Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [111]
From his terrifying ringside seat, Dana Brown captured a session no less groundbreaking than the waves his father, Bruce Brown, had filmed a generation earlier at Cape Saint Francis in South Africa for the film Endless Summer. Brown and Sharp edited together some footage, and feeds were soon caroming off every TV news network satellite in the sky. It was unprecedented, death-defying, and radiantly newsworthy.
Sharp wondered, if there were occasional 100-footers atop the Cortes Bank, what other freaks of bathymetry and swell lurked just over the Malibu horizon? A “K2” reef set in the bull’s-eye of the Roaring Forties? A submarine volcano far up north? An uncharted reef off Midway Island?
His fertile mind imagined a documentary film project with a simple concept: explore the world with the best big wave surfers looking for 100-foot waves. Sean Collins could provide the forecasting, and the lineup would consist of high-profile members of the big wave fraternity: Mike Parsons, Brad Gerlach, Ken Bradshaw, Brian Keaulana, Peter Mel, Skindog, Brock Little, Shane Dorian, Kelly Slater, and maybe, hopefully, Laird Hamilton, Dave Kalama, and the Maui crew. Since Billabong already sponsored the XXL contest and its thousand-dollar-a-foot annual prize, why not suggest that they offer a half-million-dollar reward to the Surfer to ride the first documented 100-footer? Billabong wasn’t going to let a K2-size opportunity pass them by again, and they agreed. Sharp’s first working title was “Project Sea Monster,” but he soon settled on something a little more dignified—The Odyssey—creating an event and a film that sounded like surfing’s first high-dollar Homerian epic.
Bill Sharp, mapping out The Odyssey sometime in the early 2000s. Photo: Les Walker.
Sharp laid down his logic in an article in Transworld Business, the Wall Street Journal for the extreme sports set. “A lot of pro surfing is about trying to make surfing into a jock-strap sport,” he said. “The Odyssey is Jacques Cousteau meets Evel Knievel meets Crocodile Hunter meets Jackass. It’s not nearly as contrived as having a guy put on a hot pink jersey and try to do forty-seven turns on a 2-foot wave.”
Sharp raised an interesting point. Unlike mainstream sports, which are largely spectator- and competition-driven, surfing is fanatically participant-driven. Many don’t, in fact, consider it a sport at all. That’s why a substantial percentage of surfers view competition and the ASP World Tour as contrived and even antithetical to surfing’s heart, which should ideally beat in soulful communion between Surfer and wave. So even if The Billabong Odyssey was based on a somewhat outlandish premise, it was really more of a globetrotting adventure in the mode of Endless Summer than a further attempt to turn surfing into a middle-class-friendly professional sport like football or Nascar. The same was true of the XXL Awards. In fact, to prevent some renegade glory hunter from doing something profoundly stupid, Billabong’s prize money would only be offered to sixty-four surfers on a predetermined roster. Sharp intended to lionize a cadre of hellmen and perhaps resurrect a few careers in the process. It was not his intention to inspire hordes of glory-seeking yahoos—though that is what he would eventually be accused of.
“We don’t know what the limit is,” he told Transworld. “And that’s an amazing thing.”
Indeed, the waves that towsurfing made available were blowing minds right and left. The year before the Jet Ski allowed Mike Parsons to descend the tallest wave ever ridden, it allowed Laird Hamilton to conquer the thickest at a warm-water freak of nature in Tahiti called Teahupoo (pronounced cho-poo; rough translation “Broken Skulls”). At this break, swells sweep out of four-thousand-foot-deep ocean and lumber onto a five-foot-deep reef. The resulting wave doesn’t go so much up as out. On August 17,