Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [130]
I interviewed Dave Kalama about this, and he was clearly conflicted. “We made surf videos,” he says of Team Strapped and he and Hamilton’s own role in the chaos at Jaws. “We organized Sunny [Miller] and the helicopters to get ourselves coverage. That coverage is gonna make it crowded. That’s how being a professional Surfer works. No way we can say, ‘No, you’re not allowed,’ and then we still make money off it. That would be completely hypocritical. But there’s a big difference between that and standing on a podium and saying, ‘Come one, come all.’ Throw yourselves into the gladiator pit. We definitely showcased it, but there was no money on the line.
“When a large multimillion-dollar company says, you know what, we’re going to milk this thing for every dollar we possibly can, it changes it from an individual to a corporate thing…You take a guy like Mike Parsons—he’s fulfilling his sponsor obligations and being able to ride these big waves—that I’m willing to accept, and I think most guys are. It’s the guys sitting in the corporate offices and golfing, and they’ve got nothing to do with it, and they’re making the most money off it. That’s what rubs me the wrong way.”
In fact, when he considers the surfers themselves, Kalama’s tone softens. “Enough time has gone by now that I can look at guys like Snips and Gerr, and I mean, I can appreciate them rather than look at them as competition. I can look at it like, we definitely started a path and opened a door.”
Then, when Kalama discusses the current crop of new-school paddlers— guys like Greg Long, Mark Healey, Twiggy, and a Maui Surfer named Ian Walsh—his tone switches to reverence. “Those guys are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do. Taking the subject matter and rolling through it with a steamroller. I’m almost glad I’m not having to do what they do.”
For his part, Bill Sharp concedes that Billabong puts up the check because they recognize that sponsoring a major event like the XXL is a profitable business decision. But in the last decade or so—and it is something that Hamilton and Kalama help spark—this corporate interest has allowed at least a few surfers to actually make a living chasing adventure, satisfying their addictions, and blowing the minds of mere mortals.
“The core of all of this—the core of my life—has always been about having amazing adventures in places no one has explored before,” Sharp says. “There was no such thing as towsurfing or the XXL when we first went to Cortes Bank. It was done purely for the same reason George Mallory sought to climb Everest or Laird first towed Log Cabins. We did it because it was there. We weren’t thinking, ‘Wow, here’s a wave where people can win the XXL.’ That’s beyond absurd. The XXL is a document of what’s going on in big wave surfing today. It’s a mirror on the sport, not some engine propelling it in the wrong direction. And anyone who alleges that any of the top surfers are riding big waves purely for the bounty is ignorant of what goes on in the hearts of these men—and women.”
Like Kalama, Hamilton’s complaints about the mercenary impulse seem to be in part frustrations over the role of commercialism in surfing in general. Many surfers complain about corporate involvement in surfing, even when sponsorship is the Faustian bargain that allows professional surfers to afford to do what they do. Yet not every Surfer opts in, and the living that even the most successful XXL surfers make would be considered marginal. In 2008, I was out at Maverick’s aboard Rob Brown’s boat with Greg and Rusty Long, and I noticed that Greg had blackened out the O’Neill logo on his garish blue wetsuit. One of the best big wave surfers on Earth, maybe the best, had been surfing for some time with no sponsor at all. Meanwhile, Greg was literally living in his beat up Ford Econoline van down by the San Mateo River, and Rusty was stretching a thousand dollars a month to pay for food, travel, rent, catastrophic health insurance, and gas for his rust-eaten Land Cruiser. Brad Gerlach