- Ben Mondy
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- surfer.com
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- October 28, 2025
You get old. Nostalgia kicks in. Hard. You’ve spent the first half of your life trying to kill yourself. You will spend the last half trying to keep yourself alive. Things change. Surfing changes; man-made waves. 720’s in the air. Very small bikinis. Jetskis.
And then, on the googlebox, up pops a series of highly functional, highly technical, and for me, highly emotional series of layback barrels ridden by Glen “Mr X” Winton from 1985. Memory, as Oscar Wilde said, is the diary that we all carry with us. The Larry, named either due to the ease of alliteration or from forehand layback pioneer Larry Berteleman, is a move that still really tugs at my testicles.
For those born after this clip was filmed, a backhand layback is a tube style that has largely gone out of fashion. You can blame Andy and Kelly, the pigdog, and then the no-hands technique, for the slow death of one of surfing’s most esoteric manouvres. In the 1970s and ‘80s, however, it was de rigour. Simon Anderson at Narrabeen, Matt Kechele at Sebastian Inlet (back when it barrelled), and Dane Keolaha at Pipeline, were among the best practitioners.
Half ballet, half yoga, getting a backhand barrel often required buckling your knees and contorting your body into the very shape of the wave. The board was leveraged with the strange pivot points of your toes and shoulders, and your back arm as the rudder.
Mr X, who was riding self-shaped quad fins in the 80s, and paired front foot deck grip with paddling gloves, was not only one of the most inventive surfers on the planet, but an absolute wizard when it came to the manouvre. This sequence above was at Kirra, which, after Pipe, and before it was covered with 400 megatonnes of the Tweed Riverbed, might be considered the move’s spiritual home. It could be argued that James “China” O’Connor and Neal Purchase Jr perfected this unique backside technique to the point of absolute mastery.
However, as the pig dog took over, the move started to become rarer and rarer. Many surf fans might remember the 1988 Pipe Masters heat between Todd Holland and Tom Carroll for the interference that Carroll received that ended his World Title hopes. I remember it for the layback attempt by Holland on a 10-foot bomb, which saw him ejected from the top and shot like a cannon to the flats.
If there was ever an example of the limitations of the manoeuvre compared to the pig dog, that was it. It could have been the death knell. Holland was surfing on a cassette; everyone else had moved to CDs. Yet those surfers with a certain level of flair kept it in their mix tape of turns.
Luke Egan and Occy weren't afraid of looking back. Egan, in particular, perhaps best alchemised the style and functionally of the Larry, often adding rail grabs and sweet tweaks. And despite his advancing years, he has never jettisoned the move. Here, in a clip from 2024, in a look behind the wizard’s curtain, the 50-year-old LE runs through a step-by-step guide and says, “I can get deeper this way.”
In modern times, Mason Ho is probably the surfer who has done the most to keep the Larry in circulation. Again, it comes naturally to surfers who lean into creativity and imagination. Ho inspired Balinese surfer, Nyoman Satria, who you can often see throwing his shoulders against the wall at Padang.
Ian Crane and Clay Marzo are other modern-day impresarios who have also been known to channel their inner Mr X, and use the backside layback to either make barrels look simpler, more difficult, or mainly, just more interesting.
Either way, it’s a turn that is both worth remembering and celebrating. As us old surfer’s knee ligaments are worn thin as graphene, the layback needs to be handed on to the next generation. Next surf, give one a go. It might not be successful, but you’ll get respect.
