Maverick's Excerpt | Books

Maverick’s: the Story of Big-Wave Surfing

(excerpted from the Introduction)

Almost 150 years ago, near the end of big‑wave surfing’s long, sun‑warmed prehistory, a tsunami wave roared into the northeast coast of Hawaii, peaked at some impossible height against the beachfront bills and cliffs, then abruptly reversed direction and pulled much of the landscape out to sea, including a man named Na Holaua and his small wood‑frame house. Tsunami waves travel in sets, like regular ocean waves, and as the second enormous swell lifted up, Holaua allegedly ripped a plank from the side of his house, positioned himself beneath the curl, shot down the face, and rode to shore.

Surfer magazine says it happened on April 2, 1862, on the Big Island of Hawaii. Surfing historian Ben Finney claims it was Kauai in 1868. Exactly where and when Holaua’s tsunamic encounter took place, if it took place ‑ such questions, in the operatic world of big‑wave surfing, don’t really matter. Myth and legend are the animating forces here, more so than truth and veracity. Surfers raise a skeptical eye brow at Holaua’s story, like anyone else ‑ but they indulge it, too, because its a nicely , exaggerated version of their story, that of ease and triumph in an environment that most people see as frightening, dangerous, and hostile. A 1948 oil painting of Holaua’s wave by American artist C. P. Cathcart underscores the point. With the natural forces raging around him, Holaua doesn’t just survive. He doesn’t get washed ashore, or even sled along on his stomach. As rendered by Cathcart, Holaua charges for land standing up ‑ and with rakish good form, too, in loose‑fitting cut‑offs and crouched in a hot angle across the wind‑whipped incline, damn the looming rocks and uprooted palm trees. It’s a vanquisher’s stance. It’s Beowulf gone tropical.

Holaua’s ride, with its constituent elements of spontaneity and adventure, style and daring, helps explain why big‑wave riders ‑ and surfers in general ‑ resist having their sport even labeled as “sport.” Surfing isn’t played as much as it’s romanced, and this notion has turned surfers into chronic elitists. We’re out here having a great time, holds a long‑cherished tenet of the surfing philosophy, while the rest of you dummies are stuck in there doing whatever. But surfing can be positioned as an outlier to the larger community of sport by more direct means, too. It has no regulation playing field, for starters. No written rules. Few statistics or records. It isn’t unquantifiable, exactly. But most scores, tallies, and figures, when applied to surfing, dissolve easily.

Big‑wave riding has a particularly strange relationship to the world of numbers. Some data are hard and utilitarian: surfboard measurements are precise to a thirty‑second of an inch; tide measurements, wind speed, and swell interval are monitored by big‑wave surfers like the scrolling figures on the NYSE board. Other readings are illusory ‑ or flat‑out deceptive. A twenty‑second wipeout, for example, doesn’t sound especially awful. But to the out‑of‑breath, sensory‑deprived big‑wave rider planted deep inside a fissioning underwater whorl, one moment follows the next at ever‑longer intervals until time seems to open to infinity. Panic usually hits at thirty seconds, even for an expert, At fifty seconds, most surfers will be unconscious.

Numbers and number‑assigned values have even less meaning when surfers evaluate and judge wave height. A twenty‑foot wave, trough to crest, as reasonably determined by the layperson, will be identified by the big‑wave rider as ten or twelve feet. A thirty‑footer is called fifteen or eighteen. Forty becomes twenty, or maybe twenty‑five. Fifty is still twenty‑five. And it gets stranger. Remove a ten‑foot wave from the North Shore of Oahu and graft it onto a beach in Florida, and the local surfers would probably call it eighteen feet. In southern California it would be fifteen feet. In northern California, twelve. The idea, in general, is to play it cool by playing size down, and the seventy‑foot‑high waves that are now being ridden are often labeled - with straight faces, by professionals ‑ as thirty or thirty‑five feet. Not that a more rigorous and exacting assessment would make any real difference. “Waves aren’t measured in feet,” as pioneering big‑wave rider Buzzy Trent said, “but in increments of fear.”

And Trent’s right. Measurements and numbers (and to a lesser degree names, dates, and places) in big‑wave surfing are mainly used as supports, like cotton‑candy sticks, to catch and hold the diaphanous story‑building strands of fear, mortality, triumph, folly, and courage that circulate so freely through the big‑wave world ‑ which itself was spun off from a centuries‑old Hawaiian surfing mythology that includes demigods and talking animals, kings, queens, and warriors, kidnapping and ritual human sacrifice, chants and prayers, temples and consecration, inter‑island murder plots and life‑endangering passion. “Promise me you will never kiss another woman, the Bird Maiden said to Kahikilani, the prince from Kauai who, according to the ancient story, had sailed a hundred miles from his home to try the big waves on Oahu’s north shore. The two lovers had spent several happy months together, but now the surf was up. Kahikilani grabbed his board, pledged his fidelity, and hit the beach ‑ and afterward his big‑wave excitement was such that he kissed a beautiful woman who’d been admiring him. Spying birds flew to the Bird Maiden and reported what they’d seen, and when Kahikilani returned later that day she turned him to stone.

“We’re dysfunctional “I says Hawaiian big‑wave rider Ken Bradshaw, sitting on the front porch of his North Shore house, just yards from the same sandy bay where Kahikilani rode his last wave. “We have just barely functional relationships with other people‑at best.” This, of course, is part of the bigwave mythology as well, the modern adaptation, which presents the surfer as nobly maladjusted. Bradshaw squints out at the surf and makes another doleful comment, this one perhaps closer to the truth. “It’s created junkies out of most of us. Surfing junkies, right? Our whole lives, we drop everything to go surfing, and we always will.”

Here he pauses for a self‑accepting and vaguely defiant little smile. He shrugs. “That’s what we do. That’s who we are.”

A central California break called Maverick’s made its public debut in the early nineties, and big‑wave surfing was revised and redecorated. What had traditionally been framed by translucent aquamarine water and soft coral sand beaches was now being offered in steely blues, browns, and grays against a backdrop of steep, dusky, fog‑shrouded cliffs. Hawaiian big‑wave riding is frightening, even terrifying, but always tropically warm, and often sensual ‑ a bare‑skin pastime where the scent of plumeria occasionally drifts through the lineup. Maverick’s is severe. Always. Even when the sun is out it sparkles coldly, and surfers protect themselves against the chill water and air with head‑to‑toe rubber wetsuits. Broken waves rush across a wide, jagged rock barrier. Decaying strands of kelp twine into a slippery frieze along the high‑tide line. Maverick’s, a product of the north, has the presence of an ice‑sculpted fjord, with seemingly no geologic connection whatsoever to the lava‑layered reefs of the tropics and the sport’s balmy Polynesian roots. Few big‑wave riders ‑ none, probably ‑ would choose the Maverick’s aesthetic over the Hawaiian. But everyone understands that Maverick’s presents a surfing challenge like no other ‑ and challenge, above all other big‑wave attributes and attractions, drives the sport.

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Maverick’s: the Story of Big-Wave Surfing