The Best American Sports Writing 2011

by Jane Leavy

  Nitsch and other free-divers, then, are trying to determine if it's more effective to dive with nearly empty lungs, to sacrifice oxygen for the body's reaction to the absence of it: the slow, gradual shutting down, the gentle drift to death's door. He has begun to wonder if air is the enemy.

  Liquid is life—Nitsch finds himself thinking that over and over again. Maybe we drown only because we haven't learned enough about what we're capable of. Maybe we drown only because our brain associates air with breathing and liquid with drowning. Aren't we made mostly of water? Weren't we born in the oceans?

  And so he has experimented with a technique used by a vanguard of free-divers called wet equalization. Before a dive he fills his head with water, snorting scary amounts through his nose, driving it deep into his sinuses and Eustachian tubes. (The epiglottis, the flap of tissue at the back of our tongues, keeps the water out of his lungs.) On either side of his eardrums, water sits in a kind of static harmony. It is both inside and outside the door, a perfect balance. With it, Nitsch is able to dive as deeply as he wants. So long as there is water inside his head, he can dive forever.

  Problem is, filling his head with water makes Nitsch feel as though he is dying. "It is very unpleasant," he says with typical understatement. The feeling is all that stands in his way, all that separates him from the only thing he's ever wanted. He's so close. But it's hard to evolve so quickly. Even Nitsch can't suddenly ignore the feeling he's drowning, that he is about to die.

  You would feel the same way, as the water trickles out of your sinuses and down the back of your throat. You would feel it collecting in your stomach and running like a river into your intestines, first small, then large. Some might even slip past your epiglottis and rattle around in your lungs. You would taste the salt, choke on the bubbles, feel the weight dragging you down. You would feel the water making its inevitable way down every corridor of your body, into every chamber as you sink not like a stone, but like a foundering ship, picking up speed the deeper you went. You would feel your one-way valves and muscles struggling to fight the incoming tide. You would feel blood rushing into your pounding heart and convulsing lungs.

  Nitsch might be wrong, but he thinks he knows what comes next. He's done the math, taken the measurements. He knows that, eventually, his body, your body, will stop fighting. Eventually, it will give in. Your brain will accept its fate and shut you down piece-by-inessential-piece, segment-by-unnecessary-segment. It will decide there is nowhere to go but down, that life on the surface is over and a new one awaits below. You will begin to adapt, feel yourself transform. Only then will you find a new serenity, euphoria even, your body no longer itself but something else, some new, mysterious vessel you never imagined you were capable of being. You will become a submersible, a torpedo, a seal with a giant, enviable spleen. And you will feel one with the water, as though you could dive forever, thousands and thousands of feet, where black becomes blue again, and where every one of your dreams comes true.

  The Surfing Savant

  Paul Solotaroff

  FROM ROLLING STONE

  PUT HIM IN THE WATER and Clay Marzo is magic, a kid with so much grace and daring that you laugh in disbelief to watch him surf. Every day he's out there in the South Pacific, shredding huge swells till he's faint with hunger and near the verge of dehydration. He doesn't really ride waves as much as fly them, soaring above the sea foam upside down and spinning the nose of his board in whiplash twists. Just two years out of high school, Marzo is remaking a sport held hostage by rules and hack judges, turning it into a cross between aquatic parkour and X Games stunt work. Call it what you want, it's a sight to behold. Sorry, but humans can't do that, you keep thinking. Then he goes and does it all morning long.

  But if you sit and list the things that Marzo has trouble doing, they quickly outrun the things he finds easy. He's unable, for instance, to eat a simple meal without much of it ending up on his shirt or the floor. Out of water, he has trouble interacting with other people, either staring in bafflement at their grins and jokes or avoiding casual contact altogether. He blurts things out, chants rap songs to himself, and pulls out clumps of his hair when anxious. When he speaks, which isn't often, he seems younger than his 20 years, mumbling like a bashful eighth-grader. For years, the rap on Marzo has been that, for all his talents, he's a pothead who chokes in competitions. And then there are the even-nastier names he's had to deal with, slurs that burned in deep: retard, moron, slacker, zombie. In middle school, Marzo was treated so badly that his mother, Jill, had to pull him out and teach him at home, where he wouldn't be punched for staring at wannabe thugs. His agonizing shyness has fractured his family and sparked ugly set-tos with his father, Gino, an old-school hard-hat striver who accused him of flaking off and screwing up his shot at stardom. That charge hurts Clay more than the others combined: when your own father misconceives you so badly, how can you hope that strangers will understand?

  Now, pushing back from lunch at a Maui fish stand, bits of ahi po'boy dotting his face and lap, Marzo wears the grin of a birthday boy who gets to eat as much cake as he wants. To see him like this, hands clasped across belly, is to encounter a kid whose first and last directive is pure, physical joy. But the facts are more complex and less happy. Marzo has Asperger's syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism that causes no end of social confusion and anguish, and that commonly burdens those afflicted with a single, smothering obsession: bird songs or train routes or the history of naval warfare. "Though Asperger's teens are typically bright and verbal, they can't connect with kids their age or with people they don't know well," says Dr. Michael Linden, an autism specialist who diagnosed Marzo at the age of 18, after a dozen years of botched assessments. "Feelings are a foreign language to them, and they're unable to pick up social cues. A lot of them retreat from relationships and get stuck in a special activity or interest that they devote themselves to intensely."

  Like a lot of adult Aspies, as some with the diagnosis have taken to calling themselves, Marzo is a baffling mix of powers and deficits. He has no interest in the written word (and has read few of the dozens of stories about him in sports magazines, which regularly anoint him one of surfing's saviors) but is brilliant, even clairvoyant, in the water. Looking at the horizon, Marzo can read waves that others can't and intuit where they'll break before they crest. Traveling fills him with such dread that he's sick with nausea days before boarding a plane, but he gets up each day and surfs lethal points on Maui's western shore. The kinds of waves he lives on don't crash near sandy beaches; instead, he climbs down lava cliffs to reach breaks rife with boulders and a seafloor of spear-tipped coral reefs that can turn a surfer's chest to chum. His body is a travelogue of scars and welts, but it bores him to talk about the dangers he courts—the boards he routinely snaps taking hellish falls; the waves that hold him down till his lungs scream, half a minute or more during really heavy sets. Only once, he says, has he been afraid of the surf. "There were tiger sharks behind me," he says, wiping a quarter-size splotch of mayo off his cheek. "They were pretty big, so I bailed quick."

  After lunch, Marzo pays a visit to Adam Klevin, a muscular, bald-shaved man who's seen more of Clay in water than anyone besides his mother. For the past five years, Klevin has risen at dawn to film every wave that Marzo catches and compile the highlights. Today, on one of the flatscreens in the unkempt room that Klevin uses as an editing suite, Marzo is up and riding a 12-foot swell. Dancing on the wave front with cha-cha turns that brace him for a bigger move, he whips the back of the board into a savage 360 that surfers call a throw-tail reverse. It's a common trick, but there are few people on the planet who can successfully nail it in Maui after a recent storm has raised waves the size of houses. Marzo is barely upright as he exits the spin, his mouth a perfect O of exaltation. He bangs a hard left into the next section of wave and throws a front-side snap that lifts him clean out of the water, arms and knees in vehement opposition. He can't possibly make it—his rear end's gone, and God knows what
he's looking at over his shoulder as he grabs the rail of the board for dear life. The wave collapses on the jagged floor, blowing up a squall of white-capped spray in which the boy and board go missing. For a moment there's nothing, just the chaos of foam. Then the chop parts, and here he somehow comes, half off the board but still in charge. This isn't surfing, this is sorcery, a kid so alive and electrically good that he makes this look like the world's one true religion.

  But when I turn to say as much, Marzo is somewhere else, head down and eyes fixed on some inner shore. He has everything he needs to be his sport's Shaun White—the face, the body, the game-changing skill—and a chance to be a beacon for the 1.5 million kids in this country with autism-related disorders. But Marzo has neither the drive nor the nervous system to handle being famous. No, if it's all the same, he'd rather be alone, paddling back out, through the churn and boulders, to where the big waves break. It's the one place on Earth he feels safe.

  For an island synonymous with God-sent waves and the goofy-foot cool of surf kitsch, Maui has produced shockingly few riders driven enough to compete with the sport's name-brand stars. "There's a small-town vibe here that's held guys back when they surfed the bigger stages," says Erik Aeder, a surf photographer and Maui native who has shot every local kid who showed much promise. "Plus, the trade winds make the waves choppy, which made it hard to learn the elegant moves that used to win tournaments."

  But in the late eighties, a new breed of riders stood the game on end. Inspired by the halfpipe pyrotechnics of skate- and snow-boarders, surfers like Kelly Slater and Christian Fletcher started to approach waves differently, shooting over the top of the lip, using the wave's speed to do airs and inverts and sudden, violent turns. "Those guys made their style a global phenomenon through videos and photo spreads," says Matt Warshaw, author of the forthcoming The History of Surfing and former editor of Surfer magazine. "Kids everywhere went to school on their hi-fi moves, and that next generation went bigger and faster, trying for stunt-show things in junior contests."

  Among that contingent was a brood from Maui of exceptionally gifted boys. Raised within an hour's drive of each other, they came up together through the Pee-Wee ranks and traveled as extended family, becoming stars before they were in their teens. Dusty Payne was the first to join the pro-surfer tour after winning an international juniors competition in 2008. Kai Barger and Granger Larsen are right behind him, and all three, according to an industry insider, "should be solid fixtures" on the top-money list for years to come.

  But the best of that bunch, from boyhood on, was Marzo. With his bottomless hunger for huge maneuvers and unsinkable sense of balance and intuition, he looked, to all who saw him, like the future of the sport while he was still in grade school. He was fiercely competitive in tournaments, racked up wins in every age division, and seemed an inevitable heir to Slater, the great soul surfer with nine world titles. "When he showed up for the national championships and put down perfect 10s at age 15, the media declared him the next great icon," says Warshaw. "Other kids could do some of the things he did, but not with his power and naturalness and skill at getting out of tight spots."

  Though tournaments aren't as crucial to surfing fans as they are in other sports—there's a widespread sense that the rules are too archaic, favoring cautious riders over hellions—the hope was that Marzo and his class of big-air starlings would push the game up the board-sport totem and land it in the mainstream. (Surfing, eclipsed by X Games theatrics, remains virtually invisible on TV.)

  Marzo seemed made to order for the thresher of pro surfing, which has cut down many kids with outsize talent. It begins with the yearlong World Qualifying Series, a continent-hopping gauntlet of contests against hundreds of amateur riders, all of them vying for 16 slots on the World Tour. Once Marzo turned pro and moved on to the big leagues, he would compete against the world's top 44 surfers in a globe-spanning season that lasts 10 months.

  But it's one thing to rule the scholastic circuit, where no one's really watching but the families of other surfers, and a kid with Marzo's gifts could crush opponents by going bigger, faster, and braver. It's another to dominate the junior tour, where Marzo encountered battle-tested surfers with three or four years on him, most of them versed in the mind games and sly mechanics of contest strategy. The fake-outs on the waves, the jockeying for position—it was a language his Aspie brain couldn't process, blind as it is to tacit cues. Add in the crowds of fans, the announcers blaring scores over the PA system, and the cameramen in the water shooting action footage, and Marzo was sabotaged by his own senses. Nor did he fully grasp the rudiments of tournament rules, which give riders a half-hour to produce two scoring runs. Often, Marzo would land a hellfire move on an early wave, then bob like a buoy as time ran out, waiting for the perfect swell. "He had a couple of years there of brilliance, but then something happened," says Warshaw. "We figured maybe it was the pressure or the travel or—well, no one really knew at the time."

  Including Clay. Almost from birth, he's had a sizable gift for confounding expectations. Born in San Diego, he moved at nine months to the small town of Lahaina, steps from the sea in Maui; his mom and dad, both avid surfers, wanted to be closer to the waves. "Clay was wading before he could walk, and he walked at seven and a half months," recalls Jill. "At three months, he swam with his head under water, and by one he was on the front of his dad's surfboard, riding waves all the way in." Both parents were fine, if workaday, athletes—Jill, a massage therapist, loved volleyball as a kid; Gino, a carpenter, played baseball in college—and they organized their lives around the care and feeding of not one but two surf prodigies. Clay's half-brother, Cheyne, who is seven years older, was signed by sponsors at the age of 13. "Clay adored Cheyne and wanted to be like him, right up to the stickers on his board," says Jill. "And it went both ways: Cheyne bragged him up to sponsors, saying, 'Wait'll you get a load of my younger brother.'"

  Clay entered his first contest at the age of five, and took home a trophy for finishing fourth. By seven, he'd joined the kiddie corps of local prodigies, sharing sleepovers, picnics, and family trips with Payne, Barger, and Larsen. "We were doing bigger, wilder stuff because we always had waves to play with," Clay recalls. "It's the Maui style: trying to top each other and look like we weren't even trying." There'd be half a dozen boys in the back of Jill's van, burping and farting the 15 miles to surf the North Shore breaks. "That was a magical time for Clay, the best years of his life," says Jill. "They were wonderful with him, really treated him like a brother, though even then they could see that he was different."

  Clay's mother and father were divided over his odd behavior. Jill had long been flustered by the passel of tics that presented when Clay was four. "He made these weird faces and couldn't stop doing it," she says. "He was humming and flapping and pulling his hair, and was always just very intense and nervous when he wasn't in water." He staged shrieking tantrums if anyone touched the baseball cards or seashells he collected, and soothed himself by reciting lines from movies he'd learned by heart. He was uneasy wearing anything but the softest fabrics, was easily spooked by sudden noises, and for years allowed no one but Jill to hug him, pulling away from others. But his father refused to concede there was anything wrong. "He never really shared much or let you in, but I figured that was who Clay was," Gino says. "He was always a great athlete, and loved running around to the contests together, the two of us hanging out and having fun. If he had anything, I thought he'd outgrow it. Learn to finally look you in the eye."

  In grade school, Clay was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and consigned to special ed. Jill tried him on Ritalin, but the drug exacerbated his moods and fits, made him a "kicking, screaming monster." Gino, meanwhile, derided the label. "He didn't need drugs," he says. "He needed to mind his teacher and stop drawing waves in his pad." By then, Clay's obsession with all things surfing completely filled the screen. No matter the assignment, each paper he wrote had to do with surfing. At night, he'd watch the tapes tha
t Jill shot of his rides and study himself frame by frame. Then he'd go to bed and surf in his dreams: she would find him moving around but fast asleep, yelling, "Get off of my wave!" "You didn't want to wake him from one of those dreams," she recalls. "He could be violent in that state."

  While Clay's schoolwork suffered, his surfing flourished. As a 10-year-old, he would fly long hours to competitions in California, where he would routinely whip the country's best 13-and-unders. If you're raised in Hawaii and can surf rings around older kids, you'll pop up pretty early on the radar of companies that make board-shorts and energy drinks. "I saw Clay for the first time when he was 10, and offered him a contract on the spot," says John Oda, the surf-team manager for Spy Optic eye-wear, which designs sunglasses for action sports. "He had so much speed and took such big risks that I knew, even then, that he'd be a star." By middle school, Clay had a deal with Quiksilver, and he was winning so many trophies that his parents had to cram them in the garage. Gino chauffeured him to meets and fussed over his gear and sponsor decals, making sure they were splashed on his boards. (Clay didn't like the stickers, which only served to draw unwanted attention to him.)

  At 14—the year before his biggest triumph, the men's open title at the national finals—Clay sent a three-minute tape of himself surfing to Strider Wasilewski at Quiksilver. Wasilewski, who was then the team manager for Slater and several of the world's top pros, screened the loop in something like drop-jawed awe. "I'd never seen anyone near that young be so tuned in to the wave," he recalls. "His mechanics, his flow were comparable to Slater's, but Slater in his 20s, not teens. I thought, 'Holy shit, the world has to see this. We've got to book him onto the Young Guns II trip.'"