The Best American Sports Writing 2014

by Glenn Stout

  Soon I’m out alone in the channel, watching the waves, with just a sea turtle for company. It blows its nose, cranes its neck, and regards me skeptically. We’re the perfect test for the mistaken identity theory, and I’m feeling nervous. Mostly, though, I’m worried about the waves, which make a fearsome tearing sound like crashing timber as they explode onto the reef. This is no surf break for out-of-practice middle-aged men. Still, I can recall the old compulsion, the restless nights before an expected swell, the sheer joy and the camaraderie of the wave-riding tribe. I know what it must be like to have to give it up when you’re in the throes of early passion for the sport—and I was just a surf-starved pup from flat-city Florida. To be a young surfer with the skill to ride these waves—dude, it’s gotta suck.

  But while many surfers are simply sitting out the crisis, a lot of others are organizing and developing tactics to get back in the water. Loris Gasbarre, a close friend of Mathieu Schiller, has started Prévention Requin Réunion, pushing for a selective culling but also fund-raising to buy Zodiacs and hire security for surf competitions. Christophe Mattei, a technologically inclined big-wave rider, is developing a smartphone app that would work in conjunction with shark-tagging data to provide real-time info on shark locations. Réunion island surfers are beginning to realize that the loss of safety is long-term and that they are going to have to adapt.

  One sunny afternoon, Mat Milella dons mask and fins and slips into the water of the St. Gilles harbor, within sight of the shark warning flags flying over Trois Roches. Milella is a paid vigie requin (shark lookout), part of a new CHARC “securitization” program that has begun patrolling surf breaks that remain open. With a quick prayer to the surf gods and a quicker “fuck it,” I splash in after him.

  The 32-year-old waterman is well suited to the task: whippet-thin, with piercing eyes and golden hair, he’s Rowdy Gaines reborn. We kick out of the murky harbor, heading south, away from Trois Roches, thankfully. We’re within the Marine Reserve, among knobs of bleached coral. There are a few bright tropicals, various tangs and angels and parrotfish, but no sharks, no barracudas, no mackerel or grouper. Not much of a “larder,” not here anyway. Milella dives down to 20, 30 feet, hanging motionless, working on his lung capacity and free-diving technique. If this were an actual lookout shift, Milella would be paired with a fellow waterman, ready at the first sign of danger to blow a whistle and clear the water. For the worst-case scenario, the vigies have a trauma kit and the training to use it.

  With a last look around for sharks to disperse, Milella heads for shore. Though the waves are small today, they are surprisingly powerful and disorienting through a dive mask, the swirl of sand all but blinding, and I’m greatly relieved to take off my fins and wade through the shallows. As we trudge through the sand back to St. Gilles, Milella readily expounds, in fluent if heavily accented English, on the crisis. As a surf instructor and former competitive bodyboarder, he favors selective culling, but if the culling can’t happen, he’s still looking forward to a new era of surfing on Réunion, one that’s both more careful and more hard-core.

  Milella waxes persuasive about overfishing from long-liners creating starvation conditions, the local fouling of the ravines, bad water management, and faulty water-treatment plants discharging sewage into the sea. At St. Pierre, in the south of the island, there was a bad-sewage-treatment plant right in front of the break. “And bouledogues follow the shit,” Milella says. A friend of Mat’s, Vincent Motais de Narbonne, was surfing nearby when a bull grabbed his leg, dragging him down and beating him against the bottom. “He was praying his leg would go so he wouldn’t drown,” Milella says. Miraculously, Motais, who lost his leg at the hip, survived.

  As I listen to Mat Milella, it seems to me that everything that’s shitty about us Homo sapiens—literally and figuratively—is good for the bull sharks. And half-buried in the screed, I detect a grudging respect for the beast.

  My last evening on the island, I meet with a local spearfishing legend, Guy Gazzo, at his family’s poissonerie, their seafood shop, in a mall across the street from the beach at Boucan Canot. Gazzo, one of the world’s best breath-hold divers, and still incredibly fit at age 75, has spent more time underwater with the sharks than anybody. He tells me that spear fishermen saw the problem coming—witnessing increasing numbers of bulls, which were becoming more aggressive. He recalls, back in 2006, diving off Roches Noires, when he speared a tuna and it took off, taking line. Then here it comes, back to him, with three sharks chasing it. But back then nobody took the fishermen’s stories seriously.

  Gazzo doesn’t believe anyone really knows precisely why the sharks are attacking now, or why so aggressively. Nor why they have settled in the area. “When you choose a neighborhood,” Gazzo reasons, “you a want a boulangerie, a charcuterie, a chemist, bus stops. Many factors make for a good home. It is the same for the bouledogues.”

  Guy Gazzo’s surprising anthropomorphizing harks back to Buyle’s most empathic speculations. Buyle believes that the bull sharks’ social units are complex enough that the loss of a single individual could send a group into a tailspin of erratic behavior. It’s also possible, Buyle posits, that if an influential individual were to be injured, the others might help it hunt for easy prey—and nothing could be easier prey than an oblivious land mammal on the surface. It’s a leap of imagination to see the tragedy of the attacks in reverse perspective: a beloved bull (do they love one another?), suddenly wrenched from the water, vanishing into the sky; the grieving survivors (do they grieve for one another?) rallying together, making a necessary change.

  It’s a tragic change of behavior, for man and shark. Gazzo is pro-cull, but he doesn’t want to see a shark massacre. And he believes CHARC had better hurry up with its study, or the surfers and fishermen will take out the sharks, poaching them by night. “All species have a survival technique, whether it’s speed or size or coloration,” Gazzo says. “Ours is intelligence. What’s incredible in this story is that we’re using intelligence to protect a species that is killing us.”

  Alas, we are both too smart for our own good and not nearly smart enough. Our manipulations of nature are perforce shortsighted: we are blinded by both its vastness and its proximity, its constant flux amid illusory stability. As the Marine Reserve scientists have pointed out, kill the bull sharks and you might get something worse. The world as we know it—and as we have loved it—depends on its predators for balance, yet we keep choosing the unknown world without them, the brave new world with as-yet-unpredicted monsters in it.

  With our own monster fleets, floating cities hauling humongous nets, we have ransacked the seas, perhaps irreparably. Enormous catches feed our growing populations, and population increase means increased pollution. Our success predestines our peril. It’s a bitch. Here on Réunion island, suffering its own successes, its steep volcanic slopes draining the effluvia of a burgeoning population, all the unforeseen dangers of bad stewardship of the environment are embodied in one beady-eyed, piggish thug of a fish. Which seems to be thriving, for a time, in our shit. Or maybe our sins aren’t so much good for them as survivable. Like a macro version of a super-virus, bull sharks are a symptom, and a consequence. They’re what you get in the sea when you’ve lost just about everything else: the last shark swimming.

  ALICE GREGORY

  Mavericks

  FROM N+1

  THE AIR SMELLS FAINTLY of salt water, and strongly of bonfires, diesel fuel, and weed. Seagulls squawk, the sky on the horizon is just turning green, and the air is cold in that prankish West Coast way that’s impossible to take seriously and pointless to dress for. Once the sun comes up and the fog burns off, it’s going to be a perfect day.

  It’s 6:00 A.M., high tide, and I’m a 30-minute, eucalyptus-dense drive south of San Francisco in Princeton-by-the-Sea, a tiny village with some of the biggest waves in the world and not much else. Shadowy figures are perched in the beds of pickup trucks; they speak in low voices and occasionally take sips of coffee
. I’m sitting on the ground in the near-dark, waiting for a surf contest to begin.

  An unusually steep, unusually deep Pliocene-epoch sedimentary reef rises half a mile offshore. This is where Mavericks breaks, where from November to March waves can top out at 100 feet, making them roughly 10 times the height of what most surfers would consider “big.” Sharks are common, as are riptides and exposed rocks. Accomplished big-wave surfers—famous ones—have died here.

  Some years—when tides and swells and winds and storms combine infelicitously—the waves here fail to break at anything above 20 feet, which means for Mavericks that they are hardly waves at all. If the conditions aren’t right, the contest doesn’t happen. When it does happen, the Mavericks Invitational is announced a few days ahead of time, and even in this case the plan is provisional at best. The inconvenience is unavoidable; one elemental change can ruin the wave.

  It’s Sunday, and the Mavericks Invitational was announced on Thursday, which means that 12 of the 24 competitors had to buy plane tickets—from Los Angeles, Hawaii, Brazil, and South Africa—fast. The other 12 live less than an hour’s drive away, and would probably be surfing here today, contest or no contest. They all know each other, and most surf together regularly. On this winter morning, it’s been three years since the last invitational.

  Compared with most professional athletes, these guys are ancient. Matt Ambrose of Pacifica is 40. Shane Desmond and Ken “Skindog” Collins, both from Santa Cruz, are 42 and 43, respectively. At 31, Shawn Dollar, also from Santa Cruz, is one of the youngest competitors. He also holds the world record for the biggest wave ever paddled into (61 feet, a scale at which almost every other surfer would opt for tow-in). I ask Dollar why the surfers at Mavericks are so old. “It’s scary as shit,” he says, raising his eyebrows. “It takes you years and years and years to break down fear. Put a 16-year-old kid out there? He’s probably going to drown.”

  Surfers have the odd habit of saying “I drowned” when they mean “I almost drowned.” Drowning, after all, feels like almost drowning until it feels like nothing. When I ask Dollar to explain the sensation of almost drowning, his answer, and the way he holds his face as he says it, makes me feel that the question is an intrusive one. “It’s just depressing and lonely,” he says, not making eye contact. “The lights start turning off, literally. It blinks in your mind and goes black. Pretty soon, it’s just lights-out and you’re done.” He pauses awkwardly. “It’s really fucking weird.”

  Just before Christmas in 1994, Hawaiian pro surfer Mark Foo took a red-eye flight from Honolulu to California. A swell was hitting Mavericks, and he wanted to arrive in time to catch it. Stoked but sleep-deprived, Foo paddled out and took off on a relatively innocent-looking 20-foot wave. The ride was photographed from multiple angles, and pictures captured Foo wiping out near the base. He never came up. Most think his leash got tangled in the rocks, fettering him to the ocean floor as wave after wave crashed above him. Two hours later, his body was discovered in a nearby lagoon, still tied to the shattered tail section of his board. Foo’s death brought nationwide attention to Mavericks, a break whose size, until then, most surfers considered a myth.

  In the following years there were rough storms, triple-wave hold-downs, too many close calls to count. But true tragedy didn’t strike again at Mavericks until 2011. It was late on an early-spring day when Sion Milosky, also Hawaiian, charged what many have since estimated was a 60-foot wave. Milosky—fearless, ranked, and respected—never emerged. He wiped out, was held down by two waves, and probably lost consciousness. Twenty minutes later, he was found floating in the waters of a nearby jetty. There was no contest that year; this was just a regular day—what many surfers refer to as “getting wet.”

  The first heat won’t begin for another hour, and not all the competitors are here yet. So far, the parking lot’s mostly filled with spectators, likely all surfers themselves: kindergartners sitting on skateboards, gray-haired men with ragged backpacks and promotional sweatshirts. As they arrive, the competitors are easy to spot. They’re the color of terra-cotta and look as though they’ve never been indoors. Surfers have a kind of compromised grace. They maintain dignity in spite of ridiculous clothing and a constant low level of physical discomfort (chafing neoprene, freezing water, piss-soaked wetsuits). Their shoes are cloven-toed, they wear skintight unitards, and most of the time they are responsible for a delicate, awkwardly shaped object that can serve as entertainment, transportation, and weapon. These are the kind of men who can be sincerely described as “beautiful.” To watch them as a woman isn’t to desire them so much as to wish you were a man.

  The defending champion, a barrel-chested, 38-year-old South African named Chris Bertish, stands next to a propped-up surfboard and makes prayer hands at everyone who takes his picture. The other guys are seated in the beds of trucks, next to their guns, which is what you call the extra-long boards needed to surf a wave like the ones that break at Mavericks. Some guys with camera gear are hanging around them, along with a few UC Santa Cruz students who blog for surfing websites. By this point, the sun is shining and everyone’s smiling and making small talk. The conditions, it’s agreed, are sick. Kelly Slater, the most famous surfer in the world, was supposed to compete today, but has failed to show up. “Because he’s a pussy,” someone matter-of-factly says.

  I overhear someone claim that 87,000 people have bought tickets. This is a demented estimate. Over the course of the day, about 30,000 people will trickle in and out, but right now it’s more like 1,500—max. Sierra Nevada, the unofficial beverage of Northern California, has set up a beer garden, which in this case means “fenced-off part of the parking lot with a keg in it.” There’s a clam chowder truck and a hot dog cart. For a $10 ticket, it’s about what you’d expect.

  The crowd contains a lot of stupidly handsome Australians, even more obese adults in 49ers gear, and a good number of cruel-seeming young boys. Their mothers, though irresponsibly tanned, appear attentive. They wear flared jeans, snug tank tops, and platform flip-flops. They have French manicures, puka-shell necklaces, and toe rings. Either their taste has not changed since spring break 1998 or they’ve just decided, dispassionately, that this is the hottest way to dress.

  A lot of the people here—both men and women—possess all the features that constitute a modern, normative standard of beauty, but exaggerated to a ghoulish degree. They’re so blond and so tanned and so lean that it all actually starts to look like one big mess of congenital disorders. A towheaded guy kisses his towheaded girlfriend, and it’s shocking—seconds before I had assumed they were fraternal twins.

  Among the surfers, there is a lot of synthetic fiber and a lot of buckles. Most of their clothing, it seems, is designed to be either aero- or hydrodynamic. The gear is only a symptom—almost every aspect of a surfer’s life is functional. They know the tides and what they mean for your plans to walk the dog on the beach. They know why salmon is more expensive this winter and when there’s too much plankton in the water to swim without getting sick. Their friendships are often opportunistic, but in a straightforward way: with the fishermen who can tow them out to far-off breaks, the park rangers who clear the trails that lead to the most remote reefs, the contractors who employ them when the swells are bad.

  Surf contests might be the strangest of all athletic competitions. They’re not fair, and they can’t be. Each wave presents a different set of challenges, and depending on how many happen to break during a heat—and on a surfer’s own tenacity—he might catch one or five or none. (Getting none is called “getting skunked.”) He can take off on as many or as few as he likes, and often there are multiple men to a wave.

  In any contest and on any wave, surfers must take off from a critical spot from which they’ll travel fast and perilously. They’re graded on the size of the waves they catch and on how stylishly they ride them. Style, in the face of a rapidly moving wall of water many times your height, means a relatively still pose. At a big-wave contest like Mavericks, t
here’s not a lot of need for tricks.

  The waves at Mavericks break so far from shore that the whole spectacle is nearly invisible from the beach. The waves are white specks and the surfers are black specks. If you didn’t know better, you’d think it was a harem of seals out there. So a Jumbotron, mounted high up on a pole in the parking lot, will broadcast the contest. “Jumbotron” has been on the tip of every ambient tongue all morning, as though it were some nifty new technology or the hushed name of an undercover celebrity.

  It’s not even 8:00 A.M., but the concrete is already warm. Everyone’s leaning back or sitting cross-legged; some have kicked off their sandals. I root around in my purse for sunscreen, and when I look up the contest has already begun. The entire Jumbotron is bright with whitewater.

  Skindog catches the first wave of the day, one that looks about six times his size. When a surfer chooses his wave, the first thing he does is paddle away from it. Then, when he feels the momentum of the wave beneath him—his paddling aided by the energy of the water—he determines the precise millisecond to “pop up,” which consists of grabbing the rails of his board and, in one movement, going from prostrate to a crouch. If he miscalculates that moment, he’ll wipe out. From this crouching position, the surfer stands and proceeds to travel along the wave—and down the wave, which means going sideways and forward at the same time. Meanwhile the wave will be breaking above him.

  Skindog is barreled for such a triumphantly long time that it seems like he must have gone under. Getting barreled (traveling as the wave curls above you, creating a tunnel) is objectively the most impressive feat in surfing, and it is always the thing that nonsurfers assume must just be an optical illusion. When Skindog finally emerges, he’s still standing. The crowd cheers.