Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [118]
Candace called fellow Cortes Bank pioneer George Hulse, who was still shepherding San Clemente’s growing Shoreline Church. Hulse’s one-time mentor now leaned on his young disciple. They talked for a long time. “I’d just taken a class on burnout,” says Hulse. “Larry was just going down the list and reciting the classic—headaches, fatigue, having a hard time staying focused. We prayed on it and I gave him a book. I think it was called Beating Burnout.”
For a while things seemed to improve.
“But he had told me that his headaches had been getting pretty severe,” says Hulse. “I told him, ‘This could be something physiological, and you need to get it checked out.’ Of course, we weren’t even aware of how bad things were going to get.”
Only a few weeks after he and George Hulse first talked, “it really all fell apart,” says Candace. “He’d get lost at Costco. He had this olfactory thing. When he went to work, he thought he smelled petroleum. One day he drove up on the grass and got escorted home by the police.”
On December 31, 2002, Candace and her mother checked Flame into a Mission Viejo emergency room. A brain scan revealed what Candace had feared. Larry’s skull now shared its space with an aggressive tumor—a grade-four blastoma. Even with emergency surgery, radiation, and chemo, Flame probably had no more than fifteen months to live. Still, surgery was performed, leaving a stunning scar along the right side of his skull, while chemotherapy dripped poison into his veins. The diagnosis and treatment were, of course, hell on Flame and Candace, but it perhaps most profoundly affected their son, Colin, who was not only in his tough middle teenage years but had been deaf since birth. Flame was stripped of his fine motor skills to the degree that it became very tough for him to use sign language. “The burden of parenting really fell on me long before Larry died,” Candace says.
However, for the moment and for the next couple of years, Flame battled with his typical intensity, vastly exceeding his doctor’s expectations and even returning to work at Surfing as much as he could. Flame had documented the rise of a generation of big wave surfers who would come to change the very definition of what was possible on a surfboard. His illness, though, coincided with the sudden rise of a young man who would come to eclipse anything even Flame had ever seen.
While more and more surfers were experimenting with horsepower, none would come to have a greater impact on the future of big wave surfing than Greg Long, who picked up his first tow rope in winter 2003. Long is that rare combination of seriousness, drive, and thrill-seeking guts—a younger version of and a torchbearer for Mike Parsons, his mentor. But Long has also enjoyed the serendipity of being in the right place at the right time: He was lucky enough to catch one of 2003’s most epic waves, and his Kodachrome moment became yet another reason for what happened next at Cortes Bank. Then as the decade unfolded, Long piled up the awards, records, and accolades, while leading the charge to return big wave surfing to its woolliest paddle surfing roots. He would also come the closest anyone ever has to catching and riding Flame’s legendary 100-foot Cortes monster.
Greg was born in 1983 in San Clemente, California, and his father, Steve, was the head lifeguard for all of San Onofre State Beach. Steve and his wife, Jan, raised their three children