For 24 Hours, Watch Every Episode Of Andy Irons & The Radicals — Free

Editor’s Note: The 24-hour window has closed, but if you missed it, episode 1 is still free on YouTube (see below). If you want the rest of the series, Stab Premium’s waiting with open arms.

Fifteen years gone, and Andy Irons is still the book we can’t close. His surfing remains the benchmark, the standard by which everything else is measured. Nothing’s ever quite as good. It’s always the best since Andy.

It’s no exaggeration to place him at the summit of surfing history. Talent, charisma, mythology — he’s at the apex of every measurement. Yet, his story was brief.

“From ’98 to 2005, we were un-fucking-touchable,” says Bruce Irons in episode 1 of Andy Irons and the Radicals.

Those are the years people point to when they speak of Andy. His prime, both fleeting and eternal. Unstoppable when he decided it. He bested Kelly Slater at his most calculated, three years straight. The fourth, Slater nudged him just barely, after dedicating everything to reclaiming what he’d lost.

While Slater’s focus was singular, Andy’s was divided. He lived just as intensely outside the water, fighting a demon not in white neoprene, but in black, and one far more relentless than Kelly ever was.

The story of his tragic passing is well-known, but no less painful in its retelling. In 2010, after withdrawing early from an event in Puerto Rico, he boarded a flight back to Hawaii to be with his pregnant wife, Lyndie, and the son they were about to welcome into the world.

He never made it past Dallas, and he would never meet Axel. 

Despite the darkness that ultimately claimed him, Andy Irons still defines everything we miss about the halcyon days of surfing, and everything we hope the sport can still be. The highs, the lows, the beauty, and the wreckage. Look around, and even in death, his influence is undeniable. 

Crosby Cola, in Jacob Vanderwork’s new film, Feels Like Yesterday, performed what might be the most outrageous backhand three-piece ever seen at Cloudbreak, and, inevitably, was compared to Andy. Skai Suitt, just 15 years old, born the year Andy passed, won the Lady Birds division of Stab High with Andy’s signature spray. And everywhere you go, on beaches across the world, you’ll find his ankle slapper board shorts — perhaps the most remixed artefact from the era. An accidental fashion icon, whether he ever meant to be or not.

Today marks 15 years since Andy Irons passed. In his memory, we’re running every episode of Andy Irons and the Radicals — free, for 24 hours. Enjoy below.