stu nettle and the tripkick
Stu Nettle here ..
Some blokes, you know, did ballet with their sisters when they were kids. Just for a couple of years, until the message appeared / what the fuck am I doing here? /
Stu has answered this message with poise and ability – as captured by Jack Pollard in about 1962 {?}
hard to know – so long ago.
This is an early lay-back, high-kick, arms-free, aerial backdraft power-boost. Not everyone was throwing this chicken in 1961, and the judges at the NSW Titles at Bondi in ’65 must have missed Stu’s heat that day – he did one of these on waves 2, 3 and five in the heat he lost and everyone I know thought that he had a chance at Brennan that day, and Nat. Big chance!
We like the lines here, everything is either up down or side-ways. That’s how Stu surfs. He’s the reason they invented helmets for surf photographers. Plus I’m thinking that a deck-pad might lessen the hurt of what’s coming up for the poor bastard.
And we are are acknowledging some tension in expectation of the answer to the question you guys must be asking yourselves right now – is Stu still on the way Up, or Over, or the way Down?
A three-way quandary.
So we called it the Tripkick, trip for triple and kick for whaddya reckon. {trippin’ dude} The 2 years of suburban ballet classes – that’s every Saturday morning in a summer twice over – has come home.
That’s a bold move Stu. Good leg.
– and this dance-chappy needs about double the angle to get near you mate.
petebowes.com 
Oh Pete, I had the moves alright but clearly I was let down by equipment. See my board there, smoothly and stubbornly holding its course for the channel despite being wound up by an arabesque that would make Nureyev climax.
Now fast forward to the present and picture Chippa Wilson or Ozzie Wright or any of the interchangeable tattooed rebels du jour pulling this routine with a feather-weight sunrise star shooter stuck to the soles of their feet. They’d make bank for this sort of malarky. And what did I get? Ritual humiliation and a chronic groin condition.
Some men are born too early.
clif …. I wanna do clif but I don’t have a pic – and al. we could put together a collection, until then all I have is nick carroll in lycra – on a paddleboard.
shearer? him too. somebody must have something incriminating.
The leash ruined progressive surfing. With the invention of the leash (or leg rope you wankers coined it) our young tattooed rebels du jour would be hard pressed to ride out of a move like that without risk of some form of strangulation.
Or is that maybe an early method of measuring wave height?
In any case, your’re lucky you got it when you did Stu. And that’s the truth.
legrope be buggered, stu’s gone for the skyhook there –
Obviously Stu is trying to tickle someone’s fancy, even if it is his own. Nothing if not versatile!
This stuff must make make some of those superior highly elevated all knowing sons of the 80s surfing critiques chew their lips off in disgust what a classic follow up “nice like a crocodile”
Al, are you watching ? .. because you’re next baby –
why not critique the critique NC that’s assuming you can find a relevant picture