Watch: Liam O’Brien Pops The Top Off A Couple Warm Ones

It must feel sexy to call yourself a “back-footed surfer”.

You get to feel powerful and show people your tail cancer and otherwise feel a part of the proper camp of foot-to-board weight distribution.

Being a “front-footed” surfer, on the other hand — to use a gendered term for an agender phenomenon — feels emasculating. There’s something court-jester, Peter Pan, Gene Kelly Singing In The Rain about it.

But Liam, being the balanced human that he is, doesn’t fall clearly into either camp. He’s surfing’s very own Switzerland, refusing to lean too hard one way or the other. Perhaps that’s what makes him so enjoyable to watch, particularly on pointbreaks.

The edit you see above is nine minutes of LOB’s freesurfs in and around the Surf City El Salvador Pro, where the south swell that nearly killed Timmy Patterson first made Punta Roca boil.

While back-footed surfers rely on that center skeg to anchor their approach, there’s something satisfying about a surfer who can also use the front of their board to manage speed, control drift, and otherwise mold their surfing to the speed of the wave in a different way.

It’s hard to explain in words, but LOB’s surfing here and elsewhere is consistently good and unique enough to highlight.

We’ll see him next at Chopes, where, if you don’t recall, he fucking goes.