I’VE FALLEN AND I CAN’T GET UP
THE DOCTOR SAID I was lucky I wasn’t paralyzed. I thought I’d broken my back, but the trickier diagnosis was a pair of severely herniated discs. The outside of two discs had been torn in the wipeout, and the soft inner part now pressed out through the fibers and into my spinal cord. Beyond that, medical mumbo jumbo. Beyond that, the floor is all there is. Me flat on it, staring up at the ceiling fan twirling round and round.
For two months I lay on the floor at my mom’s house in Pūpū-kea, a few feet away from where I collapsed on January 28. As anyone who knows me will tell you, I have two speeds: full throttle charging or dead asleep. Flat on my back with hundreds of lonely hours to think is worse than any bone-busting skin-abrading lung-exploding hold-down.
And please let’s not forget it was 1990. There was no i-anything, no laptops, tablets, or phones. I could hold a book or magazine up in front of my face, but I’d never been much of a reader, and anyway it gave me a headache. My mom sat at the kitchen table working on her painting projects and Liam was gone surfing. Our renters—no recollection of who they were—politely walked around me as though I was the coffee table. At night my mom covered me with a quilt and in the morning she took it off. My biggest daily adventure was being helped to the bathroom.
Maybe because my life has always been unpredictable, I didn’t stress out. The only thing we can count on is change. Why not go with it? Taking off on any given wave on any given day is a lesson in this. You eyeball the swell as best you can, take off and commit. You deal.
But I couldn’t deal with this. Seemed like every day the mailman arrived with more bills I couldn’t hope to pay. I had credit cards, a credit line. My little bit of pro fame had convinced banks I was worth the risk. Ha. To escape I turned my head to the side and stared at the TV. Daytime soap operas, game shows, Beverly Hills 90210. I took two codeine pills as often as the prescription allowed. I turned my head the other way and could see through the kitchen to the clock on the wall. Counted hours until my favorite shows. Counted hours until I could take my codeine again.
Time passed.
By March, winter big-wave season had passed and I was given the okay to walk around a little. My friend John Bryant had just become an acupuncturist, so every other day he came to the house and would practice on me. I joked that I could have a whole new career as a human pincushion. I found my way to George Cromack and his office in Hale-’iwa town, chiropractor to all the locals, specializing in wave-induced whiplash and spinal cord injuries. He graciously agreed to sponsor me in my rehabilitation. Together with Adam Salvio, my massage therapist, who worked on me for twenty bucks a session, they put me back together. My days revolved around my appointments, like some old geezer trying to shore up the ruins.
I had a few friends who didn’t mind my coming over and lying on their floors for a change of pace. One was Peter Davi. A friend of his who made Hyde sandals and baked homemade bread was also crashing there at the time. He’d bake all day long and my mouth would water and I’d eat an entire loaf for dinner. Then I’d shuffle over to my friend Buddy McCray’s place at Sunset. He had an extra firm futon, so I would lie on that for a change of pace. He would throw parties. Sometimes people would sit down on the futon, lean against my side, and then get up. It had finally happened: I had truly turned into a piece of furniture.
And then I’d go home. I never stopped to look at the surf; didn’t want to see what I was missing, which was my whole life. Three months in and I was barely on my feet. One night, after a day of wallowing around on Buddy’s futon, my balls felt a little itchy. I went to the bathroom, scratched a little down there, and pulled off what felt like a tiny scab. I held it up to the light and saw that the scab had tiny, wiggly legs. Turned out that one of my ex-girlfriends had slept on Buddy’s futon the night before. I think I might have cried. I had a robust case of crabs and I hadn’t even gotten laid.
My codeine addiction grew. I had started exercising by the end of the third month, walking half a mile, then a mile around our Pūpūkea neighborhood. I couldn’t have told you how much actual pain I was in or wasn’t in because I took a double dose of codeine round the clock. I was edgy and pissed if I couldn’t take my next dose on time. “Give me my damn pills”: pretty much the only thing I said these days. My mom, to her credit, gave me my damn pills and kept her mouth shut.
AROUND THE time I got hurt, a friend named Tom Tom Watawitz disappeared. He was a responsible, grounded guy, not the type to take off without telling someone. After I was up and around and practicing walking around carrying a surfboard under my arm, they found his body in a ditch beside Mililani Road, one of the highways that runs through the middle of the island. It was as if he’d been tossed from a moving vehicle, his head bashed in with a crowbar. They never arrested anyone, to my knowledge, nor could they even come up with a plausible motive. Tom Tom topped everyone’s list as nicest guy around. Our suspicion was that he got in the middle of some heavy shit while doing a favor for someone he shouldn’t have.
Surfers traditionally honor their dead with a memorial paddle out. Held at sunrise or sunset, we paddle our boards beyond the break, form a circle and join hands, share memories, throw leis or flowers into the center of the circle. It’s a somber, special time.
I decided that Tom Tom’s paddle out would be my first attempt at paddling since my injury. I would do it in memory of him. I remember driving down the hill to the beach listening to the Smiths. I am human and I need to be loved. I couldn’t remember ever having been so sad, and thinking of it now, I’m crying.
We paddled out at Rocky Point just as the sun was setting. The waves weren’t much, maybe one or two feet, but surely enough to hurt me had I got caught inside. We arrived outside the break and formed a circle. Tom Tom had been just nineteen, Liam’s age. We said a few awkward words of farewell and threw our purple leis into the center. We raised our clasped hands, then brought them down. A moment of silence followed.
After it was done a small set rolled in, and on impulse I took off on the first wave. The wind had dropped and the wave was a tidy, smooth right, chest high. Easy peasy. I angled my board and started paddling. My arms felt leaden, my shoulders stiff, but I caught the wave easily enough. Was a little light-headed as I stepped off in the whitewash. I was more stoked than I’d been in months, but also tired and out of breath. Definitely in no shape to surf. Then and there I vowed not to surf again until I was a hundred percent.
I had been at the peak of my career before my back injury. I’d thought I could take on anybody because I knew I didn’t need to be the best technical surfer or the most gifted athlete, I just needed to be the best paddler. In contests, the heats were stacked with six guys. If you could get yourself to the sweet spot on the best wave, it leveled the playing field. I felt that way at the time. I was probably very delusional.
Tom Tom’s friends and family surfed or paddled back in. As I turned and looked back out to sea, I saw two humpback whales swimming through what had been our circle, among the floating leis and flower petals. One of them rolled on her side and waved her fin, and the other waved his tail for about ten minutes. It was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.
“That’s Tom Tom saying good-bye,” I said to a girl named Kelsey, who happened to be standing right next to me. Every year there were one or two sought-after chicks on the North Shore who all the guys wanted to date, and she was one. Before my wipeout I’d tried to talk to her at a party and she had wandered off, completely disinterested. At the bonfire I sat next to her on a driftwood log and made more of my devastatingly witty small talk. I think she may have yawned. Then one of those gnarly half-a-foot-long brown Hawaiian centipedes crawled over her foot and began to make its way up her leg. I picked it up, casual as you please, and tossed it into the fire. She was in my arms in a heartbeat. That might have been Tom Tom, too.
I was back. Sort of.
DOLDRUMS
WHEN I WAS FINALLY able to paddle out with no back
pain I took stock of my situation and found it pathetic. I was broke. My brother ended up with all my sponsors. Deep in my heart I wanted to focus on big waves, but it was the early 1990s, so the only big-wave contest was the invitation-only Eddie.
I thought back to the $250 I’d won in the Triple Crown when I was seventeen and figured if it worked for me once, there was no reason it wouldn’t work for me again. The ASP ran the international pro tour—twenty-five big contests held all over the world—and if you wanted to stay in the game, entering them was what you did. The ASP tour has since become the World Champion Tour, and only top surfers in the world “make” it. But back then anyone ranked above 200 could pay $150 and was in.
Problem was, at that time the ASP was less focused on putting the best surfers on the most epic waves and more interested in trying to appeal to the mainstream public. People watched golf, the reasoning went, why not surfing? But to watch surfing you had to be able to actually see the surfers, which meant holding the contests on beach breaks, often in only waist-high waves.
I ignored my dream of riding monster waves and decided to be practical. Go back to what got me sponsors in the first place. Go back to what was the acceptable route to an acceptable career in the surfing world. Go back to what everyone approved of and paid attention to and applauded.
I focused on improving my small-wave style, got a YU board that was thick and short and flat, and started practicing my cutbacks. I believed I wanted to do this: what choice did I have?
I worked hard and started feeling more confidence. In smaller waves you’ve got to be nimble and even acrobatic, always doing what you can do to generate speed to keep the ride going. The adrenaline dump responsible for the big rush of big-wave riding—the rush that I loved like no other—was never guaranteed. I went to California, learned a few moves from San Clemente ripper Dino Andino, came home and started surfing Moku-lē’ia, at the western end of the North Shore, as far away from the big-wave action as you could get. Little waves, two-to-six-foot faces. Training like mad on them.
One time, at Hale-’iwa, during an early heat of the Triple Crown, I had surfed against my old idol Tom Curren, whose style I’d studied in the lineup at Niijima. We paddled out. I could feel my heart pounding. Woohoo, there’s a chance I’m going to beat the great Tom Curren! I remember the day was hot and sultry, the waves barely breaking at about a half foot. I was sweaty with focus. I was so excited. I thought I really had a chance to beat him.
Instead, I got good and smoked. Can’t remember what I did wrong. Other than not being Tom Curren.
I lived in a state of constant frustration.
Frustrated at the contests. It seemed as if the waves were always a foot high, practically ankle slop. The organizers would wait for weeks, and when they were finally forced to hold them, the wave of the day was chest high. These were no different from the waves Liam and I had learned on when we were children.
Frustrated at my finances. Endless money problems. The contests were held in Japan, Australia, California, and Indonesia. If I paid my bills at home I wouldn’t have money to travel. If I spent money on traveling, the bill collectors came calling at home. Our sponsors paid for us, but most of my sponsors had cut me loose after I broke my back. Sometimes the tour would set us up with hosts who would give us a free place to sleep, but I still had to cover my food and airplane tickets. It was somewhat easier to surf in Japan. Sponsor-less or not, I still had friends there who would put me up and treat me like a king. That was a nice reprieve.
I fell back on the only guaranteed income I knew: renting rooms to visiting Japanese surfers.
After a year or so I managed to save up enough money to go to Japan to see if I could drum up some sponsorship interest. The executives at Hotline, Peakaboo, and YU, my old sponsors, were politely interested, so some of them agreed to throw a few hundred bucks a month my way. It was something.
I also set up another meeting with Murasaki Sports. I waited in the reception area with my new portfolio on my knee. Like all surfers my wardrobe consists of a pair of swim trunks, a pair of shorts, some rubber slippers, and a few T-shirts. For the meeting I’d bought some new slacks and a polo shirt. The tag at the back of the shirt scratched my neck, and I didn’t like the feeling of shoes, also new, on my feet. In general everything felt wrong.
A secretary ushered me into the office of an enormous bald Japanese guy. I sat on the other side of his desk and asked in Japanese whether I might show him my portfolio. He didn’t seem to know why I was there, even though he’d agreed to the meeting.
The portfolio contained a few of my favorite photos, as well as clippings of pictures of me from a variety of stories published in the surf mags. I thought it was more important to show me in an editorial context than an advertising one. I never showed any of the advertising campaigns I’d appeared in, reasoning that a new sponsor wouldn’t much like seeing me working for someone else, same way you don’t show the new girlfriend pictures of you with your arms around the old. I also thought it looked better if I’d actually earned the coverage—thus the emphasis on editorial—failing to consider that if one company saw that my image was successful in selling products for another, my market value was assured.
The executive couldn’t have looked less interested. I kept trying to explain what I had to offer, wondering if he was getting it.
“If you sponsor me, I’ll put your stickers on my board and do autograph sessions at your stores when I come to Japan.”
“Stickers on your board?”
It was ridiculous. My Japanese was good but, it seemed, not good enough to convey why and how the romance and glamour of surfing would help sell his products, and how the photographs of me portrayed such romance and glamour. I thought for sure he was ready to show me the door, but then he said they would sponsor for me for $800 a month or so. It might not have been the end to my money troubles, but in my mind it was a huge victory, and we went on to have a great working relationship.
THE BIGGEST difficulty of that difficult time was watching people turn against my brother. Except for the winter, when everyone on earth who cares about surfing shows up on the North Shore, it’s a small town, with all the small-town rules and prohibitions. Liam is at heart a lover and would give you the shirt off his back, but in the lineup he was a fighter. When he paddled out at Pipeline and Rocky Point he fought for every wave he wanted, and he wanted all the good ones. On a daily basis he was alienating the gnarliest guys on the North Shore, who also happen to be the gnarliest guys in the world.
He never backed down and his reputation suffered.
Since I was his brother, basically my reputation was in the crapper too. As time went on Liam had become more and more focused. When he paddled out he was committed. He never let a wave go that he believed was rightfully his. No matter who else was in the water, no matter who else called it. Liam didn’t back down. But the heavies didn’t like it and the kooks didn’t like it and the traveling pros didn’t like it and the surf magazines, whose revenue was based on the big ads sponsored by the big companies who sponsored the traveling pros, didn’t like it.
Why? Because all summer long on the North Shore the ocean is flat. Everyone who could afford to go somewhere else went. Many of the locals, including Liam and me, lived hand-to-mouth and could barely pay our bills, so we stayed home. No waves, nothing to do except maybe partying. Then, in the late fall, the storms start percolating, sweeping down and across the Pacific. The waves finally come and thousands of people descend on the seven miles of world-class breaks that comprise the North Shore. From every part of the world they come. Surfers, managers, photographers and their assistants, corporate-sponsor executives and minions, surf-mag editors and writers, surf-contest muckety-mucks, groupies.
Every professional surfer on earth is there, and he somehow believes he deserves a wave because he’s spent a lot of time dreaming of, say, Pipeline, and he’s spent a lot of money to get there. And the photographers want to make their careers getting a gr
eat shot of him, and his sponsor, say Billabong, will feature the photo in a full-page ad in one of the big surf mags. A lot of people, not just the surfer, have a lot riding on him catching the wave of any given day.
But Liam has been here month in, month out, waiting. Pipeline and Rocky Point, the breaks he surfed religiously, the breaks he was working in an effort to have a solid career, were and are the most photographed breaks in the world. And, as a result, the most crowded.
This is where the challenges began for him. He was not about to step aside so that some pro who’d just stepped off the plane in Honolulu three hours earlier could take a good wave. Especially in contests, when all eyes were on him, he would go for it.
Writers writing their stories in the surf mags didn’t help matters. Neither Liam nor I were sponsored by the magazines’ big corporate advertisers. We didn’t ride for Billabong, for example, so we were easy scapegoats. Stories need a villain, and Liam was as good as any, especially because he was unrepentant. Why shouldn’t he be? There were California surfers who were blond and laid-back, and there were Aussie surfers who were radical and hard-charging, and there were noble and revered Hawaiians who could be as gnarly as they pleased because the entire world was encroaching on their perfect and unique waves, and there were eccentric South Africans and a few mysterious Tahitians, and there were drugs and there were feuds and choke outs and all the drama of any insular world, but there were no real bad guys. There were badasses, there were bad boys, but no bad guys. Except for Liam McNamara.
Hound of the Sea Page 12
