“My first tube-ride was when I was 5 years old. Mike had me climb on his back and hang onto his neck. He kicked over the ledge at a super scary slab by my house. I hung on for dear life as he came off the bottom and set his edge, I was screaming the whole way. We were so deep I couldn’t believe it, and then we got blown out with the spit! So I guess you could say he influenced the way I ride the barrel, sure.” —Shane Dorian
Bodysurfing is the oldest, purest, and most difficult way to master the act of riding a wave and most aficionados regard Mike Stewart as the best human bodysurfer there has ever been. He merits a place in the top 50 on these facts alone. So apprehension from anyone in the peanut gallery about having a bodyboarder on this list need not waste time building an argument. The case is closed.
His contribution to modern wave-riding, as a whole, is in the portal he has created.
By watching Mike ride waves, the best surfers in the world have been given a view into the future of surfing, and tube-riding in particular.
Michael Alexander Stewart was born in the early ’60s on Oahu. His family soon moved to the Big Island, where his father introduced him to surfing at the age of three. By the time most kids were getting their first swimming lessons, Mike could surf, bodysurf, and bodyboard…really well. As he grew up he found that there was no better way to ride the super square slabs of the Big Island than prone on the flexible planing surface his dad built him from an early Tom Morey bodyboard kit. His decision to commit to prone surfing was based on an early proclivity for progression and a budding obsession for riding in the absolute deepest part of the barrel. In his early teens he would move back to Oahu, experiencing his first session at Pipeline in the late-’70s.
From Gerry Lopez to Marvin Foster to John John Florence, Stewart has shared that magic pole position at Pipeline spanning at least three generations of the hardest charging, most talented surfers in the world. Over three decades he has quietly logged more tube time at Pipeline than any other human on Earth—never snaking anyone, never claiming his rides, and almost never wiping out. Now in his mid-40s he has nine bodyboard world titles and multiple body surfing titles. His film Fire is possibly the most intimate documentation of the ride ever recorded. He is super fit and has a good shot at a 10th title this year. Barring injury, it is likely that Mike will be logging serious tube time in consequential surf into his 60s.
Like George Greenough, his biggest drive has not been competition or commercialism, but an intelligent and calculated desire to push his own experience to the next level. And like Greenough’s influence on Nat Young and his crew in the late ’60s to find a way to ride a wave as deep as he could, Mike has pushed people like Shane Dorian, Kelly Slater, and the Irons brothers. But no matter how deep the last three generations of Pipe surfers got, Mike was there, reminding us that we could always get a little deeper.
long live the maestro!
