theinertia.com - Riding in the Barrel: What’s the Big Deal?
Why do we make such a big deal about the barrel?
So far as my research goes, the first depiction of an honest-to-god, “I did this deliberately” tube ride can be found in Bruce Brown’s 1965 classic documentary The Endless Summer. So much better known for his Cape St. Francis segment, in which out of whole cloth Brown created the myth of “the perfect wave,” in one of the film’s earlier sequences Brown makes another potent declarative statement. In a brief, two-wave sequence in which Island surfer Wayne Miyata is shown riding a short, hollow wave called “Garbage Hole,” by swinging in behind it’s three-foot peak, getting completely covered by the curl and emerging cleanly on the shoulder, Miyata is described by Brown as doing surfing’s “ultimate thing.”