Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [152]
I was terribly fortunate to be asked to cover this story for the New York Times, and the next day I went to Mike and Tara Parsons’s tidy home and sat utterly gobsmacked alongside the exhausted surfers as we watched Brown’s photos and Wybenga’s video flash across the screen of Mike’s Macintosh.
The first to actually break the news publicly on January 8 was, of course, Surfline. The following day, the story I wrote, titled “Surfers Defy Giant Waves Awakened by Storm,” appeared in the Times. In no small part because of Brown’s unprecedented photo of Parsons, the piece became the most emailed sports story of the week. It also became the spark that lit the fire for this book.
News outlets across the country picked up the story over the course of the next week. All had essentially the same reaction: These guys are crazy. Brave as hell, but crazy.
New York Times editorial board member Lawrence Downes wrote an essay titled “The Next Sir Edmund Hillarys: Riders on the Storm,” which raised the surfers into the lofty company of history’s most famous adventurer.
Surfers reacted with their own hilarious versions of the same praise. After Surfermag.com’s prolific bulletin board writer Rickoray posted an entry titled “Parsons XXXXXXXXL,” dozens of posts followed:
Spoonfish: Ghost Tree was huge but that shot is cartoon like.
el_calvo: These are the kind of pictures we would draw in our notebooks in school when we were kids. Never imagined that guys would actually ride waves that big.
phisher222000: 2-4’ Hawaiian style. Minors.
Bonzer5Fin: Surflie [sic] has video. Watched it at a big surf industry office today. All the jaded corporate guys just stood there, stunned.
GetShacked: I used to work on a 35ft. steel fishing boat. And we’d get tossed around in 6’ seas. Doing it in the dark with 20’ seas and a waverunner in tow is just simply a bad idea bordering on stupidity or recklessness. But in their case it totally paid off. Snips balls are far larger than mine.
Then, three months later, a newly minted father, his young apprentice, and an insane boat captain took the stage in Anaheim, California, to count blessings and better than $30,000 of Billabong bounty. There was no question, really. Greg Long’s 53-foot wave at Todos was the Monster Paddle Award winner.
Meanwhile, the photos Rob Brown captured of Mike Parsons represented the biggest ridden wave ever captured on film, for which Parsons won a total of $15,000 and the Billabong XXL Biggest Wave Award. In 2006, Bill Sharp altered the XXL format to represent the resurgence in paddle surfing, and he changed the XXL’s main prize to a $50,000 award for “Ride of the Year”—a prize only open to motion picture entries. With no video, Parsons’s ride was ineligible for the top award, which went to a tow-in Teahupoo barrel by Shane Dorian that beggared description—and earned him Surfer’s second ever “Oh My God” cover.
In the end, Flippy Hoffman, Sean Collins, Bill Sharp and the other XXL judges were not even sure how big Parsons’s wave really was. Normally you’d measure the height of the crouched Surfer in his position on a wave and simply take calipers to determine the wave’s height from the trough to the crest by a multiple of the surfer’s height. But in the photos, there’s a wave in front of Parsons that makes it impossible to see the trough of his wave. Eventually, the XXL judges determined Parsons’s wave to be “70 feet plus,” and Sharp sent it to Guinness to have it declared a new world record. And yet, the wave is “plus” by quite a few more feet. In my humble opinion, hidden behind the wave in the foreground, there must be at least another ten feet of slope height to the trough of Parsons’s wave. This would make it roughly 80 to 85 feet high.
In the fall of 2010, I managed to corral Rob Brown and all the surfers from the January 5, 2008, mission at a breakfast joint in San Clemente called Antoine’s Café. We dissected a session that each Surfer still considers the heaviest surf experience of his life. Scrolling through Rob