This week I posted a clip of Narrabeen Col Smith (not to be confused with Newcastle Col Smith), and the historian in me is frustrated at the complete lack of context. This happens all the time with EOS videos. Maybe one in a hundred people watching Smith will get how advanced his trip was. Everybody else will (hopefully) groove along to the '70s vibe, or (just as likely) shrug and wonder why I bothered making the clip at all. Smith is not a pretty surfer and, let's face it, what he was doing in 1972 doesn't much thrill in 2018.

Surf photos often age well. Film, on the other hand, rarely does. Motion is cruel—that's when you see the equipment limitations, the undeveloped body mechanics. How many of our legendary really translate well from their day to ours? Just a handful. Lopez at Pipe. Phil Edwards and Miki Dora, if you like jazz and improv. Mid-'60s David Nuuhiwa. Tom Carroll at Sunset. Tom Curren at Jeffreys. Not many others, though. If you're old enough, surfers from the past can speak to your heart. But the younger you are, the less context you have—in terms of your own surfing experience, and your understanding of where surfing was at various points in time—the less chance you will connect with the historical stuff unless you have some wrinkled pedantic glasses-wearing know-it-all flapping in your ear.

Let's have a look at how the backside off-the-lip went from prehistoric to Col Smith to now.

You know the move. An open-shoulder backside turn off the bottom, followed by a sharp-angled ascent up the face. Poke the nose over or through the lip, then a pinwheeling 180-degree (more or less) turn, using your lowered head as a center point, and a vertical descent back down the face. Fast and powerful. The bullwhip of surfing maneuvers.

A little over 50 years ago, this turn didn't exist. Not even in the imagination. Riding backside, in fact, was pretty much a chore. Watch here as Dora, Nuuhiwa, and Weber all struggle.

Old surfers can guess where this is going. As with all things having to do with high-performance surfing fundamentals, you follow the trail all the way back until you end up at Wayne Lynch. The clip below, shot during the 1968 World Championships in Puerto Rico, doesn't show Lynch at his progressive best, but you can at least see that where the first three surfers (Corky Carroll, Al Byrne, David Nuuhiwa) have zero interest in any lip work (Carroll and Byrne leave the closeout section at the end of their respective waves absolutely begging), Lynch is very much hunting it down.

And keep in mind, Wayne was just a few months from attempting, and occasionally making, turns like this:

Here's a quick detour, although it relates to what we're talking about. This just occurred to me. At the bottom of a wave, when the red flag goes up, the defensive move is to crouch. This makes sense: if you're going down, you're already in a ball. But the defensive move while at the 

 of a wave, on the other hand, frontside or backside, is to straighten up. Why? I'm guessing, but probably it's because if you're elevated, and things are falling apart, the natural reaction is to be heads-up and scanning for a soft place to land.

Anyway, the most common mistake our pioneering backside shortboarders made—apart from the dodging the lip altogether—is to not commit to a crouch while moving up the face, or to come out of the crouch too early. Nat Young is the period's blue-chip surfer, and the guy I have the most footage of, and I don't mean to pick on him here. But you can see here that, unlike Lynch, Nat doesn't really want to get low and compressed up there in the business area around the curl. Nobody did. Except Wayne and a big blonde Viking from Narrabeen named Col Smith.

That's not completely true. It was Lynch and Smith and a few others. Before we get to Col, here's a quick take on Angie Reno, shot in 1969 and featured in 

and believe me when I say that at the time, in California at least, this turn was considered the very outer limits of radical. Blew us right away. How Angie did it on a rockerless eight-something full-race gun makes it all the more mysterious and wonderful.

Aussie filmmaker Steve Core shot most of his debut movie 

 in 1971. "Audiences outside Australia will be surprised at this film," 

 magazine said in their review. "It's the new surfers who are interesting, including Terry Fitzgerald, Col Smith, Simon Anderson, Ian Cairns, and two Queenslanders of special note, Peter Townend and Michael Peterson." This is the part I love: "The wide variety of styles [in 

] will bewilder many. The wiggles, the arm-waving, the maneuver-mad approach will sometimes seem grotesque to the stylist." For God's sake. California surf media, still angry and hurt after the '66 world titles; still being a little bitch to the Aussies. We deserved every bit of the international pummeling that came our way in the 1970s, we surely did.

Anyway, that line about wiggling and arm-waving was aimed squarely at Peterson and Smith. MP is by far 

 most progressive surfer in, and his style, like that of Phil Edwards', has an offbeat pop and twang that makes it appealing even today. What Smith brings to 

 is limited almost solely to the topic at hand: the man has somehow, all at once, unlocked the mysteries of the backside off-the-top. The clip below begins with Col, then sprints all the way to Italo Ferreira. Smith is the guy you've probably never seen before. Watch those first three rides closely. The torso pivot and turns ahead of the board. The back arm swings around. Front arm points up the face. Head down for the whip. Shift weight to the front foot; back foot inscribes the arc. Hold the crouch. Don't let up too early. What you're not seeing here is the way Smith could do this on repeat. Four times a wave at times, one blast after another. "Col Smith is tall and spindly," one of the surf mags said in 1969, "his blonde hair is never tidy and he wears the same shorts all the time. But who the hell gives a damn anyway. His feet are size 24 or something ridiculous. He pulls off vertical re-entries which snap the mind."

Two more points. First, even with Smith showing the way, it was 10 years or more before this level of backside smash was commonplace among the world's best surfers. Otherwise progressive, radical surfers never fully figured it out. Larry Bertlemann didn't. Ian Cairns didn't, or Michael Ho, Bobby Owens, on and on. Nobody in 

 does a backside turn to compare with Col Smith in 

, the only surfer who does a Col Smith turn is the 

 Col Smith, the one from Newcastle. No doubt I'm missing some names, but the only person who comes to mind from the '70s who really nailed this turn is Mike Purpus. Not until Simon Anderson gave us the Thruster in 1981 did the backhand whip become something you'd see on the regular. (Twin-fins, high-performance surfing's greatest mixed blessing, were especially difficult to ride backside.)

The other thing to say out is that, while we've added a few tweaks and variations to the move (fins out, slides, spins), the DNA is lifted straight from Col Smith's original rendering. He's out there somewhere, Col is, hear untidy, same shorts, and when he gets to Italo at the end of that clip he'll feel that turn in his feet, chest, and head.

WATCH: BACKSIDE OFF-THE-LIP TIMELINE, FROM PHIL EDWARDS TO COL SMITH TO NOW

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