The Best American Sports Writing 2011

by Jane Leavy

  The Young Guns series of DVDs was a breakout marketing tool, showing off Quiksilver's future stars in exotic surf locales. Clay boarded an enormous yacht in Indonesia, where Slater and a film crew were shooting a handpicked group of the sport's best up-and-comers. Pitted against phenoms like Ry Craike and Julian Wilson, Clay astonished the pros with his flying-fish maneuvers, surfing the barrels with such command that he'd slow himself down to prolong his ride. For Slater, arguably the best surfer who has ever lived, it was a kind of a Clapton-meets-Hendrix moment, the jolt of newfound genius. "I didn't know anything about him, but he blew my mind," Slater recalled later. "I don't get intimidated by 15-year-olds often, but he was charging every wave, throwing the biggest, craziest reverses. He knows things about surfing that I don't."

  The video that emerged moved a million units as a promo in surfing mags, and introduced Clay to a global public of preteen surfers. Soon, he appeared in a slew of new titles, signed six-figure deals with Quiksilver and others, and was trailed by groupies at media events, a sex symbol before his first girlfriend. "I'd be with him on a beach, just hanging out surfing, and suddenly all these kids would chase him down," says Klevin. "That really freaked him out and made it less fun, being in the bull's-eye of all these strangers." Whisked to late-night parties by sponsors' reps and roused for morning meet-and-greets and in-store signings, he began hiding out in foreign hotel rooms to avoid the stares and pleas of fans downstairs. "As a kid, he'd dreamt of going on trips with his heroes like Kelly," says Gino. "But suddenly, he was with them every week, in Tahiti one day, Australia the next, and he got sick of it pretty fast."

  To earn his keep from the sponsors who pay him, a top rider lives out of a duffel bag, constantly jetting to end-of-the-world beaches for four-day "surf adventures." There he is shot, like the product he is, for photo spreads, online clips, and DVDs, all the while supplying punchy quotes about the "bombing reefs in Malaysia." He's also expected to pile up points on the tour circuit, flying to contests in Europe or Asia on weeks when he's not doing junkets. Finally, there are trade shows and promo tours and media events to do, a teeth-grind gamut of jostling cameras and sensory overload. It all so unstrung Clay that he eventually shut down, hiding behind headphones with the volume cranked, a mute, sullen kid who kept apart. His surfing cratered on the junior tour, he staged sudden ailments to get out of trips, and wouldn't leave his hotel bed when it was time to surf a heat. "All the guys were talking about this crazy kid, saying he's Pigpen in Peanuts," recalls Jamie Tierney, a senior Quiksilver producer who befriended Clay. "He'd lose his wallet and cell phone, and he'd lay down on the floor after he got done eating, rapping to himself over his iPod. It wasn't, let's just say, the greatest entrance."

  One of his sponsors dumped him for odd behavior, and Clay came within a lash of losing Quiksilver, by far his biggest backer. Interviewed once during a promo for his sponsor's line of goods, he was asked how the board-shorts felt. "They should be a little longer, maybe with better material too. And I don't like the color," he said. "Why—do you want me to like them?"

  Several days after the monster storm that raised 50-footers off the coast, I arrange to meet Marzo at a forbidding break on the far west shore of Maui. A rock beach hidden from highway views by a copse of Cook pines and palms, it's reachable only by a bonejarring track down the side slope of a cliff. At the bottom, several hard-boys in the beds of pickups have their feet up, smoking a fattie. The surf is mush, dreary three-footers that crumble like stale saltines, and the place has the last-dregs air of a keg party gone too long. Marzo and his girlfriend, Alicia Yamada, are slouched in the cab of her truck, hoping for an offshore breeze to kick up bigger waves. "Surf's beady," he yawns through the rolled-down window. "Barely worth getting out of bed."

  "No biggie," says Yamada, nut-brown and pretty, with hair almost down to her waist. "You've surfed worse than this, so what the hell. Go out there and rip it up."

  They're a curious pair. She: short, dark, and dazzling. He: tall, impassive, and half-present. Though Yamada won't discuss it, I've heard from others that Marzo can be a difficult mate. He grabs food from her without thinking to ask, gets jealous when she talks to friends, and used to say vicious things if he didn't get his way. "She's a tough cookie and doesn't take shit, but I worry 'cause they're together noon and night," says Jill. "Clay's real possessive, and they're both so young. The good news is they're in couples counseling now."

  They met four years ago, when he surfed with her brothers and was shy to the point of anguish around her. But they were thrown together enough that a friendship developed, and by 16 and 18 (she's two years older) a fumbling romance began. This caused a lot of grousing in the Marzo household: Gino, suspicious of Alicia's motives, resented her frequent visits to Clay, particularly when she slept in his room. "Here's my son, with no experience in life but earning lots of money from sponsors, and she comes around with no job or cash, making herself right at home," he says. "Next thing I know, he stops going on trips or wanting to compete. They won't keep paying you if you won't leave Maui, no matter how great you surf." There were constant battles at the dinner table, where he hectored Clay to be like his old Maui buddies, who traveled full-time to earn points and exposure on the junior circuit. Jill pushed back on Clay's behalf, saying he couldn't handle the punitive schedule of the typical top-shelf surfer. The fights so upset Clay that he'd flee upstairs or hide in the yard with his dogs. After a while, he stopped coming home altogether, staying with Alicia for days or weeks in the condo Jill had bought him with his earnings. Sides were drawn, and the siblings dragged in. Cheyne, the oldest, turned on Clay and accused him of hyping his ailment. Their younger sister, Gina, who's now 12, aligned with Jill and eventually stopped speaking to Gino. Last summer the couple split, after 21 years of marriage. Clay has no contact with Cheyne, whom he still reveres, and barely speaks to his father.

  It takes more cajoling, but Marzo gets out of the truck; per usual, he's wearing just his trunks. Staring past the jetty to where the small sets form, his emerald eyes gain light and lose it, tracking currents the way a cat tracks birds. He's perfectly built for surfing: tall and broad-shouldered, with long, muscular arms to paddle hard, and short, rubbery legs that hold their line in the heaviest conditions. He's also strong in slop, carving whiplash turns in the flume of blah three-footers, but bored and saddened by the sight of them. Come summer, when the offshore winds die down and the surf here becomes a rumor, Marzo slides into a deep funk, moping on the couch with his laptop out, eyeing the conditions in Peru. "I'm eggy," he says now, Clay-speak for "vexed." "I checked the swell charts. It was s'posed to go off."

  There's a small group gathered on this rutted slope that overlooks the ocean: Tierney, who's visiting from California and who, two years ago, made Just Add Water, a wise and affectionate documentary about Marzo and his condition; Klevin, on hand to film Clay's rides; and Yamada and her father, a surf-battered man who claims to have ridden 40-footers. They gently coax Marzo to ride for an hour, but he stalls them, eyeing the tide. The prospect of being watched by even five admirers is enough to make him want to get back in the truck and go hide out in his room. His panic ratchets tenfold at tournaments, where he's still so pained by the crowd noise and cameras that he recently blew his chance to win the World Junior title by showing up late to his own heat. Nor is fear the only thing holding him back. In contests, he's incapable of playing it safe, going for broke on each wave. Time and again he has coughed up leads by failing to land an inverted blowtail when a modest, two-turn ride would seal the win. "Strategy's a huge part of contest surfing, which is how the hack guys earn their living, doing the same move over and over," says Tierney. "Clay can't do that, or says he can't. Me, I think he could if it really mattered."

  Tierney, the son of two psychologists, seems to have a feel for handling Marzo. "C'mon, dude," he tweaks him. "I came all the way from SoCal. Show me how you surf this right-hand trash."

  A half-smile tugs the corner of Marzo's mouth. "Eve
n you could do it today," he murmurs.

  "Well, let's go, then," says Tierney. "I brought my board along. Meet you where the dry rock sticks out."

  Marzo hefts his six-foot Super and starts down the path to the shore, bumbling over roots, barefoot. To the consternation of his parents and backers, Marzo often responds to anxiety by getting stoned. It seems to brace his moods, which can reel on a dime, and allays the jitters that overtake him when he heads out into the world. As a maintenance drug, though, pot has its limitations. Marzo has ducked so many trips and promo junkets that he almost lost his meal ticket in 2008. "All the suits were on me hard to get rid of him, saying, 'He's a stuck-up, pot-smoking slacker,'" recalls Quiksilver's Wasilewski. "But I knew he was special, a once-i n-a-lifetime talent who needed understanding and hope."

  To save Marzo's career, Wasilewski pushed his parents to have him examined for autism. Jill, who had already put him through years of tests for everything from learning disabilities to depression, was loath to subject him to more doctors. After months of prodding, though, she accompanied Clay to California for a week of tests by autism specialists. In waiting rooms full of three-year-old boys who flapped their arms and wailed, she knew the truth before the findings came. "I went online to look Asperger's up and cried and cried, saying, 'That's Clay,'" she says. "The years we let pass, the push to do the contests—it all just hit me really hard. I thought from now on, it's only about him being happy. Whatever he wants to do, that's what we'll do."

  "Clay drew comfort from the diagnosis," says Mitch Varnes, his manager. "It turned off the heat to finally know the facts and also took the heat off from his sponsors. They said, 'Forget doing promos and the junior tour—just go surf and have fun.' He still wound up in tons of films and mags, but on his terms, not theirs."

  Marzo cut his trips down to six or ten a year, and began seeing a behaviorist who taught him cues for managing the fans and press. The treatments salved his panic. Though sparingly seen in contests, he won his sport's Oscar for Best Male Performance at the 2008 Surfer Poll Awards and became a bigger rock star in near-absentia than most of the tour's top guns. Marzo can go on earning a substantial living even if he never wins a championship or the handful of tourneys he enters when the mood occurs. The public adores him, especially kids, who seek him out in the trade publications and online sites where surfers gain exposure. "If he wants to surf contests, great," says Wasilewski. "If not, we'll film him wherever he roams, do Webisodes fans kill to see, which justifies what we pay him. He'll be with us as long as he wants. He's a part of our family."

  But even with the fact of his diagnosis, the surf world expects things of Marzo. Tierney thinks he should "bite the bullet" and do the Qualifying Series, which can now be completed in a "doable" six months instead of a hellish year. "It would be a tough haul, but he'd get to join the World Tour and surf against his idols in great waves," Tierney insists. "He's one of the five best on the planet in terms of talent, and with focus and a couple of years' experience he could be one of the best who ever did it." Marzo's manager is pinning hopes on a prospective new pro tour for big-air, balls-out riders. "Just 16 guys, the best progressive surfers, and an hour, not a half-hour, for heats. No one knows if it'll go yet—there's no sponsor attached—but it would be perfect for Clay," says Varnes. Even Marzo is prone to grand ambitions, though they change each time you ask him. "The new tour would be cool—I could deal," he says. But the next day he's talking about the free-surf option, in which the great alternative riders—Dane Reynolds, Bruce Irons—command big money to travel the globe for films and photo shoots.

  Still, as I stand on the rise overlooking the beach in Maui, it's hard to imagine how a kid like Marzo could manage any of those options. I think back on our first—and last—sit-down chat, in which he all but fled the room, screaming. It began well enough, with Marzo talking about his childhood and name-checking his heroes, Bruce Irons and Kalani Robb. "Those guys invented the moves," he says. "We were just trying to take them farther." Then, out of the blue, he announces that surfing is the thing that "saved" him. "It's the best drug ever," he says, "and I'm lucky to have it."

  I gently ask what it saved him from. He stares out the window and starts to yank his forelock. "I just ... see things different, from the back of my brain," he says. "Other people see 'em from the front, I guess. It's not good or bad, just how I am. Sort of makes it harder, though, you know?"

  "How so?"

  His free hand paws the side of his trunks, damp in the air-chilled room. "Well, I need people's help to get stuff done. Telling me where to go and what to say, and sometimes I don't like that, or I'm tired and don't want..."

  The sentence just hangs there, whirring in space. I hold off, giving him room to work through the tangle of half-formed thoughts. Instead, he tugs his hair so hard that a clump comes off in his fingers. Panicked, I ask about the feeling he gets when he does something splendid on a wave. "I can't describe it," he says, slouching so low that he burrows into his chest. "Just pleasure, I guess. Where you want it over and over, and do anything to get it ... Are we almost done?"

  "Just one more," I say, looking at a poster-size photo on the wall. In it, Marzo is stock-still on his board, raising his arms in benediction as a 20-foot wave hulks above him. In the undepicted instant after the photo was taken, he paddled coolly around the edge of the wave before it smashed him to bits on the rocks. "What do you think when you see that picture?" I ask.

  He mashes his lower lip, but releases the hair he's wrapped around a clenched index finger. "I was stoked," he says. "That wave was bombing, and there was another, even bigger, right behind it."

  What he doesn't add is that he had just returned from a nightmare trip and felt blessed to be home again. Marzo is a creature of waves, but of these waves, the rocky, shark-toothed waters of Maui that he knows by heart. Look at him now, out beyond the reef, doing tricks to raise his flagging spirits. In surf no bigger than a picket fence, he's positioned himself above the swell, skimming like a coin from crest to crest. Just as each dies, he spies a new section to carve his name upon, hurling his board up the short-sleeve face to ride the foam again. He's forgotten the guys watching from their pickup trucks, and the small crowd up here with our mouths agape, and the father he can't please, and the brother who cut him dead—all of that's gone now, carried away by the hunchbacked westerly waves. He'll surf until lunchtime, then come back after a nap, and if not for the tiger sharks that hunt these waters once the sun goes down, he might never get out of the bliss machine, which makes no claims, only grants them.

  School of Fight: Learning to Brawl with the Hockey Goons of Tomorrow

  Jake Bogoch

  FROM DEADSPIN.COM

  TOM BLOOMBERG DECIDED to teach me how to punch another kid unconscious on a hot summer day in rural Manitoba. He called this unsolicited lesson "the moves." I was 15. Tom, an oak trunk of a man who lived two doors down from my family's cottage, knew that I was entering a tough age for hockey players and decided I was ready.

  Tom had done well in hockey. He'd earned himself a tryout for the St. Louis Blues. Now he sold real estate. We stood above Falcon Lake on his dock, sticky with freshly lacquered stain, and Tom began the lesson with a story about a fight he'd won. The morning after the brawl, he'd woken up with a throbbing hand and driven to a hospital. Tom attributed the pain to a broken bone in his hand; the X-ray found that in fact the pain originated in his knuckle, into which his opponent's tooth had interred itself.

  Tom segued into hockey fighting's rules of engagement: 1. Never fight with your visor on. 2. Don't antagonize only to back down. 3. Star players have immunity. 4. Enforcers only battle other enforcers. 5. No trash talk if you can avoid it.

  Last, Tom showed me how to tear off another guy's helmet and how to use his own jersey against him. If everything went well, I'd grab him by his equipment and yank his face into my fist until the refs stepped in. Then Tom wiggled his pecs at me and dove into the lake.

  The lesson had lasted
five minutes, but it was an important one. I started playing competitive hockey at age five, which is what you do when you grow up in western Canada. You play until your trajectory stalls or your father allows you to quit—whichever comes first. For a short stint, I played on an elite team. I was a tall kid, which meant that I played defense and was tasked with protecting our goalie. "Protecting the goalie" is a coaching euphemism for "goon." I was given this role at age seven.

  This was a loosely defined role but in general it meant that I attacked anyone who bothered our goalie. If it happened, I was supposed to hit him, though my coaches never provided any further instructions. This was confusing for a second-grader: if this was my job, and it was so important, why didn't they teach me how to do it?

  Aside from Tom, no one ever actually taught me how to fight. Teaching kids to fight is the single biggest taboo in the minor hockey establishment. With or without instruction, my role was locked anyway. Despite 12 years of junior hockey, no coach ever taught me to stickhandle, deflect a shot from the point, or roof the puck with a backhand. But how to hip-check? How to discreetly break a wrist with a slash? No problem, kid.

  Most coaches stop short of fighting lessons because they don't know how or can't bring themselves to do it. Instead, fight lessons are whispered from a deviant uncle, a friend's dad, a neighbor. It's a sort of Talmudic tradition, passed down orally through generations of goons.

  So I was shocked to learn, in 2007, that someone had violated that tradition and opened a school that promised to teach kids how to fight each other on skates. The world's only hockey fight camp for children was the brainchild of Trevor Lakness, a franchisee of Puckmasters, a chain of year-round hockey schools. Fight camp was held twice a year, cost $50, and was unadvertised. Players as young as 11 were welcome to attend the one-day clinic, where they learned basic fighting theory, how to throw punches, grapple, defend themselves, and the code of ethics as it pertained to helmet-less, bare-knuckle fighting among children in skates.