LONE RIDERKen Bradshaw near his Sunset Beach home, on Oahu’s North Shore, a 13-mile stretch of renowned surfing coastline.
Last winter, on the North Shore of Oahu, in Hawaii, the man who is believed to have ridden the biggest wave ever surfed, Ken Bradshaw, fell down the outside stairs of his self-built beach house while rushing to take the garbage out. The stairs do not have a handrail. The house does not seem to have been built to code. It looks like an assembly of beach shacks stacked three stories high. Bradshaw lives in parts of the second and third floors, and rents the rest out to other surfers, for income. He is 58, so no longer young, but he remains athletic and strong. This is obvious on first sight. He stands six feet tall and seems to be built of muscle and jaw. If you punched him hard enough you would break your hand. If you hit him with a bat you might break it too. History shows that he shrugs off greater punishment than that. It also suggests that having hit him you would be wise to step back. I don’t mean that Bradshaw is an especially vengeful or violent man. Actually, he is considerate, unpretentious, and polite. He does not drink. He does not eat meat. His neighbors like him a lot. But, after all, you’re the one who picked the fight. Your problem now is that Bradshaw has experience in these matters, because on the water there are rules he tries to apply.
The classic rule is the one-surfer-per-wave or, if that cannot be maintained, the no-coming-at-Bradshaw-from-the-side, the no-crowding-Bradshaw, or the no-cutting-off-Bradshaw-when-he’s-deep-into-a-ride. Afterward, he paddles up to the offender and warns him. If there is a need for a second warning he paddles up again and says, “O.K., that’s two. You will go in on the third one.” He means he’ll send the man to shore—usually by breaking the fins on his board. To me Bradshaw explained, “Sometimes then it gets ugly. They start into ‘Fuck you, asshole!’ If they say that to you, what are you going to do about it? A challenge like that. Are you going to back down, or go for it? I’ve sat on my board saying, ‘You get the first swing, dude. Swing away. But as soon as you hit me, I will take you down so hard you will not believe it.’ Some swing, some don’t.”
The problem is that there are too many surfers in the world and too few good waves to ride. This may come as a surprise, given the extent of global coastlines, but most surf is unrideable or uninteresting, and good locations are small. The North Shore, for instance, is only 13 miles long. It contains several dozen renowned surfing spots—particularly the “inside breaks” of Pipeline, Sunset Beach, and Waimea Bay, one after the other, close to the shore—but their takeoff zones are typically just a few yards wide, and they are crowded with surfers vying for advantage. Bradshaw calls this the dark side of surfing. The crowding is compounded by the fact that, even on good days at good breaks, good waves are relatively infrequent, and when one finally arrives, even if it is large, it usually offers enough space for just one good run. What goes on as a consequence Bradshaw calls natural selection. Actually, he calls it Darwinism, and means the same thing. It’s not about survival so much as getting the rides. In the minds of people like Bradshaw, the two are related. If you leave a challenge unanswered, the punks will start stealing your waves. There are a lot of punks in surfing. Bradshaw said, “Yeah. I’m not afraid to go for it. I’m not afraid to be underwater for a long time. And I guarantee you I have stood on people.” By people he meant men. For some reason this never comes up with women.
I mentioned the options: “You can hit them, hold them underwater, or knock their fins off.”
He nodded. He prefers to knock their fins off. There is a technique to it. First you flip over the other man’s board and brace it, sometimes by holding it under your arm; then you smash through the fins hard with your fist, striking beyond them in your mind, as in karate. It is only if the punk later persists, or challenges you directly, that you have to resort to more drastic measures. At least that’s the way it was before, when scores were settled fast. In recent years the struggle for dominance has become more drawn out, with threats of lawsuits and criminal charges. Bradshaw has been visited by the police several times.
It goes like “There’s been another complaint, Ken. Did you hit this guy?”
“No. I knocked his fins off.”
Or like “Did you really bite his board, Ken?”
“Why, did you see teeth marks?”
“Well, it could have been a mouth, Ken. Hard to believe it was a mouth. Was it really a mouth, Ken?”
“I was trying to make my point without getting in trouble.”
Trouble? Ken, like which kind? This is a man who rides waves so heavy they shake the earth when they break. Who has sacrificed comfort and wealth to do it. Who has willingly suffered the derision of conventional minds for the choices he has made. Who recently married for the first time, and to a much younger woman. Who may give her children. Who knows that she may break his heart. Who accepts that we are all alone when we die. Who rides with a single-mindedness that no one can equal—crouched low on his board in a predatory stance, left foot forward, body coiled, intently assessing the contours ahead, swerving and carving through the salt water. And for what? To do it again without repetition. And why? Because he is an athlete. Because every wave is different.
Last winter was an El Niño winter, and conditions on Oahu were extreme. Most of the inside breaks were trashed. The crowds of pretenders stayed away. Bradshaw reveled in it, taking on giant waves at the outside breaks over volcanic reefs a mile or more offshore. These were huge ocean swells that rolled in from distant storms and reared up to twice their height over the shallows, forming vertical faces that stood 50 feet high before curling and lunging forward with unfathomable force. Fifty-foot waves are five times higher than the highest waves that most surfers ever ride. Bradshaw rode them in obscurity, with no expectation of gain, absorbing the hits and hold-downs, spitting up blood, and continuing on for hours. His subsequent tumble down the stairs seems minor by comparison, though it broke two of his bones. We spoke about it the next day. He described his loss of balance, one foot missing a step and the other stepping into air, and the perception of inevitability that followed. He said that because he is accustomed to falling from heights the tumble seemed to happen in slow motion. He curled to protect his head, rolled in flight, and bounced once hard on landing. I sympathized with him for his injuries, but expressed greater concern for the stairs.
I. Outside Log Cabins
He set the record for the largest wave ever surfed on January 28, 1998, when he was 45 years old and his career as a professional surfer was nearly over. It was during another El Niño winter. Forecasters had predicted giant waves for that day on the North Shore. The California beachwear company Quiksilver had reacted by announcing that it would hold its premier big-wave contest on Waimea Bay. The dividing line between big and small waves is not clear-cut but seems to lie around 15 feet. Small-wave surfing is by far the dominant form of the sport—the place where most of the competitive action lies, and, for the industry, where the money is. Big-wave surfing, by contrast, is small. It can be done only when the ocean cooperates, and is attempted by just a few hundred people worldwide. Nonetheless the big-wave contest at Waimea is perhaps the most famous surfing event anywhere. It is an “invitational” that assembles 28 selected surfers to vie on-camera for a $55,000 first prize. It requires swells of 20 feet or greater (producing wave faces of 40 feet or more), so it is not held every winter. Quiksilver promotes it as something of a spiritual event, named after itself, as in “The Quiksilver,” and in memory of Eddie Aikau, a Hawaiian waterman who drowned in 1978. Bradshaw knew and admired Aikau, and has surfed in the contest many times, but he dislikes the event, and he hates the hype. He told me that the contest is actually just about selling beachwear to landlocked dreamers in Iowa. He said that Quiksilver is just another unnecessary brand that came along uninvited, and that it benefited no one but itself by glomming on to big-wave riding and Eddie Aikau’s name. I asked if Quiksilver didn’t also benefit the surfers whom it sponsors or who compete in the contests it holds. Bradshaw has had both experiences with the company. He said, “Dude, sponsorship is hard on the soul if you think how it goes. And, dude, the surfers who come when Quiksilver calls are like monkeys on a string.”
So he was like a monkey in 1998. Now he shuns the contest, but at the time he was broke as usual and still trying to make money by surfing. Whatever resentments he harbored toward commercial interests, he needed to take a crack at that prize. On Tuesday, the day before the event, he stayed home and monitored the weather reports. Local conditions were balmy, but the latest low-pressure system in the distant North Pacific was an especially dramatic one that had aimed unusually powerful swells directly toward Hawaii. At seven p.m., Bradshaw telephoned for the hourly observation from a wave buoy anchored 390 miles to the northwest. It was reporting massive 19-foot swells, measured top to bottom, with extraordinarily long 25-second intervals between successive crests.
Swells are energy pulses, not movements of water. The interval between their crests is a function of their speed. Bradshaw did a rough calculation and concluded that these were traveling at about 60 miles an hour—at least 15 miles an hour faster than the fastest he had experienced before. To top that, over the next few hours the buoy reported swell heights increasing to 22, then 25, then 27 feet—all with the same high-energy interval of 25 seconds in between. Bradshaw had a hard time sleeping that night. The swell could rise to 30 feet and beyond. If it did, the next day might bring the heaviest surfing ever seen. Eighty-foot, 90-foot, 100-foot faces—who knew? A 100-foot wave is the size of a 10-story building. Getting drawn up that face and thrown from the top would be like being thrown from a 10th-floor window and then having the building collapse onto your head. Bradshaw told me that in the darkness that night he did not feel afraid. Of course he didn’t. He said he felt the anxiety of anticipation. Of course he did. The entire direction of his life until then—the accumulation of every serious choice he had ever made—meant that he was going to take on those waves. He tried to worry instead about his house getting washed away, but there was no question about the relative importance of surfing in his mind. The location was equally clear. It would be the outer reef known as Outside Log Cabins, more than a mile offshore. That place has its name because it lies outside an inside break called Log Cabins, which itself is named after log cabins that once stood on the shore. The cabins are gone, but Outside Log Cabins remains as Bradshaw’s discovery, a reef where mammoth waves continue to break in conditions much larger than those that Waimea Bay can handle.
Waimea Bay is really just a cove. It is famous because of its flanking shoals and its central deepwater channel, which in combination can handle swells of up to 25 feet and turn them into perfectly shaped breakers twice as high—with faces up to 50 feet within easy camera range of spectators on the beach. It does have limits, however, and is overwhelmed on the rare occasions when swells of 30 feet or more come in. When breaks get overwhelmed they are said to “close out.” This means that the waves they form no longer peel progressively from their peaks but collapse at once along their entire fronts and are impossible to surf. At Waimea this looks like breakers of 50 feet or more exploding into the confines of the cove, turning the place into a seething bowl of whitewater that Bradshaw calls a cauldron of death. Resting in the darkness, with the buoy readings in mind, Bradshaw expected that Waimea would close out in the morning, and that Quiksilver would have to cancel the contest. He was just as glad. The company would step aside with its proffered prize, and he would head offshore in good conscience.
At dawn he heard, to his surprise, that Quiksilver was insisting on the contest. Wearily, he loaded his boards into his car and drove to Waimea Bay. When he got there the circus was on—in a tangle of police, video crews, Quiksilver publicists and contest organizers, civil-defense officials, all sorts of vendors and tagalong merchants, and crowd-control enthusiasts of various kinds. A least a thousand people milled on the beach. Bradshaw groaned inwardly at the scene. Then he looked out at the bay and saw a close-out set come in.
A set is a cluster of similarly sized swells, typically about a half-dozen strong. These particular ones must have been about 30 feet tall. When they hit the shoals they rose into 60-foot faces and collapsed explosively across the full span of the bay. For some minutes a relatively peaceful interlude ensued, during which 25-foot swells rolled in, which could perhaps have been surfed, but then another close-out set arrived, and others after that, with less and less time between them. After watching the pattern for a while, Bradshaw realized that any competitors who tried to paddle out there to ride in the interludes were going to get crushed before they could even get into position. The hopelessness seemed so obvious to him that he wanted to leave, but a Quiksilver representative advised him to hang around. The man spoke in exclamations. “Ken!” he said. “Don’t go anywhere! We’re going to run the contest!”
“Are you out of your minds?”
“No, no! We’re going to run it!”
Bradshaw walked over to lifeguards from the Hawaiian Water Patrol, a commercial rescue service hired to stand by with specially equipped Jet Skis in case intervention was necessary to keep surfers alive. Bradshaw said, referring to Quiksilver, “Are they serious?”
A lifeguard said, “Man, they are serious. Can you help us talk them out of it?”
He said, “Yeah.”
He meant he could try. At that moment another close-out arrived, and people on the beach shouted “Oh my God!” because they had never seen anything so big. Conditions continued to worsen. Two photographers on Jet Skis appeared, having negotiated a passage up the coast and into the bay from the outside. Hardly had they arrived when another giant set came in. Bradshaw was watching, everyone was watching, and no one could believe how big these things were. Seeing what was coming, the photographers on the Jet Skis desperately gunned their machines straight up the enormous faces, taking air across each crest and barely escaping into the ocean beyond. Bradshaw went to the contest organizers and said, “Isn’t that proof enough? You can’t even rescue people if they get in trouble. Pretty soon you’ll be trying to rescue the rescuers. You’ll have to send in the helicopters. People can die in these kinds of waves. You need to call this whole thing off.”
The organizers said, “Well, if you don’t want to be in the contest, Ken, just leave. We’ll put in an alternate for you.”
Bradshaw thought they were being dicks about it. He said, “O.K., fine, fuck you, I’m out of here,” and he headed for his car. But other contestants, who themselves were reluctant to rebel so openly against the power of Quiksilver, asked him to stay and keep up the fight. He did, and endured the attitudes of the contest organizers for another hour. Remembering, he recently said, “It was like ‘Even if the surfers are afraid, Quiksilver is ready to go for it!’” But conditions at Waimea continued to worsen, until nearly every wave was collapsing, and Quiksilver had no choice but to cancel the show. It was 10 in the morning, and time had been wasted since dawn. At last Bradshaw could leave. State officials had just declared “Condition Black,” a typically superfluous prohibition against dying by entering the waves. Bradshaw got into his car. He was thinking about the deepwater break a mile or so offshore and how he might be able to get to it. A friend asked him where he was headed. He answered, “Where else?”
II. Death at Maverick’s
The destination was ordained. Bradshaw was born in 1952, in Houston, Texas, to a middle-class family with a house in a subdivision of similar homes. He was an all-city linebacker with good grades until he resolved to become a surfer instead. By then it was the summer of 1968. He was 15. He had been surfing for two years on the beach breaks of Galveston. He smoked dope there for the first time. For several hours afterward he could not catch the waves. He never smoked dope again. He never drank alcohol. He was incredibly single-minded. He was determined not to let anything interfere with his surfing. That included football. He quit the high-school team, then ran away from his family to make the point clear. This quickly brought his parents to their knees. He went home after a week, turned 16, surfed through a frigid winter, odd-jobbed for cash, drove straight to San Diego for the summer, wrangled friendship from a surf shop in Encinitas, and returned to Houston for barely a month—just long enough to turn 17, drop out of school, and catch a bus back to Southern California.
It was October 1969, at the outset of what turned into the largest El Niño winter anyone had yet seen. The waves were big in Encinitas. The waves were huge in Hawaii. According to Matt Warshaw, author of The Encyclopedia of Surfing, among other excellent works, the surf on Oahu’s North Shore smashed 60 houses and washed two people away. Toward the end of that episode a man named Greg Noll surfed the largest wave yet attempted—an impossible, exploding, 35-foot face at Makaha, on Oahu’s west side. Noll was an animal. People called him “The Bull.” Twelve years earlier, in 1957, he had been the first to take on Waimea Bay. He was as strong and tough as Bradshaw would someday be. He survived Makaha by diving off the back of his board during the wave’s collapse. This means he did not technically “make” the wave, but he did ride it for a while, and in these matters courage counts for a lot. Warshaw quotes Noll’s memoir, in which he wrote, “That day at big Makaha was like looking over the goddamned edge at the big, black pit. Some of my best friends have said it was a death-wish wave. I didn’t think so at the time, but in retrospect I realize it was probably bordering on the edge.”
Bradshaw told me about meeting Noll many years later. He said, “Noll asked me, ‘Do you ever close your eyes?’
“I said, ‘Excuse me?’
“‘At the top of the wave.’
“I said, ‘No! I always want to know where I’m going!’ Then I realized, that’s how he did it. He’d get to some point where it was scary, then just close his eyes and keep going. Because his desire was greater than his fear.”
But after his big ride Noll’s desire seemed to disappear. He drove away from Makaha, dropped out of surfing, and became a commercial fisherman in far-northern California for 20 years, before returning to the industry as a board-maker and nostalgic figure. Bradshaw told me that for the longest while he could not understand what had come over Noll to cause him to quit. But in 1969 he didn’t care. Noll was an old man of 32 who was leaving the scene. Bradshaw was a kid of 17 fresh in to Southern California and carving up the waves of an El Niño winter. He thought about larger things—girls, for instance, and the war in Vietnam—but mostly he thought about surfing. Among the important developments in world events at the time was a shortboard revolution that was reducing the length of surfboards and ushering in a new riding style of tight turns and expansive maneuvering, particularly on small or medium-size waves. Bradshaw was all for the new maneuvers. Certainly the old longboard straight-ahead stuff—Hang 10!—was too boring to contemplate. But when he competed in California he did not generally do well. He realized that he was marginally less nimble than others and that because of his size he had some disadvantages on small waves. He also realized, however, that his unusual strength gave him advantages when conditions were large.
He needed big waves. He flew to Hawaii. When he landed there he was 20 years old with $20 to his name. It was 1972. He got a restaurant job, picked up an old car, and eventually rented a shack on the North Shore. Over the following years he worked on and off as a backhoe operator at construction sites, and he devoted his winters to learning the North Shore breaks. It was a huge investment of time, much of it spent just floating around and waiting for waves. The waits were agonizing. If there were other surfers there, some talked stories, some talked shit, and some just stared at the ocean in frustration. Bradshaw got good at shooting water out of his hands. Surfing was only beginning to get commercialized, and the breaks were uncrowded compared with now. The better ones were still partly claimed by locals, some of whom disliked outsiders. Bradshaw grew a beard to look tough. It didn’t take much. He was a single-minded all-city-linebacker health-food freak. He stood his ground in fights. He made a few friends. He began to make boards imprinted with his name. The boards did not say Ken Bradshaw from Texas. They said Ken Bradshaw in Hawaii. He had found his place.
He was a moralist. He refused to chase publicity. He equated it with the greed that causes some surfers to steal other surfers’ waves. Recognition came to him anyway, in 1978, when the biggest magazine in the business, Surfer, ran a glossy story about him, titled “The New Matador?,” drawing attention to his heavyweight style and suggesting that he was the next Greg Noll. Principles aside, Bradshaw did not deny that he was pleased. A bathing-suit company called Sundek offered to sponsor his surfing. The arrangement did not pay well. It required Bradshaw to pose bare-chested in the company’s swimsuits—holding his own boards, yes, but exhibiting himself as a man who could be bought. It was demeaning. Nonetheless, combined with the additional earnings from his board-making business, it allowed him to stop working in construction and to make a down payment on a house.
It helped that the world’s premier big-wave contest of the time was held every year at Sunset Beach. It was called the Duke Kahanamoku Invitational and was financed and televised by ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Bradshaw won it in 1982 on a nasty day with an onshore wind and a riptide running west through bumpy 20-foot faces. He was the best surfer in the worst conditions. He said, “Yeah, it had to be crap before I could win.” He was 30. He never won another contest. He was probably too determined in his style. He probably lacked some of the flare necessary to impress the judges. Even so, he was now a star. He set off on the first of many publicity tours in California and up the East Coast from surf shop to surf shop from Florida to Maine.
Back home there were women around. He fell in love with several but in single file. He was not a misogynist. He was a serial monogamist. Somehow the women always left him. It was always sad. He always warned them in advance that he had no time for raising children. He always explained that to catch good rides he needed to be in the water when the good waves arrived. Maybe the women thought they could change him. Love is blind. During a long dry spell for big waves on the North Shore he spent more time in the water, not less. The dry spell ended dramatically in the first few weeks of 1983, during a huge El Niño winter, when Bradshaw surfed Waimea on 23 out of 49 days. Sick. It was so good it was insane. For the first time in memory there were more big waves than volunteers to ride them. That was the craziest part. There were days with to-die-for conditions when the bay looked nearly abandoned.
Actually, it was eerie. Be careful what you wish for. Focus had shifted away from big-wave surfing as the industry concentrated its promotional energies on the much larger markets associated with the use of shortboards in small waves. Now, however, in this huge El Niño winter, the photographic opportunities on the North Shore could not be ignored. Bradshaw himself was one of those who called up the magazines to tell them what they were missing out on. In retrospect it was a mistake—and it certainly violated his principles—but he was caught up in the excitement about the surf, and caught up in a career. The magazines responded. Surfer ran a picture of Waimea on its cover and published celebratory stories, one titled “Whatever Happened to Big-Wave Riding?,” which proclaimed the North Shore’s return, and another called “Dinner at Charlie’s,” which made the scene seem fraternal and fun. For the marketing juggernaut of Quiksilver, that was enough. The company needed time to figure out how, but it would soon claim Waimea Bay as its own.
Big-wave surfing was revitalized in popular culture. However complicit Bradshaw was in the commercialization that followed, he was never the whore that industry required. He just wanted to surf. One day in January 1985 he and a few others went out to ride Waimea in swells that rose from 15, to 18, to 22 feet—with wave faces twice those heights. After a while he was the only man left at the break. The sets kept getting larger until the biggest swells surpassed 25 feet, and giant waves began to close out across the bay. Bradshaw surfed in the intervals until he wiped out and lost his board. Now he was swimming. Conditions were so intense that he failed in two attempts to go ashore and had to return to the open ocean outside the breakers for a rest. Tourists on the beach demanded that the lifeguards take action. The lifeguards answered, “Oh, he’s fine. That’s Ken. He’s just resting.” Some of the tourists rushed off to a fire station, where they reported that the lifeguards were refusing to save a drowning man. The firemen called for a rescue helicopter. Bradshaw had been swimming for an hour since losing his board, and he guessed he needed to succeed with his next attempt to get ashore. He did succeed—riding the ocean’s energy inbound, rolling, and taking repeated poundings until he was able to emerge onto the beach. A lifeguard stood there with a radio. He said, “You’re fine, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, where’s my board?”
The lifeguard radioed, “He’s fine. I told you he was going to be fine.”
Bradshaw said, “Where’s my board?”
They had his board. The rescue helicopter arrived and clattered overhead. The bay was now a mess, offering few if any rides between the close-outs. Bradshaw made the obvious decision to quit for the day. Soon after he did, however, four surfers in two pairs launched from the beach and paddled toward the break. Bradshaw regarded the second pair especially with distaste. One was a man named Alec Cooke, who called himself Ace Cool. Enough said. But the second of them was someone for whom Bradshaw reserved a particular disdain. He was a brash, fast-talking self-promoter named Mark Foo, who had washed out of the professional small-wave circuit and had recently come to the North Shore determined to leverage big-wave surfing into wealth and success. Foo was six years younger than Bradshaw. He was not a bad surfer, but he cared too much about fame. He made pronouncements like “If you want the ultimate thrill, you’ve got to be willing to pay the ultimate price.” He was constantly hustling the press, mouthing off about his exploits, working deals with photographers, angling to have his picture taken, and getting in the way on the water, stealing Bradshaw’s waves. This last was a mistake. Bradshaw believed that, because his motivations were wrong, Foo did not know how to behave. He had no patience with him. He had already held Foo under, and had sent him to the beach just for being Foo. But Foo was irrepressible, and he was obviously up to another of his publicity stunts today. Bradshaw could think of no other reason why a surfer would bother with the waves that by then existed at Waimea Bay.
All four had to be desperate for attention. They managed to paddle to the standard takeoff position just outside the break, and there they floated in the heavy swells waiting for any chance of a surfable wave. Bradshaw and a couple of friends watched from the coastal road overlooking the bay. Two big sets passed under the surfers and closed out at the break. Then suddenly a huge rogue wave arrived. Bradshaw watched in amazement as it broke far out in the ocean and surged violently over the surfers. Mark Foo had attached his board to his ankle with an elastic double-length leash. He popped to the surface in the aftermath, found the board intact, and paddled back into position outside the break. Foo was nothing if not persistent. The other surfers had to quit because they had lost or broken their boards. Ace Cool had to be rescued by helicopter.
Meanwhile, Foo had made his move. Unable to find a wave that could be ridden, he launched over the lip of an impossible 50-foot vertical face and then free-fell to the base without making it to his feet. The wave collapsed on top of him. He survived, and was plucked from the impact zone by the helicopter. That one wave made him famous as a big-wave rider. He had not ridden it. He had attempted it knowing full well that he could not succeed. But a dramatic picture had been taken, which he then promoted as documentation of “the biggest wave surfed” and used to launch his career. Bradshaw still shakes his head at the thought. Recently he said, “Mark was such a marketer. It was a picture of an airdrop going nowhere. It was stupid, right? But that’s what we were becoming.”
Stupid, or smart. You did what you could to get by. Bradshaw too. In 1986 he signed on with Quiksilver as a sponsored rider specifically to help promote the North Shore scene, and set up the company’s first Waimea Bay contest, which was held in February 1987. Bradshaw competed in it and did well enough. The second contest was held three years later, in January 1990. Bradshaw competed in it and totally bombed out, placing 27th. The loss shook him badly. To me he said, “Self-doubt is the worst thing you can have. I know. I spent the next couple of years getting over it.”
“Doing less surfing?”
“Doing more.”
In 1991, Quiksilver tried to drop him, and he found himself begging for mercy. In 1992, Quiksilver did drop him, and by comparison it was a relief. He kept surfing in the competitions. He rejuvenated his board business. One day, in March 1993, he was surfing with a partner at an outer reef called Outside Alligators. The day was gorgeous, all pretty and clean, with long, glassy, 30-foot breakers coming in. Suddenly Mark Foo showed up. Bradshaw was not happy to see him, but he kept his peace. After a while Bradshaw’s partner had to leave to go to work. Foo paddled over to Bradshaw and said, “You staying out?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought you might.”
They began to surf together. The waves were incredibly consistent. You could just pick them off. Both men had ridden them in and were paddling back out in the channel when Foo said, “This is it, huh? This is as good as it gets, isn’t it?”
Bradshaw was surprised. He said, “Yeah? Yeah, Mark, it is.”
Foo said, “But, no, no, this is really it, isn’t it? Just two guys in the water. Fifteen- to 18-foot swells. Perfect waves. No sections. This is as good as it gets.”
Bradshaw said, “Yes, Mark. This is what it’s about.” A light came on in his head. He thought, Wow, Mark actually does get it. He actually understands why we do this. Bradshaw said, “There’s just the two of us in the water. You’re riding some of the best waves of your life, and having a great time. How cool is that? No photographers, no cameramen, no nothing—just us.”
They paddled to shore and ended up at Foo’s house. They talked about nothing much, and for a while it was great. Then the phone rang, and suddenly Foo was saying, Oh, man, you wouldn’t believe what I just did! I did this! I did that! Oh yeah, I was out there with Bradshaw! Blah, blah, blah!
Bradshaw looked at him in disbelief. Foo hung up, called a magazine, and started in again. Bradshaw walked over and hung up the phone. He said, “You don’t get it after all, do you? Can’t you let it go once? Just once in your life? Don’t tell anybody? This was our moment. We did it. Isn’t that good enough for you?”
“Um, I don’t know, Ken. I could try, I guess.”
Cautiously, they became friends. The following year, in December 1994, they flew together overnight to San Francisco, to surf the rocky cold-water break called Maverick’s, near Half Moon Bay. During the flight Foo was full of talk about his latest publicity scheme. He wanted to team up with Bradshaw to undertake what he was calling the Trifecta—surfing a single Pacific storm over a period of three days at the big-wave breaks of Waimea, Maverick’s, and Todos Santos, in Mexico. In the airplane he kept saying, “We can do this, Ken! We can market it!” They could video it, they could whatever it. He wore Bradshaw down. In weariness Bradshaw tentatively gave in. He said, “O.K., Mark, O.K. I guess I gotta make money, too. I’ll submit to that.” An implausible partnership had been formed.
After landing in San Francisco, they rented a car and kept talking about the plan while driving to the coast. When they got to Maverick’s the breakers were not as large as they had hoped for, but still big enough at 30 feet to be worth the effort. Bradshaw and Foo joined others in the water and caught a few rides. Bradshaw had surfed at Maverick’s before. Foo had not. Bradshaw asked Foo if he was having a good time. Foo said he was. Both of them tried to take off on the same wave. Bradshaw was in the prime position and should have owned that wave, but he saw the look on Foo’s face, as he had seen it many times before, and he knew that Foo was going to take it no matter what. Foo stole the wave. Bradshaw pulled back at the last instant as Foo dropped over the edge.
Foo immediately wiped out. He fell sideways off his board and was sucked up the face and thrown forward over the curl, then pounded deep into the water. After more than an hour he was found floating facedown with his ankle leashed to a fragment of his board. Exactly how he drowned is still not known. He may have hit his head against the reef or been held down by a snared leash. In the parking lot of the harbor nearby, Bradshaw knelt and held him for a moment, finding it hard to accept that this had just happened. Later a funeral was held in Waimea Bay, with a large group of surfers sitting on their boards in a circle. Bradshaw tried to say something, but to his surprise grew too emotional to speak. He still thinks about Foo often. “Death is part of life—I know that,” he said to me recently. “But we had just made this turn together, and he ends up dying that same day. It was a tough one in the big picture of what you’re chasing, and what you’re doing it for.”
III. The Monster
But three years later, on the morning of January 28, 1998, when the contest at Waimea Bay was canceled under pressure from the waves, there was no question of where he was headed, or why, when he drove away. He was going to surf the last place standing on the coast, the deep-water break called Outside Log Cabins. Bradshaw had first noticed it a quarter-century before, in the 1970s, when he was new to the North Shore. I asked him about the discovery. He said, “What happens in surfing, as the waves get bigger, the inside breaks become massive areas of white water, just football fields of white water, but as they do, the other opportunities open up in deeper water farther outside. Waves that don’t break in a 12-foot swell start breaking in a 20-foot swell, and when those waves start closing out, there’s waves that break in a 30-foot swell. Those are the ones you’ve never even seen before. So it took a few years of living here to realize, Oh my God, that thing that kind of flops over out there, that mushball, it’s not a mushball at all, it’s a wave. Wait, it’s a top-to-bottom-gigantic spitting barrel. It’s not possible to ride something like that, is it? Back then, riding those waves was so impossible, it was like thinking about walking on the moon. Like, really? Naw. That’s how far-fetched Outside Log Cabins was at the time.”
It was far-fetched because surfers need to nearly match the speed of a wave to intercept it at the start of a ride. The problem is that the speed of the wave is (partly) proportional to its size, and those that broke at Outside Log Cabins were too fast for even the strongest paddlers to catch. It turned out that, with rare exceptions, swells larger than 25 feet simply could not be joined. This meant that 50 feet was the maximum face height that surfers would ever ride. It was discouraging. Ambition was no substitute for entry speed.
Then everything changed. It happened in the early 1990s, when a few Hawaiians, including the poster boy of big-wave riding, Laird Hamilton, began strapping their feet onto boards and using Jet Skis to tow one another into high-speed intercepts of fast-moving waves off Oahu and Maui. Doing this required enormous strength, and the ability to endure almost unimaginable punishment when things went wrong, but once the surfers released the towrope and dropped over the edge of the rising faces, they were rewarded with rides that were longer and faster than anyone had experienced before. More fundamentally, because intercept speeds were available up to 60 miles an hour, there was suddenly no limit to the size of the waves that could be ridden. Purists objected to the idea of power-assisted starts, and they deplored the noise and pollution caused by Jet Skis, but the sport of tow-in surfing was born. Bradshaw embraced it from the start, and with a sense of awe at the possibilities it afforded. To me he said, “I remember sitting around with Laird and a couple of other guys saying, ‘So how big is big?’ and ‘How do we ride it?’ and ‘Do you realize it hasn’t even been big yet?’ We looked at each other and almost got a spooky feeling. It was, like, Wow, we’re really going to have to face it when it comes.”
That was in the spring of 1995. As it turned out, they had less than three years to wait. Bradshaw had acquired a Jet Ski and enlisted another big-wave surfer, Dan Moore, to be his tow-in partner. They trained hard, perfected their intercept and recovery techniques, and surfed some 60-foot faces that they would never have caught by paddling in. During the same period they designed and built a series of specialized tow-in boards for their own use, progressively making them shorter and more responsive as their confidence grew. The boards were thin, flat, high-speed hulls of dense fiberglass construction, weighted with steel ballast to smooth their rides. They were also extremely strong. Bradshaw and Moore believed they had to prepare for conditions bigger even than they had hoped for.
Those conditions arrived on the now famous day in January 1998. After the cancellation of the Waimea contest, Bradshaw and Moore drove up the coast to a grassy beachfront lot in a neighborhood called Velzyland, where they kept the Jet Ski. The lot is a prime location for launches, because it overlooks a channel that dives straight away from the beach and is so deep that it allows access to the open ocean even in 30-foot swells, when every other possibility has been overwhelmed. But the situation now was different. By the time they launched their boat through the surf at the beach, at 10:30 in the morning, the swells had risen to 35 or 40 feet, and the channel was succumbing to the pressure about a half-mile out. How big is big? Large waves collapsed over deep water between huge waves breaking across the shallows on both sides. Bradshaw sat in front, doing the driving. Moore sat behind him, hanging on to the board. After repeated attempts, they made it through the maelstrom into the open ocean outside.
It was a beautiful place to be. When Bradshaw and Moore got to Outside Log Cabins they found powerful swells rising into giant, velvety, perfectly formed breakers. The water was warm. The wind was light. The swells were traveling in sets as always. The biggest of them were easily 35 feet high and producing solid 70-foot faces that cascaded from their peaks or pitched forward into tubes, and peeled majestically from left to right, as seen from behind, before smoothly tapering off onto broad shoulders. Moore later said that not a drop was out of place. For half an hour he and Bradshaw studied the waves, pacing the inbound swells, plotting the entry and exit lines, and planning the rescue if things went wrong. While they were doing this, another tow-in team showed up. These guys were loose cannons, Bradshaw thought. No sooner had they arrived than they went for a meager 20-foot swell. He decided to ignore them because they would not get in his way.
Moore assumed the driving, and Bradshaw rolled into the water and strapped onto his board for the first rides. They took off among the inbound swells outside the break, with Bradshaw water-skiing at the end of a 40-foot rope waiting for the right wave. They had worked out hand signals. Two fingers up from Bradshaw meant “Not this one, the next one—maybe.” One finger up meant “This one!” Moore’s role was to handle the intercept well, driving toward the shore while allowing the swell to approach from behind, and accelerating to match its speed even as it slowed and began to rear up over the reef. At the same time, he would place Bradshaw in the perfect position for the release, known to surfers as “deep,” meaning close to the peak, where the break would begin, the high-energy core of the wave. For his first wave Bradshaw caught a 30-footer, and surfed the 60-foot face. It was smooth and fast and a good ride for a starter. Moore circled close around him to give him the rope, and towed him back outside. A third tow-in team arrived and stood aside to watch for a while.
The playing field was large. The biggest sets were coming in about 15 minutes apart. Bradshaw and Moore saw one developing in the distance, and they headed straight out to meet it, skimming fast across the water, with the wind in their ears. These were big swells all right, in the 35-foot range, and, better yet, each one had a bigger one behind. Bradshaw kept signaling, “Next one!” and jacking up the sizes. He passed up the first three. Then came the fourth, an absolute monster of 45 feet, maybe more. People may have seen larger swells before, but no one had ever tried to ride the sort of wave face it was about to become. Ninety feet? One hundred feet? Who could know? Bradshaw wasn’t thinking about making history. He was shouting into the wind and signaling, “This one, this one!” Moore turned the Jet Ski around and headed toward the shore, chased by the monster approaching fast from behind. Bradshaw signaled, “Faster, faster!” The boat was running wide open and doing about 40 miles an hour, but it was just too slow. They were going to lose the intercept. The swell was going to pass under them and leave them behind. Bradshaw kept shouting, “Come on!,” for all the good it could do.
Then suddenly they were inside Outside Log Cabins, and the monster was rising directly beneath them, drawing water up its face and steepening into an enormous wave. Bradshaw was thinking, This has got to be the biggest thing I’ve ever seen. This is definitely the biggest thing I’ve ever seen. My God, this thing is really big. He stopped worrying about missing the ride and started concentrating on technique. In surfing, any move toward the break is known as a fade. If a wave peels to the right and you slice to the left, toward the core of falling water, that is a fade. The word is deceptive because a fade makes things more intense, not less. The more you fade, the deeper you go. The deeper you go, the more wave energy you encounter. The deepest you can go is inside a barrel, or tube, but you can’t always get there. If you go too deep, you will wipe out and get crushed, demolished, and slayed. On the other hand, if you don’t go deep enough, you will have wasted the wave. To some minds the waste seems the greater shame. Carving the line between wipeout and waste—managing to go deep without dying—is the real art of big-wave surfing. Normally on a tow, with the wave gathering beneath him during the last seconds before the release, Bradshaw would have faded toward the peak, swinging in this case to the left of the Jet Ski ahead and placing himself as deeply as possible into the energy of the wave, while also giving Moore the margins to peal off to the right and escape to the shoulder. But not now, not this time. Instead of thinking, Go deeper!, he thought, Just don’t fade! He signaled Moore to widen to the right, and Moore started a turn toward the safety of the shoulder. Bradshaw released the rope. Moore felt the drag come off and looked back. Bradshaw waved to him like, “See you later.”
He had the intercept he needed. The wave continued to rise beneath him, drawing water from ahead and below, steepening, and advancing toward the coast as he accelerated down its face. The ride was smooth for lack of chop. The board fluttered because of its speed. He heard the wind, and then the thunder as the wave began to break to his left. He crouched low on the board, with his arms out for balance and his feet locked into the straps. He thought, O.K., don’t look left! Don’t fade! Don’t even think left! Then the slope turned vertical beneath him and he went weightless as he began to drop straight down the face.
Later he told me it was like skiing down an avalanche chute in the mountains. He said, “You know that feeling you get when you’re going over a cornice and it’s just straight down after that?” He counted the seconds. He went, “One. Two. Three. Four!” Already it was a long drop, and the wave kept rising higher. “Five! Six! Seven! Eight!” He went, “Holy shit!,” and kept dropping. He went, “Don’t fade! Don’t even imagine it!” He got toward the base of the face, still well above the bottom, and rounded out of the drop as the surface curvature allowed. Bradshaw had never seen such wave expanses before—huge fields of sloping water to the right. He was aware of the mass gathering above and behind him. He went, “I gotta get out of here, now!” He dug his right rail in, banking the board hard against its will, and held it with all of his strength into a carving right turn. The turn was slow because the board was fast. Bradshaw kept at it, however, and went slicing up the wave face almost to the crest. He was briefly elated. Technically he had “made” the wave, but he wasn’t done with it yet. From the crest he turned again and went angling back down the face. He intended to perform a full cutback toward the break, but no sooner had he started than a roar erupted behind him as the wave formed a giant barrel. The barrel spat spray at him from its throat. There was no way into that barrel from his position, and it blocked any turn back toward the core of the wave. The ride was almost over for Bradshaw. It had lasted 30 seconds, or hardly more. He exited straight ahead and over the wave’s shoulder. He was angry with himself. He thought that he should have been in that barrel, and that he would have been if he had not shied away from the peak at the start of the ride. He did not care about having made history—and did not consider it until others began to insist on it that night. He did not even think that this had been a great run. He thought, Shit, I should have faded.
Moore had a different idea. He motored up to him wide-eyed, shouting, “That’s it, man! That’s it! You should have seen what I saw! It was crazy! It was nuts! You were like a cartoon character on that face! You could have put houses in the barrel behind you!”
There were other eyewitnesses to the ride—some nearby in the water, and a few more on the shore. They agreed that the wave had been very large, though their estimates of its face height varied, ranging between 85 and 105 feet. Only one piece of visual evidence exists—an optically compressed low-resolution video, shot from shore, in which Bradshaw’s wave is at times obscured by other waves in the foreground, and Bradshaw appears about three pixels high. The number finally settled on was something less than 90 feet. It was almost arbitrary, as Bradshaw knew, and for him it was a poor measure of the ride. The largest wave ever surfed? O.K., fine. He regretted that the wave happened early and turned out to be by far the biggest of the day. He and Moore stayed on the water for six hours and were joined by other tow-in teams as they sliced repeatedly down 70-foot faces. It was the best surfing ever. But not once was there a wave like the one he had ridden in the morning—another monster that would have given him a second chance to fade, take risks, and correct the mistakes he had made.
Life can be like that, too. Bradshaw sank into a listlessness that lasted months. At last he understood why Greg Noll had walked away. What does record-breaking mean, anyway? Something, of course, but probably not a lot.
Sitting with me on the ground overlooking the waves last winter, Bradshaw said, “It’s weird how a single wave can seem so important, when it’s all the waves it took to get there, and all the waves since, that actually count.” I nodded. He shrugged. Now the North Shore breaks are hopelessly overcrowded, and even the coastal road is thick with traffic. The paradox is that Bradshaw helped to bring this on, if only by adding legitimacy to the scene with his purist attitudes and his presence in the waves. He does not agree. He blames the entire mess on commercialization and greed. The loss of Waimea Bay is particularly galling to him. The success of the Quiksilver contest opened the gates to marketers, photographers, and ambitious surfers from around the world. Every beachwear company, every surfboard company, every accessories company wants its surfers photographed there. The surfers are primarily (and in descending order of numbers) Brazilian, Japanese, Australian, and Californian. Their purpose is to get their pictures taken. The pressure is so intense that one day last winter no fewer than 90 people occupied the pool-size takeoff zone at the break. Bradshaw absolutely refuses to surf there anymore. Furthermore, Pipeline is just as bad, and Sunset Beach is getting there. Bradshaw said, “I can show you. At some of these breaks it’s like that every single day. It never stops. It’s like going to war, being in battle every time you paddle out. You know what you’re going to have to do. You know what everybody else is going to try to do to you.”
Still, there is great surfing to be done at the North Shore, especially at the outside breaks, and Bradshaw remains a surprisingly cheerful man. He told me that he takes life as he rides waves, one section at a time. Now he has a wife with whom he is deeply in love. Now they may have babies. I asked him if he had regrets about the choices he had made. He said, “My life is full of ‘my faults’ because I chose passion over industry.” But a “my fault” is not the same as a regret. He mentioned that he was going through a manic What’s-Ken-gonna-do-for-the-next-25-years? phase.
I pitched him a smile.
He laughed.
