Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [129]
Indeed, what motivates a big wave Surfer to pursue this life? It’s a question the surfers themselves often have a hard time answering. Is it possible, I ask Bill Sharp, that the lure of money is enough? Has the XXL encouraged surfers to bounty hunt for big waves they otherwise wouldn’t go near?
“Let me answer the question this way,” Bill says, and he queues up a video that he shot in November 2008 while at Maverick’s.
On the first wave, Grant “Twiggy” Baker paddles into and sticks the drop on a four-and-a-half-story bomb. Moments later, another wave looms, and Greg Long also bare hands it. But Long doesn’t make it. He free-falls a third of a football field straight down and skids across the water like a polished stone before taking the entire ocean on his head. In less than a second, he is driven thirty feet deep. The wipeout is so violent that Long’s aquaman lungs are almost completely deflated while an instantaneous, crushing pressure change pops one of his eardrums like a balloon. Another wave steamrolls through the lineup. Long still fails to surface.
Shouts ring out among the Maverick’s water patrol. Below the water, Long is suffocating, and the forty-eight-degree water has induced a blinding ice-cream headache, while his ruptured eardrum has given him vertigo. He swims in confused loops twenty-five feet down, circling and twitching like a dying fish. A trio of WaveRunners roar into the seething impact zone. They have seventeen seconds before the arrival of the next wave. Groggily, Long grabs his half-inch-thick ankle leash and climbs it to his surfboard. He surfaces, but his emptied lungs will only accept squeaks of air. He weakly waves to Jeff Clark and somehow manages to grab his rescue sled an instant before the next impact. Steve Long, who’s been watching from the boat with Sharp, drops his head and breathes a long sigh of relief. The Godfather of Maverick’s has just saved his son’s life.
Sharp asks, “Would you be willing to endure that on the outside chance that you might pocket the annual pay of a McDonald’s manager after taxes? And would you then paddle back out the next time it got big?”
No, money alone seems a poor incentive to become a big wave surfer. There are, in fact, too many other ways to earn a paycheck through surfing that don’t involve eardrum-bursting two-wave hold-downs. At best, it seems, the promise of money could only be a partial explanation and incentive for such risk-taking behavior. Indeed, it seems to me that most of these guys—including Laird Hamilton, Dave Kalama, Mike Parsons, and Greg Long—are addicted to the life, not the livelihood.
Then again, even big wave surfers need to make a living, and so, Bill Sharp asks, is it really fair for Laird to imply that money is no motivation for himself? While Hamilton is a highly respected surfer, one who has earned the right to speak out on behalf of the sport, doesn’t his accusation over money amount to a double standard? Sharp wonders: Why are he and the XXL surfers accused of being sellouts when Hamilton boasts sponsors from Oxbow to American Express to Davidoff cologne and has his own line of stand-up paddle surfboards? “How much was he paid to ‘pimp’ Jaws in the film Die Another Day,” Sharp asks. “Why did he split a million-dollar advance with Susan Casey to be a subject in her book The Wave. I don’t think any other surfers she interviewed were offered a bounty.
“Asserting that the guys who surf in the XXL are doing it for bounty—or that I’m somehow leading lambs to slaughter—those are quotes from someone who either has their own agenda to push or does not have any grasp of what goes on in the mind of the big wave surfer. I mean, whether you’re Mike Parsons, Greg Long, or even Laird, you do this because you love it. If we shut down the XXL today, on the next big swell, I can guarantee