide to order one of these. A few inches shorter and about an additional liter volume than you usually ride. And while there is absolutely no way it’ll make you surf like John, it might make you have a little more fun… which is the whole point of it, right?
