Amateur Hour: Meet San Clemente’s Cannon Car

While anyone who has surfed Lowers the last few years will be fond of and familiar with young Cannon Car, please allow us to introduce you San Clemente’s pint-sized Taj Burrow, a tow-headed frother with an insatiable appetite for kiddie bowl rights. Cannon’s surfing possesses a maturity and flair well beyond his 11 years, the product of a proper San Clemente upbringing at the hands of his pops, Andy.

“I got the kids surfing young, on a trip to Puerto. Cannon took out a soft board with the fins taken out, just like in the low tide zone. But then immediately after we got back, they were down at Lowers everyday,” Andy tells me, as his youngest son Carson is bolting out the door of their San Clemente home, to head to the skatepark. Cannon is patiently enduring our interview; the waves have been tiny for a few days, and Lowers is firing, fresh southeast swell in the water.

“When Cannon was five, he was out at Lowers with Wardo and all the boys hooting him into bombs. I mean, we live two streets over from Carl’s Jr.* We’ve been here eight years now.”

But Andy ain’t no Orange County square, at least not according to longtime family friend and Cannon’s shaper, Matt “Mayhem” Biolos.

“Andy isn’t your typical “soccer dad,” Mayhem says. “He seems to take Cannon on a lot of dirty little mini surf trips. Baja, etc. gets him tons of waves.”

“I try to take them down to Mexico as often as I can,” Andy says. “We’ve been going down to some favorite mysto points and some pretty off-the-map spots since Cannon was really, really young. It’s been a really special place for us.”

“Andy is a hard-core surfer, one of the few guys who can hang traveling with Chris Ward** (it’s an acquired taste),” Mayhem tells me. “He’s been a friend of mine since before we had kids. Our families are friends. He’s a scoundrel. There’s a lot of little surf kids in this town. I try not to get to excited about it till they get a bit older.  In general, I do better with slightly older kids. I like kids who can work directly with me..not through the dad. Like I’m helping them grow up as well. Teaching them to take care of their own stuff. And I have a semi rule: Dad isn’t allowed to meddle in our relationship unless he surfs better than me. Andy makes the cut on that one!”

Despite Andy and Cannon’s preference of a Mainland Mex strike over a weekend scratching through NSSA heats, young Cannon has collected his fair share of Ws the last few years, including a NSSA Westerns title.

“I’ve always surfed up a division, so I’ve been up against older kids who really push me,” Cannon tells me. “There’s some kids my age or a few years older, like Hayden Rogers, or Kade Matson. And then growing up I was always watching Kolohe and Wardo, or Noah Beschen and Griffin Colapinto.”

You can catch more of Cannon here, and follow his pops, here.

Cannon standing small in a San Clemente cylinder.

Photography

Nick Hartman