The Long Awaited Return Of Solaman Bailey
From CONEHEAD to BONEHEAD.
Violent delights, violent ends. Sometimes.
Vlad, Alexander, Napoleon, Julius, once untouchable figures, all woke up one day in the midst of their empires, and found their reckoning waiting. The power they wielded, the death they spat at for years, came for them all the same, with unremarkable finality.
It might only the pirate queen Ching Shih, who rose from the ranks of village prostitution to command a fleet 1,800 ships strong, and who terrorised the fuck out of the South China Sea with a reign so violent that the very state she once threatened had to recruit her. She brokered amnesty for her entire crew of 70,000 pirates, then called it a day, retired to a small village, opened a gambling house, and lived out her days in peaceful wealth until she passed naturally at 69, with her son holding her hand.
The point is, most of history’s dominant figures see their reigns end suddenly, right when they’re at the height of their power. Soli Bailey very nearly became one of those names plucked from the throne before his time.
“After last year, I felt invincible,” he says at the beginning of his new edit. “And coming into Hawaii, it just felt like it was all clicking again.”
Quick refresher: Soli had himself a year in 2024, before a devastating, near-career-ending spinal injury in Hawaii tore the page. He’d already taken out Natural Selection on a rifling “reverse Teahupo’o” right-hander in Micronesia. Played Timothée Chalamet in Surfline’s Maps to Nowhere. Got wave of the day on the swell of the year at Shippies, did it again at Cloudbreak. And then wrapped it all up with BIIG — a Ments boat trip that he orchestrated from the ground up, and landed in the middle of one of the year’s best swells.
You’d forgive Soli for feeling untouchable.
“Maybe I got caught up in it,” he told us after a long exhale, before laying out the events that took him from the peak of his career to a hospital bed, enduring months of directionless pain, and facing the possibility of never being able to surf again.
Soli landed in Hawaii just after the 2024 Pipe Masters comp window shut. “It was fucking relentless,” he says, of his three weeks spent on the North Shore. “It was six-foot plus for three weeks straight.”
He and Ian Crane were filming a project for O’Neill, surfing six hours a day, every day, dragging themselves out of bed like hungover labourers, joints screaming, shoulders barely functional. “By the end we were peeling ourselves out of bed going, oh my God, another day of crazy waves. I was so burnt out, but the waves just kept coming.”
A wipeout at Off the Wall ended the trip, and things turned serious fast. “There wasn’t a drug under the sun that could fucking kill the pain,” he says. “What started as a crazy pain in my neck quickly turned into my worst nightmare. Doctors told me I couldn’t surf again, couldn’t walk. Just constant pain.”
“I had the choice: risky surgery or never surf again. That one was easy.”
His new edit, BONEHEAD, showcases the riches he was drowning in pre-injury in Hawaii — footage he’s been sitting on for nearly a year. At the end of the edit, we watch a structurally repaired Soli strike a swell to Indo. “Grateful doesn’t even begin to cover it,” he says.
Redemption arc completed, and ahead of schedule.
“It’s been six months of dealing with this injury,” says an elated Soli. “The last two days, getting to come back over and strike a swell, and not re-injure myself is such an incredible feeling. I can’t even think right now. There was a lot of nerves, and a lot of what ifs, and I didn’t feel 100%, but it was close to. It’s been a long journey, 6 months of questioning everything. I’m very thankful.”
It ain’t his time just yet, and there’s no reason to think we won’t see another chapter in his reign.
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