Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [82]
Bob admits he could, perhaps, go a bit too far, yet Mike insists that his dad only truly pissed him off once. It was during the 1986 Sunset Beach World Cup—one of the most prestigious events in surfing. Mike was a twenty-year-old pro who had the made the finals alongside powerhouses Hans Hedemann, Mark “Occy” Occhilupo, and Sunny Garcia.
“They were calling the finalists to come up onstage,” Mike says. “Me, Hans, and Sunny were there. But Occy hadn’t shown up. Dad saw Occy kind of run off around a house. I think he was smoking some weed or something.” Parsons laughs heartily and continues, “My dad went up to him and made a comment—something like, ‘It was good of you to finally show up.’ Occy starts yelling at my dad. Then he comes over to me and says”—Mike uncorks a pitch-perfect imitation of Occhilupo’s boyish Australian accent—”‘Hey mate, your dad said this and that. I’m going to fight him after the final.’ I was like, ‘Whatever’s going on with you and my dad is between you guys.’ He’s yelling the whole time. I got third, and I was so mad at my dad that I said, ‘You’re never going to come to another contest.’ My dad was so upset. He went to Occy’s house that night—knocked on his door and says, ‘I owe you an apology. I want my son to win so bad, I was out of line.’ Then Occ was like, hugging him and saying, ‘Aww mate, I love my parents, too. They’re just as into my surfing.’ From then on, he and Occ totally hit it off. He was definitely the dad who wanted me to do well.”
“That was probably the stupidest thing I ever did,” says Bob. “But Mike’s right. I was just so interested in seeing him do well.”
By age twelve, Mike was the unofficial leader and drill sergeant of a crew of young Three Arch Bay rippers. A young disciple named Chris Mauro became his most ardent and terrified disciple.
On a day when Chris’s parents might think he was at the Parsons’s house, he would be in Santa Cruz or Ventura at a contest. “It’s 12 feet and I’m this little guy in the junior’s division trying to sleep with the gearshift in my back—just scared shitless,” Mauro says. “Mike would battle this guy from Ventura named Barry Wilson to see who could get in the water earlier. He’d be like, ‘Come on you little fucker, I don’t want Barry to beat us.’ When we’d go to Trestles, I’d have to show up on the dark front porch of his house at 4 A.M. Freezing my ass off. But if you were five minutes late, you’d miss the bus and you’d be hearing about it. “
Mike’s posse held mock contests, pretending to be surfers like Simon Anderson, Rabbit Bartholomew, and Shaun Tomson. Mike named his dog Shaun. He sent his friends fake letters, saying that Tomson’s nascent surf company, Instinct, wanted to sponsor them. At some point, for no apparent reason, Mike’s friends started calling him “Parsnips,” a moniker eventually shortened to “Snips.”
Snips’s surf heroes didn’t smoke pot or drink—at least so far as he knew—so he concluded that he would live the same way. He became surfing’s answer to Richie Cunningham—with his freckled Irish complexion, closely cut red hair, and skinny build, he even looked like a young Ron Howard. “My dad just drilled it into me when I was young—don’t take things from strangers, and drugs will take away from your dreams. I don’t think I was a total Goody Two-shoes. I mean, I tried smoking weed once or twice, but I was like, ‘What is this? This is just going to get in the way of my deal.’ I chose my path. I wanted to be the best Surfer in the world.”
Mike made his first North Shore pilgrimage at thirteen. If his fearlessness scared the hell out of Bob, his judgment left his dad somewhat reassured. Walking from the water after a session at big Sunset, a burly Hawaiian relieved Mike of his board, calling it “an aloha tax.