Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [84]
Among those watching on television were Joe’s wife Cheryl and their 5-year-old son Bradley, who asked, ‘Is Daddy dead?’”
To Bradley, Dad was a true Superman, but he was also gone a lot. If Joe landed, say, a marquee job in Vegas, the family sometimes went along, yet by the time Brad turned seven, the long absences and travel took their toll, and Joe and Cheryl split. Brad became a troublemaking latchkey kid in an Encinitas duplex. He sees some parallels of his early life to that of Laird Hamilton, whose adoptive dad, Bill Hamilton, was a larger-than-life surf hero also AWOL during stretches of his childhood. Brad says he felt “definitely a lot of pride in my dad. But also a lot of anger that he wasn’t around and wasn’t paying me much attention. I know Laird got in a lot of fights when he was younger. He probably could have used a little more attention from his dad, too.”
Three years later, Brad found an orphaned surfboard on the beach with a big picture of Jesus laminated beneath the fiberglass. He quickly learned to walk on water and was soon emulating the moves of local pro John Glomb. One day Brad paddled over to a budding amateur, who was his elder by a couple of years. “Hey, hey, hey, are you sponsored by those guys?” he asked, pointing at the logos on Jeff Novak’s board. “Umm, what do they give you? Hey, you can come down and surf and stay at my house if you want to. My mom’s always gone.”
Novak was bemused that this brash little ten-year-old kid would paddle over to a complete stranger without fear of being insulted—or punched. “I’m thinking who is this kid?” Novak laughs.
Before long, Jeff Novak and buddy Ted Robinson were hitching rides down to Encinitas to stay with Brad. Cheryl worked long hours, but when she was around, there was a lot of laughter. “She was just, just stunningly beautiful,” Novak says. “You know, back then we’re kids, and his mom was hot. She was so cool and just really enjoyed talking to Brad and his friends.”
Brad fed off Novak’s experience, but awe at his dad’s wildly unorthodox career mingled with resentment over his absences also pushed him to compete. “That anger fueled my drive,” Brad says. “I wanted to be the best guy surfing.”
Novak and Brad pushed one another hard, and Brad mapped out his plan by age thirteen: compete in the NSSA, then the Professional Surfing Association of America (PSAA)—a sort of stepping stone to the big leagues—and then graduate to the Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) World Tour. His obsession bore early fruit when he was signed to John Glomb’s Nectar surfboards team at age fourteen—a heavy accomplishment.
A few years earlier, in the winter of 1976 when Brad was eleven, Joe Gerlach shared a Chicago bill with Evel Knievel—a show neither would perform. On the same day that Joe’s plane crashed into a snow bank on its final approach to Chicago, Knievel crashed during a practice attempt to jump over a tank of live sharks, breaking both arms and taking out the eye of an ABC cameraman. Both hellmen took the day as a sign and quit jumping forever. Knieval retired rich. Joe bought an inflatable dome and a machine that projected a mechanized laser light show to Pink Floyd songs and took the show on the road.
After that, Brad began to travel with his dad during the summers, working as a carny. He visited towns in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Arizona that few Southern California kids ever see. He smoked joints, drank beer, and performed grand swan dives into huge piles of dad’s beanbag jump cushions. When he wasn’t with his dad, Brad and Novak tooled up and down the California coast, with a far-too-young Gerlach tumbling out of Jeff’s VW camper beneath a halo of smoke. “But no matter how hard we partied, we were always up first thing the next morning surfing,” says Novak.
Brad increasingly