[3] He won at nearly every venue on the ASP calendar, only missing Gold Coast, Brazil, and Portugal.
[4] His younger brother Bruce Irons is a former competitor on the World Championship Tour of Surfing.
During his childhood, Andy regularly lost to Bruce in contests, but that changed once he entered the World Championship Tour.
In 2009, Irons withdrew from doing the full ASP World Tour season for personal reasons, though he did participate in a few events.
He was found by two hotel staff lying in bed on his back with the sheets pulled up to his chin after he had failed to respond to knocks on the door and they went in to investigate.
The Tarrant County Medical Examiner's Office concludes that Irons died from a cardiac arrest due to a severe blockage of a main artery of the heart.
The official autopsy report lists also a second cause of death as "acute mixed drug ingestion", listing alprazolam, methadone, benzoylecgonine (a metabolite of cocaine), and traces of methamphetamine as the drugs found in Andy's body at the time of his death.
[11] Irons had withdrawn from the event citing ill health and was flying back to his home in Hawaii during a stopover in Grapevine, Texas, near Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.
[12] In the days immediately following his death, it was reported that in Dallas, an extremely ill Irons had attempted to board his connecting flight to Honolulu at 11:30 a.m. but was turned away at an American Airlines gate—a claim the company denies.
His wife, Lyndie, and brother, Bruce, scattered his ashes outside Hanalei Bay, where thousands of family, friends, and admirers said their last goodbyes.
The 2018 movie Andy Irons: Kissed by God (directed by adventure-sport documentarians Steve and Todd Jones) is about the three-time world champion who died at 32 after a lifelong struggle with bipolar disorder and addiction.
The 2005 movie Blue Horizon (directed by surfing filmmaker Jack McCoy) paralleled his life on the WCT tour with that of free surfer David Rastovich.
In addition to Blue Horizon, Irons was also a subject of many other surf films, including his screen appearance in Trilogy, which starred himself, Joel Parkinson, and Taj Burrow.
[23]Slater himself was quoted in a Surfer Magazine tribute for Irons: Andy was an absolutely gifted individual.