The Best American Sports Writing 2014(118)

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, there’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.

Skindog’s wave is, for lack of a better word, awesome. Or insane. Or a slow, silent what the fuck. Such a big wave produces such a crude reaction that there’s really no need for more precise vocabulary. Maybe surfers talk the way they do because they’re used to being amazed, and that carries over into their ordinary interactions. This wave does not inspire nuanced feelings in me. Basically, I’m just like, dude.

I feel a tap on my shoulder and look up to see a figure looming above me, completely backlit, with a sort of white halo radiating out from around his head. I squint but can’t make out a single feature. “It’s John!” he says. I stand up, still confused, and realize that I’m face-to-face with my former boss, one of the co-owners of the surf shop I worked at in high school, in Bolinas, about 50 miles north. He lives in Santa Cruz now, shapes surfboards, and works for Clif Bar in some graphic design capacity. He unloads 10 Clif Bars into my hands, gives me his phone number, and wanders off to liquidate the rest of his promotional stock as quickly as possible.





The job at the surf shop was one of the better ones I’ve had. Usually, it was just me there. The store-approved music collection included an unlabeled, Pixies-heavy mix, a few scratched Bob Marley CDs, and something horrible-sounding that I think was Sum 41. One of my few responsibilities was to make sure a surf video was always playing on the overhead monitor. Hypothetically, I was supposed to change it, but I just played the same one on muted repeat from open to close and nobody ever said anything. For lunch, my parents or a friend brought me a sandwich. It was a great gig.

In the wintertime it was very slow. A local might run in to replace a just-broken leash or pick up a bar of wax, but otherwise I did my homework in peace. I’d sit tucked into a ball on a stool behind the counter with a sweatshirt stretched over my knees. I crammed a miniature space heater underneath my seat and let it run until the safety feature set in and automatically turned the thing off. There was no Internet and I didn’t get cell-phone service. I read a lot of books and tried on a lot of flip-flops.