Philip Andrew “Andy” Irons was born on July 24, 1978, in Lihue, Kauai, and learned to surf on the island’s shallow reefs alongside his younger brother, Bruce. In 1998 he won the world junior title.

Filmmakers were onto the Irons brothers early. Bill Ballard traveled with them in the mid-1990s and put a teenage Andy in Insanity and the HIC film Rise and Shine (1995), and Larry Haynes filmed them at home in Kauai Boys On The Edge (1997).

He won three world titles in a row, in 2002, 2003 and 2004, and his rivalry with Kelly Slater became one of the great stories in surfing. He won the Pipe Masters four times, the Triple Crown of Surfing four times and 20 events on the Championship Tour, the last of them at Teahupo‘o in 2010.

Andy died on November 2, 2010, at 32. His son, Axel, was born a month later. He was inducted into the Surfing Walk of Fame in 2008, Hawaii named February 13 Andy Irons Day, and his story was told in the documentary Andy Irons: Kissed by God (2018).