Hang 10

Hang ten foot positioning

Longboarding maneuver during which the rider hangs all 10 toes off the front end of the surfboard—the most celebrated form of noseriding. "Getting ten," Florida surf journalist Jim MacLaren wrote in 1995, "separates the good noseriders from everybody else."

Surfers generally prepare to hang ten by trimming the board across the wave face and cross-stepping to the front. One of the sport's most difficult and delicate maneuvers, hanging ten is possible for the most part only on smaller waves; rarely is it possible to hang ten in surf over four feet.

California surfer and boardmaker Dale Velzy is occasionally cited as the first surfer to hang ten, in 1951; it's possible that noseriding surfers in Waikiki, especially Rabbit Kekai, were hanging ten in the late '40s on their finless hot curl boards—although it's unlikely they were able to backpedal and return to a trimming position. Californians Mickey Dora, Mickey Muñoz, and Dewey Weber, in the late '50s, were among the first to consistently hang ten, but Malibu specialist Lance Carson is sometimes named as the first real master of the art, having all but perfected the maneuver in the early '60s. Hawaiian-born David Nuuhiwa made further refinements in the mid-'60s.

Hanging ten, and noseriding in general, fell out of fashion after the late-'60s shortboard revolution; longboarding and noseriding regained popularity beginning in the late '70s, and by the early '90s California teenage longboard phenomenon Joel Tudor was hanging ten with a style and consistency that surpassed anyone from the original longboard era—Carson and Nuuhiwa included.

"Hang ten" is second only to "wipeout" as the most famous surfing phrase, and is familiar to nonsurfers across the English-speaking world.

See also

• List of tricks

Bibliography

• http://encyclopediaofsurfing.com/entries/hang-ten