I have no other explanation for what happens next other than the hand of God reaching out and setting me back down in the front of the wave, perfectly level and pointed toward shore. The second I land I press the gas, the ’ski sputters to life, and I’m out of there.
I can’t believe what just happened.
In the meantime, thankfully, Rodrigo has been rescued by the lifeguards.
WHEN MY turn comes I breathe to calm myself and focus on what’s in front of me. The first swell is twenty feet—a forty-foot face—nothing giant, but solid and respectable. I let go of the towrope and angle down the wave. After I’ve gone, I don’t know, twenty yards across the face I can see the wall of water hollowing out in front of me, the lip heavy and threatening. I feel the urge to pull in now, but the plan was not to pull in until the fourth wave. Instead, I feel a rush of fear and kick out, bailing out of the wave back over the lip.
The humiliation is instant and absolute. I thought to myself, This is the biggest contest I’ve ever been in, the biggest waves I’ve ever surfed, the biggest purse on the line, my career on the line, and I just wussed out. I haven’t given them a thought all morning, but suddenly I remember the thousands of spectators lining the cliff. I feel the eyes of every one of them boring down on me. From a half mile out to sea I can see their thought bubbles: Garrett McNamara—total wuss.
And it wasn’t even a big wave.
To say I’ve lost my mojo is an understatement. Rodrigo speeds back around and I pick up the rope. We circle back around and we wait. I hate waiting. I hate feeling like I’ve let Rodrigo down. Let myself down. And even worse, I’ve jacked myself out of the moment. I can’t focus. The hamster wheel in my head is whirring. What am I going to do? What did I just do? What am I going to do next? How am I going to do this? I remind myself what I know to be true about fear, that it’s something we manufacture. It arises when we’re stuck in the past remembering something bad that’s happened, or projecting into the future, imagining something bad that will happen. Right now, in this moment, I know I know how to do this.
Finally another set arrives and the wave Rodrigo puts me on this time is twenty-five feet, fifty-foot face, and he puts me in the perfect spot. I torpedo across the face, almost get barreled twice—it takes everything I have to resist the urge—and finally make it to the channel and kick out.
Confidence surges with the adrenaline. Okay, I think, let’s do this.
My second ride is similar to the first. Find the sweet spot and surf like it’s a race to some invisible finish line.
But my wussing out on what would have been my first wave has indeed cost me. The minutes on my heat are ticking down. Rodrigo tells me we only have a few minutes left. The next set is cruising toward us. He guns the jet-ski and moves to put me in on the wave.
I shout no no no. Rodrigo guns it and we zip back over the shoulder. We wait, maybe twenty seconds, a long time. The second wave gathers itself up and again Rodrigo drives on the gathering peak. Again I shout no and again we move off over the shoulder. The third wave is usually the biggest one of the set, so I’m banking on that.
Rodrigo taps the face of his waterproof watch and gives me a what’s-going-on-here shrug. We’re running out of time. I point at the next wave, rising up huge and glistening, and he slingshots me into position. It’s on. The squirt of confidence I’d gained on the second wave reassures me, calms me down, nudges me back into the moment, and now my hunger wakes up.
IT ISN’T the biggest wave and doesn’t have much to it, but I’m able to fade for a while and do a snap and a cutback. Offshore wind is blowing a little stronger and I can hear the sound of the horn blowing, signaling the end of the heat. I execute a sharp cutback. I am aware of the mountain of wave on my back, but I’m not scared shitless racing out to the channel. I surf the whole thing as though I own the place, then I kick out at the end. I can’t believe it. I’ve made it in the nick of time.
Rodrigo picked me up and we rode back to the gulch where we put the ’ski in that morning. The contest was over, and the judges were tallying the score. I felt optimistic. Our performance was solid if not inspired. Now we struggle to get the ’ski out of the water, same situation as that morning only in reverse, waves crashing on our backs and on the trailer and truck. I’m relieved for the distraction.
I can’t remember how, exactly, we found out that we’d won. There was no formal announcement over the loudspeaker. I think a contest volunteer may have found us as we pulled the jet-ski from the water. I do remember my reaction. I walked away from the crowd and looked out at the waves. I asked for a phone and called my wife and I burst into tears.
At that moment, I thought about my months of hard work; the predawn workouts; the lean and clean eating; the mana and power I’d tried to embody as I walked around the heiau; the blueprint I’d written on impulse that day in the shop, listing, confidently, the winning of this contest as one of my goals.
I’d made the right choice choosing Jaws over the Eddie. I was only an alternate, and there was no guarantee I would have been able to paddle out. Even so, amid a little controversy, Kelly Slater had won the Eddie. At first Australian Tony Ray had been declared the winner. Tony was the tow-in partner of Ross Clarke-Jones, and one of those guys who lived and breathed big waves. Then Kelly Slater asked to see the judging sheets and, wouldn’t you know it, someone had counted wrong. Tony’s celebration was cut short when the announcer came back on and apologized. The winner was Kelly Slater. How easily I could have been in Tony’s shoes.
HOUND OF THE SEA
THAT NIGHT I FLEW home. For the next week or so, people came into the shop to congratulate me. When I was shopping for groceries at Foodland they congratulated me. Sunset was pumping a little later in the month, and when I paddled out the boys (who I once thought of as the gnarliest locals) nodded and asked howzit and threw me the shaka. Definitely had the feeling that I’d gained some new respect.
I was proud of myself for making my blueprint and, along with Rodrigo, earning the win at Jaws. But it was unclear how it was going to help me with my ultimate goal: keep surfing. Sponsors didn’t flock to me. I fielded phone calls from Red Bull, which I signed with (and left years later, after it came out that energy drinks were hard on your heart and in general bad for your health), and Quiksilver, which I didn’t. (They offered me $2,000 a month and I thought I was worth more than that.) I also signed with No Fear clothing, and Xcel wet suits.
I was trying to be a better businessman, but a high-school diploma and Small Business for Dummies can only take you so far. The shop was doing all right, but I wanted to close it, and soon.
I was thinking about a Web site for the shop, and thought maybe I should have one for myself too. It was 2002 and the concept of personal Web pages was just catching on. I didn’t know a lot about it, nor did anyone I know. Surfers didn’t care much about the Internet except when it came to predicting storms and the big swells that came with them.
“Claiming”—publicly acknowledging that you totally owned that monster wave or heavy-lipped barrel or snagged the wave of the day during a historic swell—was frowned upon in surf culture. Depending on who you were and how heavy the wave was, you were sometimes permitted to raise your arms for a moment of stoked triumph after a barrel spit you out. But after that it was best to underestimate the size of the wave and let others marvel about your epic achievement behind your back. It occurred to me that having a Web site was probably the digital version of claiming. But my instincts said that I needed to put myself out there if I wanted to succeed, instead of waiting for people to come to me. And anyway, Laird Hamilton, who people generally admired, had one and it seemed to be working for him.
The shop’s Web site was hosted by a company called GlobalHost. The main office was in Hale’iwa, above Coffee Gallery, and I’d seen their ads around town. One day during a slow afternoon I called and told them who I was, and said that if they cut me a deal I would consider them a sponsor and wear a GlobalHost T-shirt or run a
banner ad on my Web site or whatever they thought was fair. The guy I spoke to asked whether he could call me back. I assumed he had to check with someone before setting up my new account.
A few minutes later the phone rang, someone named Lowell Hussey calling. He was on the board of directors at GlobalHost and also happened to live on the North Shore, near Log Cabins, just down the road.
“We’d be happy to host your Web site, but how about we also build you a better one, and why don’t we meet and we can talk about management.”
I said sure, because when do I not say sure? I was a little unclear as to what he meant about management. Did he mean managing my Web site?
Turns out he meant managing me.
LOWELL HUSSEY was one of those start-up guys who makes a fortune by the time he’s thirty-five, then “retires” to pursue his passion, which usually involves making a few more fortunes. (Lowell was thirty-seven.) He had an MBA from Harvard and was a former senior vice president of marketing and programming for Time-Warner Cable. Solar energy, Web site hosting, digital communications—Lowell was into it all. He’d also volunteered to help big Kahuku High and Intermediate School, at the far end of the North Shore, eastside, start up their own e-commerce site. In their second year they were pulling down $150,000, mostly in T-shirt sales (their football team had been back-to-back state champs.) The kids were fully in charge and the profits were fed directly back into school programs. He would go on to build a few more companies, start a couple of charities supporting animal welfare, and introduce American football to Poland.
I put on pants and an aloha shirt and went to the meeting. Lowell was a big guy with a firm handshake and a lot of master-of-the-universe-type confidence. Most managers of professional athletes have no idea what to do with surfers, even now. Most surfers resist anything that gets in the way of surfing. Which pretty much means anything. We don’t like to be counted on to be somewhere at a certain time because our passion and our reason to get up in the morning always depends on those massive storms tracking around the planet. Our daily lives are literally as changeable as the weather. Team sports and tennis matches are scheduled years in advance; the best we can do is have a three-month holding period for our marquee events. We are the only professionals in the world who have so-called big-wave clauses—if there are giant waves pumping somewhere on earth, we reserve the right to take off and not attend the event, the opening, the premiere, the fund-raiser, the whatever it is we’ve been contracted to do.
Maddening.
But Lowell Hussey was stoked by the challenge of helping me figure out how I could keep surfing.
We worked together for a few years and he taught me everything about business, specifically the world of marketing. How corrupt it was and how cynical it was and how political. All these things I had no desire to know and still wish I didn’t know.
I was a little kid who grew up in a commune. I never had a father who came home and read the Wall Street Journal and talked about what went on at the office. Never had family holidays where the businesspeople talked about buying low and selling high. I was a boy raised on too much pot and no sex, no killing, no materialism.
Business, it turns out, is all about numbers. It is only about numbers. Only about profits. Bottom line is all that matters. Shareholders are all that matters. Everyone else is completely expendable. A corporate-sponsored surfer whose role it is to use a product to make it look sexy and glamorous by association, and whose only value lay in being photographed carving a beautiful line across a glassy turquoise wave in an exotic location, can be replaced in a heartbeat by a younger, blonder, smoother surfer who is photographed on a bigger, glassier, bluer wave in an even more exotic location. Chew you up and spit you out and on to the next guy and the next and the next, and that was how it worked.
This was no surprise to me. Hadn’t I seen this in my own life when I broke my back? Out of commission for a single surfing season at the height of my so-called career and my sponsors fled, rats on a sinking ship. Didn’t even have to look too far to find the next big thing—my own brother stepped right up. Lowell made me see that winning the Jaws Tow-In World Cup was all well and good, but unless I changed the way I thought about myself and what I had to offer the world, I would very soon find myself in the same position I’d been in before I bought the shop. Maybe now I’d be negotiating for $5,000 a month instead of $500, but I was still replaceable, probably by the next guy who won the next big contest. Also, staring down the barrel of thirty-five. Also, as Lowell kindly reminded me, not blond, not blue-eyed, not only not smooth, but rough around the edges. I found myself telling him something my dad once told me, that the original Celtic meaning of the name McNamara was “hound of the sea.” Lowell laughed and said, Why not?
The only way to become irreplaceable was to distinguish myself from everyone else. To make myself recognizable as a big-wave hellman named Garrett McNamara. The one and only. The hound of the sea.
Oh, I had a hard time with this. This went completely against the unwritten surfer code of ethics. We accept sponsorship money to wear the hats and T-shirts with the corporate logos, but we don’t want our faces on anything. We don’t want our names on anything. Maybe a limited edition surfboard, maybe. If a Japanese company wanted to stick my mug on a giant billboard looking down on the traffic of Tokyo, that was their business.
The bigger cajónes we have, the bigger waves we ride, the more we risk our lives, the more humble we’re supposed to be.
I told Lowell all of this one day over breakfast at Cafe Haleiwa.
“I totally get your point,” I said, “but I don’t think I can do it.”
“Let’s try an experiment,” he said.
Before I could ask what kind, he reached down and picked up a poster leaning against his legs and unrolled it. There was a glossy picture of the Jaws barrel and my name across the bottom in bold black letters. It was against everything I thought I believed in.
He’d had a limited edition made for $2 apiece. I signed maybe two hundred. We placed them in surf shops all over O’ahu. Unsigned, $5. Signed, $10.
They sold out quickly. Suddenly, my name was everywhere. I’m still not sure if I agree with the tactic, but it worked.
TEAHUPOʻO
THE SUMMER AFTER RODRIGO and I won the Jaws Tow-In I could afford to get off the rock. The only place I wanted to go was Tahiti, where I had some unfinished business.
Teahupoʻo is a half mile out from a tiny village on the southwestern coast of Tahiti. The wave is a rampaging left, a heaving slab of glass that doesn’t break so much as collapse onto a coral reef so sharp that a side order of massive lacerations are served with every wipeout. Added bonus: the fire coral, abundant here, ensures that your open wounds will sting for days, then possibly get infected.
There’s no real height to the back of the wave here, and in pictures taken from behind it looks like a moving waterfall instead of something that rises up and spills over. So much water is sucked up from in front of the wave it bears the distinction of being the only one in the world that breaks below sea level. Sitting in the lineup as every set rolls in feels as if the entire ocean is moving toward the beach. But however unusual the wave may seem, it’s basically just a ridiculously huge closeout with a nearby channel that offers a last-minute avenue of escape.
Every aspect of the wave is life or death from start to finish. Surfing it puts your nerves on permanent edge. Once, in 2005, after a nasty wipeout I felt what I thought was a huge strip of my own thigh meat hanging from my leg. I reached down and touched the skin, but felt no pain. For a long moment I thought I must have brushed up against some poisonous coral that contained a neurotoxin. Then looked down and saw it was only a neoprene strip from the leg of my wet suit.
When Laird Hamilton surfed what came to be called the Millennium Wave at Teahupoʻo in August 2000, after he emerged from the explosive foam ball at the end of the barrel, he sat on his board in the channel and wept. The cover of Surfer showed him just before th
e fat lip rolled over, and in the lower left-hand corner it said “oh my god . . .”
A few years earlier, Liam and I and a couple of up-and-coming kids made the trip the week before the Billabong Pro Tahiti contest. A bunch of other Hawaiians showed up as well, including Danny Fuller and Hank Gaskell. Everyone else was there to practice for the contest, but I was there to get barreled and have fun. It rained for three days—a steaming tropical rain with crashing thunder and lightning that sounded like a Star Wars lightsaber fight, so heavy and loud that Liam was practically in tears. But on the fourth morning the sun rose so we drove out to the break before dawn.
I was jittering with anticipation and fear. I had wanted to surf this wave for so long. I’d tried to get here ten years before, when only bodyboarders talked about the massive, freakish wave at the end of the road in the little village of Teahupoʻo. I’d saved up money for a ticket from Honolulu, bought two weeks’ worth of spaghetti, canned tuna, and mixed nuts at Costco, then was turned away at the airport when it turned out I didn’t have enough money to bring along my surfboards. It was seven hundred dollars, more than my ticket. I went home, and Scott Ostrander, the guy I was supposed to travel with, wound up on the cover of Surfer.
We drove the boat out to the lineup. The water was so clear. If you paid attention to the reef, you could see green-and-blue parrot fish, and bright orange clown fish poking around the coral. But no surfer wants to think about the reef. Instead I watched the freakish, thick slabby waves. They were the perfect size—not monsters—and I went for an eight-footer, the first of a set. It was a bad choice. It was like I was in an elevator and someone cut the cord.
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