Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [88]
Through the 1990s, though they didn’t realize it, Gerlach and Parsons were on a collision course. They were not what you’d call friends after they stepped off the tour, but they were making the same choices: preferring the quality of their surfing life over competitive glory, world titles, and celebrity. They occasionally crossed paths in the water, particularly at Todos Santos, but were initially nothing more than cordial. Gerlach loved to surf Todos, but he also possessed an appreciation for his own mortality that Parsons and a few of his friends—like Evan Slater and a few of the boys from Maverick’s—seemed to lack.
“I was in awe of Mike,” says photographer Rob Brown. “At the same time, he was just scaring the hell out of me. He would absolutely, 100 percent take off on anything. He didn’t say, ‘I’m going to charge it,’ he just did it. One time I taped an expensive water housing to the nose of his board. He paddled out and took off on a 30-foot closeout—got absolutely murdered—and we never saw the camera again. I was like, ‘Mike, what the hell?’ He just said, ‘I’m so sorry, but God, I just had to go.’ He just couldn’t pass anything up. It was bizarre. There was a period where I was seriously worried that he was losing his mind.”
“Rob’s observation is pretty good,” Parsons says. “I’d watch footage of guys at Waimea, and they’d always come up. At Todos, there was a series of winters where I felt I could take any wave and survive it. I’d take off from a place where I knew I wouldn’t make the wave because I just wanted to see what would happen. One time, I sat way out for a couple of hours and waited till the next really big set came through. I took off and got to the bottom of the wave. The lip landed on me and I put my knee right through my board—a horrendous wipeout. I don’t think that even slowed me down. I went even harder after that.”
One day around the turn of the twenty-first century, no one seems to remember exactly when, Parsons was out towsurfing small- to medium-size Todos Santos with his buddy Taylor Knox. A panga showed up bearing Brad Gerlach. Gerlach was curious as hell about the ski, and eventually Parsons offered his former enemy a turn with the rope. Gerlach was suddenly making big, swooping carves—the sort of gouges he might have made at 6-foot Rincon, but at Todos. Holy shit, this was fun. Maybe even addictive.
Gerlach had never really spent a lot of time talking to Parsons. He always thought Parsons was so serious. Instead, it quickly became evident to the former enemies that they had a hilarious, adventure-filled past to look back on and laugh about. In fact, Parsons made Gerlach laugh like hell. They started recalling contests, paddling competitions during the NSSA years around the Huntington Pier, when Gerlach was so hungover he could barely see straight, but God if he let Parsons beat him. The time Gerlach convinced a buddy to sound a contest horn a second before Parsons caught a wave. There were so many moments that each wanted to kill the other, but said nothing. If only they had looked past the surface—what each thought the other represented at the age of nineteen—they might have found a perfect yin-yang balance. Had they been there to critique and encourage, instead of willfully disdain and misunderstand one another, each might have eventually walked away with a world title.
One thing was also obvious. They were complete fiends for this new sport, and they suddenly