Tom Curren’s style is unmistakable. It’s often emulated, but never successfully–Curren seamlessly mixes power and grace like no one else on earth. He’s never been one to do what everyone else is doing. Instead, he does what feels right to him, looks at what feels good, and expands on it. “Part of surfing, I think, is experimenting with so many different boards,” he explained. “Get involved in what you’re actually riding; the design and what its function is.”
Take, for example, the boards that nearly everyone was riding in the ’90s. Performance shapes were incredibly narrow and short, most with lots of rocker. They were–and still are–difficult to surf on average waves. Unless you had access to steep, powerful waves, the popular shapes at the time were not for the everyday surfer in everyday waves. And right in the middle of all that, in 1992, Rip Curl released the now-timeless film The Search.
In it, Tom Curren had a section surfing a throwback (for the time) board: a short, flat, wide fish. And he was really surfing it, tearing apart sections in a way that only Curren could do, but on a board that worked well for an average surfer on average days. “It was a revolutionary moment that still has legs to this very day,” Ken Lewis wrote on KelpFire.
Although the footage above is old, Curren’s still at it. He’s been riding Tomo’s boards for a long time now, and most recently, he went the way of the Domke and gave a skimboard a shot on a trip to the Mentawais. “Sometimes if things are going exactly they way you want them to,you have to break out of the pattern,” said Curren. “If you’re focused and everything, then usually if you think of something, the best thing to do is to act on that feeling that you’re getting.”
