Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [83]
Bob financed Mike’s second competitive journey to Hawaii with a second mortgage on the house. This was when Mike’s surfing began to terrify Jodi. “The first time I went to Pipeline, here comes Mike walking up the beach with his surfboard in two parts,” she says. “I asked him, ‘If it did that to the surfboard, what did it do you to you?’ He just said, ‘I’m fine, Mom.’”
Hawaii increased Mike’s bravery fivefold, and Chris Mauro suffered for it. One day Mike egged the grommet to the outside at Three Arch Bay on a massive wintertime swell. Petrified over paddling in through the slabbing shorebreak, Mauro started crying. One of the surfers, maybe even Mike, called him ‘sis’ for sissy. The name stuck. “Then I felt really bad for him,” says Mike. “He was my little right-hand man. I’d tell him what to do and he’d do it. Chris just had so much talent. He was a real natural. I wanted to encourage him like my dad did for me. So I basically put him on my shoulders and said, ‘If you want this surfing thing, you can do it. I paid for his meals—every meal he ate—and even entered him in contests when he couldn’t afford it.”
Chris Mauro eventually followed Parsons to Hawaii with the National Scholastic Surfing Association’s (NSSA) National Team. Parsons would order the bug-eyed grom out in the predawn darkness before either Surfer even knew how big it was. He loaned Mauro brand-new boards and ferocious waves broke two in one day. Mauro also worked as Mike’s board caddy during the World Cup contest at Sunset Beach—ferrying out a new stick when Mike snapped one. “I was this little kid,” Mauro says. “I’d take out a board and have to swim in—and it was massive. When Randy Rarick, the contest organizer, spotted me, he goes, ‘That little kid can’t be your caddy!’ We stayed with Peter McGonagle one time—this hard-core San Clemente guy. Back then an 8-foot board was considered a big rhino chaser. Peter had this 10-foot 6-inch gun. I was like, ‘Holy shit, what is that for?’ He looked at me like I was crazy and said, ‘Dude, it’s for outer reefs.’ Those are the guys Mike surrounded himself with. It was heavy.”
It was around this time that a cocky, witty, handsome, and supremely talented kid named Brad Gerlach joined the National Team. Mike and Brad soon developed an interpersonal rivalry that would define their surfing careers. If you had told Mike that this brash, noisy punk would one day become his best friend and guardian angel, he would have laughed out loud.
In some ways, Brad Gerlach’s (pronounced gerlock) Aquaman future was preordained. Gerlach was born in 1965 to a stunning water ballerina, while his father, Joe, was a Hungarian high diver who had finished fourth in the 1956 Olympics. After defecting to the United States in the wake of a bloody Hungarian revolt, “Jumpin’ Joe” Gerlach earned a pair of collegiate national championships. He then revolutionized the sport of pole vaulting by inventing a thick series of pads about the size of a Chevy Nova for jumpers to land on. Eventually, he dove into a livelihood by performing spectacular leaps onto these pads from terrifying heights. On the day before he was to be wed, a slight aerial miscalculation shattered his facial bones like an eggshell. “I look much better with this beard,” Joe says today with a laugh.
One of Joe’s biggest leaps of faith came in 1971 during halftime of a Lions-Eagles football game, an event described thusly by Sports Illustrated writer Sandy Treadway:
A Sunday night national television audience estimated at 30 million saw a giant red, white, and blue balloon ascend 80 feet above the 50-yard line. A slight man dressed in a white leather jump suit stood precariously on a wooden plank attached to the gondola and directed the placement of a foam rubber mattress—his landing pad. After several minutes of tension-building waving, the man appeared satisfied that the