It was mid-May when Albee Layer soared off a wave in Maui and did something exceptional, if not unprecedented, on a surfboard. He sped along the wave and then launched into the air, taking off facing away from the beach and turning back toward where he came from — known as an alley oop — rotating a little more than 360 degrees. He landed backward on the wave and then slid another 180 degrees to ride in facing forward.

Days later, video of the move went viral, and soon the surfing, skateboarding and snowboarding worlds were colorfully debating what it should be called.

Everyone agreed that Layer’s move was impressive, but everyone seemed to disagree on whose sporting heritage it evoked. Depending on your point of view, it is:

• Clearly a skateboarding move, and there is already a name for it.

• More like snowboarding, but let's use the skateboarding term.

• Something altogether different and unique to surfing.

I followed along on Instagram as Todd Richards, a former professional snowboarder, sent text messages to pioneers in skateboarding who invented some tricks and have namesake moves. Tony Hawk quickly responded.

Tony Hawk responded to Todd Richards’s question about what he should call Albee Layer’s trick.

Hawk produced a clip of himself doing the same trick as Layer — in 1992. On wheels, not on water:

Tony Hawk from Birdhouse Skateboards Feasters video, 1992.

“My clip was just a mini-ramp trick that kind of went by in a Birdhouse video on VHS, but his was definitely way more monumental and more difficult as far as I’m concerned,” Hawk told me as I was going down this rabbit hole.

Hawk then shared a sequence of the first known alley-oop air, by Chris Strople:

James Cassimus Chris Strople at the Del Mar Skate Ranch from a January 1979 issue of Skateboarder Magazine detailing the origins of the alley-oop.

“That’s right when I started skating, so I knew exactly, like, who created the alley-oop and where they did it, and I remember the sequence, you know, like it’s seared into my memory,” Hawk said about his certainty of the origins of the trick.

Unprecedented? Depends on whom you ask.

These sorts of debates have become a regular occurrence, and Layer has been involved in them before and since May 21. Other surfers, like Kelly Slater and Mikey Wright, have surfaced naming controversies after revealing new moves. But this episode sparked a few new in-depth conversations trying to get to the bottom of it.

To continue building his case, Richards sent Mike McGill, a former professional skateboarder who invented the inverted 540 known as the McTwist, a similar trick to Layer’s done by the surfer John John Florence. Here’s a response from McGill:

Mike McGill responded to Todd Richards’s question about what trick he saw in the included clip

Skateboarders and snowboarders think they know what to call these tricks because they have been looking at bodies moving in a similar way for close to 40 years. But this is new in surfing, and progression deserves to be rewarded. So who gets to name a move?

Skateboarding evolved from surfing but quickly developed its own identity, and snowboarding drew from both surfing and skateboarding but evolved as well. Even though skateboarders were emulating surfing by riding in pools and on ramps, the progression resulted in techniques not easily transferred to surfing until recently.

“What makes it different from, you know, every other sport is our ramps move,” Layer told me. “So when we do an air maneuver, we’re never taking off at the same angle.”

But this is on water.

So at this point we’ve heard from Hawk and McGill, giants of skateboarding. Enter Kelly Slater, the most famous surfer in the world. He went back and forth on Instagram with Pierre Wikberg, a snowboarding filmmaker and Richards’s ally, over the question of whether Layer’s move was frontside or backside.

Kelly Slater questioned Pierre Wikberg’s judgment on what to call Layer’s move.

Wikberg’s conclusion was that because Layer’s trick so closely resembled Hawk’s trick from 1992, it should be labeled accordingly.

Pierre Wikberg declared victory after receiving the Tony Hawk clip from Hawk himself.

When I asked Wikberg about this, he told me: “Kelly Slater is the most famous surfer in the world, and for him to be pushing the ‘wrong’ names for tricks deserves to be called out.”

Slater explained his position by saying: “In surfing, you are going in one direction, forehand or backhand. Maneuvers are strictly named so on a wave. Skaters and snowboarders can hit nearly any surface forehand or backhand, natural stance or switch, and so it’s defined differently in my opinion.”

At least one surfer, Freddy Booth, took the skateboarder-snowboarder approach:

Freddy Booth came around to thinking like a skateboarder and snowboarder after going back and forth with Pierre Wikberg.

So where do we stand after all this?

Layer calls his move a “double alley-oop,” attempting to avoid one of the key aspects of the debate: the degrees of rotation.

Slater calls it an “Albee-oop,” avoiding direction or degrees of rotation altogether in favor of using Layer’s name. Although if Layer’s name were different, this might not be as cute of an option, and the bar to having a namesake trick is debatable.

“I think the unwritten rule for skating at least was if you did something truly unique, you get to name it,” Hawk said. “In these days, it's very hard to do something that isn't just a combination of existing tricks, and you would just give it that name.”

For his part, Hawk calls Layer’s move an “alley-oop 540,” counting the final 180 degrees rotated on the wave in the name, similar to sliding the final half rotation on a ramp. Richards and Wikberg are dead set on “alley-oop backside 360.”

Slater’s frustration with the situation is palpable.

“We’ve got snowboarders trying to tell us how to name surf maneuvers,” he said. “I don’t know a single surfer trying to do the opposite and name snowboard maneuvers. We should all know enough to know we should stay in our lane.”

Layer echoed a similar feeling of frustration. “I think as a whole it’s like no one ever thought of these things; they're just like, oh yeah, it's different in surfing,” he said. “But now that our tricks are getting closer to snowboarding and skateboarding, like with spins and whatnot, we’re going to have to figure this out so we don't sound stupid.”

Richards was the one who got all this started by getting his influential friends to weigh in. I talked to him after things had died down. Let’s give him the last word.

“The problem is highlighted because surfers use the established grab names from skateboarding, which have been adopted by snowboarding,” he told me.

“The way that they add rotations is where the discrepancy begins. And it comes down to if you look at the wave in comparison to a wall on a halfpipe or a straight jump. Surfers look at it more like a straight jump. Snow and skate look at it like the wall of a halfpipe.

“Surfers use frontside or backside to describe their body’s orientation to the wave, but in air tricks, it is in relation to the spin, and in an alley-oop, the orientation and the spin direction are in opposite directions.”

O.K., makes sense. But why is the issue of who gets to name a move so heated?

“Surfers are going to look ridiculous calling something that has been done in a different sport by a different name,” Richards said. “It is about paying respect to the people who came first and pioneered the tricks. They killed themselves to put their names on tricks.”

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I talked with Hawk, Slater and Layer for this article, and they had unique takes on the debate around trick names. Here is an edited version of our conversations:

How do you count rotations?

“The rotations for us (skateboarders), the rotation is very cut and dry. You know it goes in 180 degrees because you can't ride up the wall at any other angle or down the wall than any other angle. And I think the surfers, they measure rotation by where you've left the wave, where you land on the wave, and that doesn't work for us.” — Tony Hawk, on the difference in calculating rotation between skateboarding and surfing.

“It’s more about progressing and sticking things cleanly in sections that make sense for those maneuvers. If you force something and it looks bad, it doesn’t really matter how much you rotated unless it’s a full 180+ more than anything that has been landed.” — Kelly Slater, on the importance of calculating degrees of rotation.

In the end, who gets to decide?

“It’s up to them, and for sure because they're speaking to their tribe that’s going to translate better. And then, you know, as skateboarders we just kind of sit back and snicker. It’s kind of like how snowboarding they coined the term frontside indy, which doesn’t exist in skateboarding, and it’s sort of a taboo to say. But I understand how that came to be.” — Tony Hawk on the who gets to decide in the end.

“So many snowboarders were influenced through skating and by skating that that crossovers a little easier and they’ve actually kind of evolved past our names because now there's, you know, these double McTwist and double corks and stuff and that stuff no one’s ever done on ramps so they're pioneering that and they get to name it.” — Tony Hawk on how you earn the ability to name a trick.

Should we put a name on it?

“I think the unwritten rule for skating at least was if you did something truly unique you get to name it. In these days, it’s very hard to do something that isn’t just a combination of existing tricks, and you would just give it that name.” — Tony Hawk on how you get a trick named after yourself.

“He (Kelly Slater) told me to call it an ‘Albee-oop,’ like there’s no way I’m going to put my name in the title of a trick that already exists, but thanks Kelly.” — Albee Layer’s reaction to the suggestion that the trick be named after him.

“That is pretty rare these days in skateboarding, so I guess it’s more snowboarders that are creating these new things that they can actually have a unique name for. I haven't seen anything out of surfing that I could say would pass that test, that’s so new that you could say like it’s a whole new thing.” — Tony Hawk on naming precedent in other sports.

Do you pay attention to the other sports?

“A group of my friends and stuff just like we started watching snowboarding more and more and it’s just every trick we're probably ever going to be able to do is already being done in the snowboard halfpipe. So it's just it's kind of nice to just have it there and just try to adapt it to surfing.” — Albee Layer on the importance of snowboarding in his surfing.

“The cultures are different and surfers might not know what skaters have called something or maybe each sport wants ownership on some level of their respective maneuvers. Also, in surfing, something we all agree is done on the forehand can be regarded as a backhand maneuver in skate or snow because they have a stagnant surface.” — Kelly Slater on the importance of parity between sports.

“I just think that we've crossed over into skating influence in surfing so much that it's like, all right, these are the tricks that we created on ramps and that's what you’re emulating so these are the names, as far as I'm concerned.” — Tony Hawk on why it is important to use names pioneered in skateboarding.

“I don’t think surfers would get offended by them owning their own names if we created certain ones first, but the super basics will align namewise across the board. Plenty of more variations happen in both skating and snowboarding. Surfing has a different evolutionary timetable for maneuvers and so maybe those don’t exist in surfing until done on a surfboard and need to be differentiated for surfing.” — Kelly Slater explains why he thinks the crossover doesn’t matter between sports.