Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [81]
I use the word addiction deliberately. The simplistic view writes off what Parsons and his friends do as somehow optional or voluntary—people assume that what they do is somehow chosen. This leads many to conclude that big wave surfers are either outright crazy or utterly selfish and self-destructive. The truth seems to actually be anything but. Mike Parsons and his friends are prisoners. They just don’t seem to know it.
One fine day in 1973, Robert Parsons was alarmed to find his seven-year-old son perched on a high cliff near their home above Laguna’s Three Arch Bay in Southern California. “What are you doing up there,” he asked young Mike.
“I wanna know what it would be like to take off on a wave at Waimea Bay,” was the reply.
Bob wasn’t terribly surprised. When Mike was three, he knocked out a tooth downhill skateboarding. A few months later, he learned to ride a bike without training wheels. When Mike was four, Bob paddled him into his first waves at San Onofre, and by seven, Mike had won his first contest. “He had such athletic ability and was just so determined from an early age,” says his mother, Jodi.
Mike ran, leaped, and fell with seemingly reckless abandon. He excelled at soccer and little league baseball, and when his parents took him skiing, he would find the best guy on the mountain and follow him down like a kamikaze pilot. But Bob and Jodi soon noticed an incongruity in their little hellman. Mike may have been nearly impossible to track, but he was well-behaved and seemed to generally abide by his parents—sometimes to a fault. One day at Big Bear Mountain, Bob sent his tyke up the rope tow with the instructions, “Don’t let go.” Near the top of the hill, a sharp-eyed ski patroller realized that Mike was moments from having his hands run through the massive pulley at the end of the line. “I said, ‘Mike, you’d have gone through that and crushed your hands.’” Bob recalls. “He said, ‘Dad, you told me to hang on—so I did.’”
When Mike was six, his family moved to Three Arch Bay. Mike’s boyhood home is a small, one-story shake-shingled cottage, built during an era when Laguna was a far less expensive community of artists, hippies, and cosmically tuned wave riders. It’s set just off the Pacific Coast Highway above a thin crescent of desert chaparral, palm trees, blond sand, and azure sea. The waves aren’t world class, but they’re punchy, fast, and perfectly suited to high-performance wave riding. When the swells get big, the outside peak can be downright intimidating. “It was the ultimate spot to grow up,” says Mike. “Almost surreal. It’s hard to believe I had such a setup as a kid. It was the kind of place where parents would just let the kids go, and you could just run around all day and night. When the waves were good, there would only be three, four, maybe five of us out. And in the winter, when it got big, I was always the ringleader—even from an early age.”
During these years, a glitch was revealed in Mike’s auditory processing that made it initially very difficult for him to learn to read. He struggled through elementary school and was heckled even by his friends. He was eventually enrolled in a visual learning program at a school an hour away—a place he hated. Yet he rarely missed a day, and chose instead to channel his anger and embarrassed frustration into bravery and athleticism. “I wanted to do something no one else could,” he says. “It was like, people can say what they want about me, but I can prove that I’m better at something, too—I’m braver than they are. I’d skateboard the highest hill, go the fastest, and crash the hardest. When I started surfing, I wanted the wave of the day. I would be pissed off and completely distraught if someone caught a bigger wave than me.”
In the ensuing years, Mike would go on to enter arguably more surf contests than any person in history, and he has never missed a roll call for a heat. It’s also likely that no father ever watched his son compete more. Bob Parsons developed a reputation among Mike’s friends as a fervent