Chapter 5

HIGH-RISK FUN

“Pearls don’t lie on the seashore.
If you want one, you have to dive.”

—Chinese proverb

“Adrenaline junkies with a death wish” is how a lot of people think about those of us who love high-risk fun. But that’s not what the research shows.

When high-risk athletes are compared to no-risk athletes and nonathletes, those who engaged in high-risk sports score the highest levels of emotional stability, conscientiousness and, of course, energy.1 Most of us develop our skills and take our risks in responsible ways. If you crash and burn, you can’t go another round!

Alex Honnold, whom some consider to be the most impressive solo climber to ever live, admits, “It’s more than a quick hit of adrenaline. It’s personal.” Instead of going for the high, as outsiders assume, most of these athletes say that in the midst of these risks, they find a sense of recognition, something ineffable, hard to describe, that just feels right—like coming home.2

After all, not that long ago, living without knowing what was going to happen next was what we used to call simply being alive.3

SCUBA DIVING

Risking death by diving with a bottle of compressed air, deep in an ocean full of predators—what’s not to love?

We basked in the warm Aegean sun as the traditional Turkish sailboat bobbed in the calm sea. The captain’s call jolted us to action: “All you men, grab a spear gun, mask, fins, and snorkel. We’re going to get an eel for dinner!”

Soon I found myself hanging upside down underwater in front of the unfortunate moray eel’s cave. My two Turkish friends and I, each in turn, handed our loaded spear gun to the captain—who shot all four spears into the eel’s head. Dinner was delicious, but I regretted the unfair fight with that eel.

That was in Fethiye in 1993, and I never personally harmed an undersea creature again. Since then, I have come to admire moray eels for their powerful jaws and sharp teeth. They move with great beauty and elegance when we entice them from their caves.

I’ll never forget this trip. It was my introduction to undersea life, and I was hooked! The Aegean Sea was breathtakingly blue. I’d never before used a snorkel deep underwater. For all I knew, they were only for paddling around near the surface. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had just opened the door to a whole new world. My involvement would go further than I could possibly have imagined that first sunny day.

At Georgia Tech, every student had been required to complete a survival swimming course, so I’d spent a lot of time in the water. In one of the tests, we had to swim fifty yards underwater without surfacing, with our hands tied behind us and our feet tied together! To get an A in the course, you had either to complete this test or pass out trying. I did it twice, but Fred Lanou was a tough teacher, and he only credited me once. It still annoys me.

As you can imagine, swimming underwater with an air cylinder, mask, and fins is a lot more fun. It’s the best way to see the 70 percent of our planet that is water.

We enjoyed the trip to the Aegean so much that Suzanne and I signed up for scuba lessons not long afterward. We were given training manuals to study, then our local dive shop, Malibu Divers, sent a great guy to our house to test our knowledge.

Our initial training dive took place in a large local pool. We were taught to descend and ascend without blowing out our ears. We learned to control our buoyancy so we could linger fifteen feet below the surface after a dive. This safety stop permits the nitrogen bubbles that accumulate in your blood during a dive to pass out of your body, so they won’t damage your heart. Scuba diving has big risks—perfect for adventurous folk like us.

The trainers at Malibu Divers took us on our first dive in the open water in front of our Malibu home. It was awful. A strong current pushed us around. Visibility was so poor that we had to use a compass to navigate, just yards from our own house.

Most startling was how hard it was to get out of the water. After swimming in the sea many times and walking back out without a hitch, I was not expecting it to be such a challenge. Because of the fins on your feet, you can’t simply walk from the water to the beach. You have to go out backward. This makes your chest a target for the waves! You think you’ll be able to sustain the blow, but oftentimes, you can’t. So you’re knocked down into the surf, where the compressed air tanks strapped to your back make you roll like a wheel!

In 1993 we took our first diving trip to Mauritius, off the coast of South Africa. Our dive boat was basically a rowboat with a motor, and the dive master was a local boy. Looking back now, I realize that we didn’t sufficiently appreciate how dangerous diving could be. Don’t start off like we did.

Since that first trip, I’ve dived in over twenty countries. In the amazing Blue Hole in Belize, I went down 136 feet.

As my knowledge has grown, my diving has become far more sophisticated. Lately, for instance, I’ve been breathing nitrox (air plus nitrogen) instead of just compressed air, because it has fewer side effects. I tried using a dry suit for cold-water diving, but it was too tricky for my comfort level (which is not very high). Mostly, I use dive skins, because I’m allergic to the neoprene used in most wet suits. If I were younger, I’d take advanced diving courses just for the adventure. The rebreather courses are appealing, since they allow you to stay underwater for hours. And I’d love to go on an expedition to the deep ocean in a mini sub, to see how the truly strange creatures on our planet live. I’m currently assembling a trip to the Puerto Rico Trench, the deepest spot in the Atlantic Ocean. It’s never before been explored.

Suzanne and I went on so many memorable dives together. We enjoyed the novelty of beautiful coral gardens and interactions with octopuses, sharks, tropical fish, and eels. The high point of these adventures was when our Bora Bora dive master lured a friendly moray eel from his cave. We were amazed to see them kiss each other on the lips. Then the eel wrapped its beautiful body around the dive master before swimming away. I was completely enamored of sea creatures after that!

Although some underwater species attack divers and others sting, the biggest risk to a diver is the loss of air supply and buoyancy. Emotional control is essential, especially in a crisis.

A few years after we started diving, Suzanne and I were down eighty feet in the Bahamas when she signaled that she felt bad. When I checked her air pressure gauge, I saw it was on zero! Panicking, I quickly took her up forty feet and rotated her air control valve to let more air in.

We finished our dive without incident, but she never dove again.

As Billy Wilder famously said, “Hindsight is 20/20.”4 What I should have done was share my air with her until we diagnosed the problem. I still take the blame for her disaffection for diving, because I feel I failed her as a dive buddy. What’s worse, we were then diving without a trained dive master, who could have followed the correct procedures. Suzanne is brave and independent in so many ways, but her sense of adventure does not include taking major personal risks. Although I went on to do countless private dives with my own dive master, after that she stayed on the surface—preferably waterskiing.

Most of my subsequent trips were solo. I took five diving trips to Palau and Belize. A boat dedicated to diving is intense. Often, I did two dives in the morning, two dives in the afternoon, and then a night dive after dinner. I dove in the Sea of Cortez, off Sulawesi, Indonesia, and among the Turkish islands in the Aegean Sea. Each experience was unique and wonderful.

My encounter with dolphins in the Grand Bahamas was far more relaxing than the ones with sharks. On the group dive, we all sat in a circle on the bottom of the Caribbean Sea as the dolphins swam around us. The high point came when we removed the air supply tube from our mouths, puckered up our lips, and the dolphin kissed our lips. These intelligent mammals were a pleasure to interact with, especially in open water.

Wonderful, intelligent, and powerful mammals.

Swimming with trained dolphins in the Grand Bahamas.

A free diver with a humpback whale. They don’t like bubbles, so we couldn’t scuba while swimming with these gentle giants.

Lionel Pozzoli, the terrific underwater photographer, told me about Rurutu, one of the few places in the world where divers can interact with humpback whales and their babies. The Rurutu atoll is about five hundred miles south of Tahiti, and it’s reachable only by boat or small plane. A group of us spent a few days there. Lionel recorded it all with his cameras. Whales don’t like bubbles, so we had to either snorkel at the surface or free dive.

Imagine swimming underwater, just a few feet from a baby whale, while its forty-foot-long mother keeps her eyes on you constantly. These gentle creatures navigate the huge distance from their summer feeding grounds in Antarctica to the warmth of the Southern Pacific waters, which act as their maternity ward. In Rurutu, only licensed naturalists are permitted to guide visiting divers on these encounters. This is a good thing, because predicting the whales’ behavior is not for amateurs.

Later I took a trip to the Kwajalein Atoll to dive the Prinz Eugen. One of the “unsinkable” battleships built by the Nazis, it is lined with five-foot-thick steel plates for armor. After surviving World War II unscathed, it was used in the Bikini Atoll atom bomb test, and it survived that, too. Then, as it was being towed into Kwajalein, it sank. That must have been a sight to see. One end plunged down ninety feet, while the other rose from the sea like a great steel skyscraper.

The US military base at Kwajalein tracks the trajectory of all missile shots at the Pacific Missile Range. To get permission to stay on the island, my friend Ed Roski and I had to get my military pals to obtain formal orders for us. I enlisted the aid of the local dive club, but it was rudimentary, to say the least: a rowboat and two civilian contract engineers, who took a vacation day to host our dive. We stayed overnight in trailers that had been built in the 1940s.

After my first dive, I swam to the boat but couldn’t find a way to board. I yelled out to the operator, “Where’s the ladder? I need to get back up!”

In all seriousness, he replied, “I promised myself that if I ever had to provide a ladder, I would quit diving.”

There was nothing else to do but hoist myself up from the water, in full scuba gear, onto a bobbing rowboat. Try to avoid this.

On the same trip, Ed and I visited the war museum in Guam. It was an especially poignant trip for Ed, who had been a marine platoon leader in combat in Vietnam, and he has the scars to prove how lucky he is to still be with us. Afterward, we went diving in Yap, Micronesia. Yap is giant manta ray heaven, but the greatest manta photos I ever shot were in the Maldives.

Playing with a big stingray.

Their barb on the tail can be fatal, but I was very patronizing.

My latest plan is an underwater photo expedition in the Puerto Rico Trench. Second only to the Mariana Trench in size, it is almost five hundred miles long and more than 5.3 miles deep. It straddles the plate boundary of the Caribbean Sea and the deepest point in the Atlantic. An earthquake along this trench could set off another tsunami, as it did in 1918, when Puerto Rico was devastated by a twenty-foot wave just minutes after the San Fermín earthquake. It’s going to be quite an adventure, but I think I’ll experience this one from the boat!

SKIING

Sports give you the chance to take your love of risk out for a joy ride.

At Harvard, I started a student publication called Career Guide, which relied on advertising sales for profits. I hired a first-year student as ad sales director so he could be groomed to take over the publication when I graduated.

Hank Heinz was perfect. In addition to his famous last name, he had a big, energetic personality that made him a successful salesman. One day it would open the door for him to become a United States senator. Sales at Career Guide were doing better than expected until snow season arrived and suddenly Hank took off to go skiing!

Not only was I annoyed when ad sales dropped, but I completely failed to appreciate the attraction of snow skiing. For that matter, I’d never even seen a snow ski!

Years later, the young hotshots at Bear Stearns were bragging about their ski exploits, and it piqued my interest. They were talking about how steep the cliffs were and how few ski buckles they’d actually closed. It was all new to me, but I was eager to give a new adventure a try.

Word was that the great Stein Eriksen had started a ski school in Sugarbush, Vermont. I signed up for lessons. Skiing fast was very liberating. The terrain was entrancing. And everyone looked gorgeous in ski clothes, especially my instructor, Heather, whom I paid more attention to than I did to the angle of my edges.

I really liked the whole gestalt of the ski world, but I was too impatient to take many lessons. My form conveyed that fact in unfortunate ways, as I fell early and often. A few years later, I broke my leg while skiing, and it’s still a mess. The side effects of the break, plus three months in a full-leg cast, would have chastened a more cautious person, but I’d caught the ski bug and I just kept seeking new adventures.

In 1970 I built a ski house in Killington, since it had the most reliable snowfall in southern New England. Skiing in that area is infamous—the cold, humid weather there tends to create treacherous patches of ice, and most slopes are below the tree line, so the trails cut through mountain forests. Trees and ice are a bad combination for new skiers. When you hit a patch of ice, you can take a huge fall, scattering your skis and poles down the slope. Experienced skiers call it a garage sale. Long before I lost the ski house in my divorce, I was seeking out other places to ski.

Utah and Colorado boast deep, light snow with trails above the tree line. I liked the idea of having fewer obstacles to hit. Speeding across the wide-open bowls was a new pleasure that I came to look forward to every year. As reluctant as I am to quote the movie Top Gun, I soon found that I too had a need for speed! I started entering program ski races.

Before long, I was schussing in Europe with some of the most famous names in ski racing. For many years I raced in three pro-am invitational races, each led by a fabulous character. Participating in these races reinforced my view that entrepreneurs and other highly successful people crave adventure and risk in most parts of their lives.

Vail named their annual Ford Cup after President Gerald Ford (though the name was later changed to the American Ski Classic). The televised race attracted sports, entertainment, and political people. Ford not only was an admired leader, but he had played football at the mighty University of Michigan. He and his courageous wife, Betty, were our neighbors in Vail. The five-person teams were captained by a famous retired ski racer. One year my team won first place!

President Ford and Betty appreciating our newest puppy.

The annual Directors Cup was headed by the brilliant real estate investor Sam Zell. The nine-person teams were headed by a female professional racer, and the second slot was saved for either a retired Olympian or a professional racer. Most racers were from Wall Street or the real estate business. Naturally, we all gambled on the outcome. Sometimes the pot exceeded $100,000. Since the race always had a tequila bottler as a sponsor, there was a certain amount of drinking involved. I believe that the day of the tequila party (which often included dancing on the bar and sometimes collateral damage) was that bottler’s peak sales day!

Many lifetime friendships flowed out of this event. My son Andrew races in the Directors Cup to this day.

The Silver Cup is raced every other year and headed by the great Mike Markkula, who was the first chairman of Apple (and then owned 30 percent of it). He was one of the few people who could manage Steve Jobs. He chose the Silver Cup over the Directors Cup because he preferred a more genteel environment. Since most of the racers are from Silicon Valley, it gave us the chance to get to know yet another group of fascinating people and race with less alcohol content.

We also became friendly with some of the greatest ski racers of all time. Franz Weber was our favorite. For five years in a row, he was the fastest ski racer in the world, blazing down the mountains at 135 miles per hour. When he stopped racing, he took over the management of the fabled racer Franz Klammer. We participated in the European ski weeks he organized. It allowed us to ski famous race courses after the races. Even today, Suzanne and I can ski the Val Gardena downhill course—just not straight down! I manage to do it at high speeds, despite five knee operations, two total knee replacements, the rebuilding of my right shoulder, and a series of lesser injuries.

Suzanne and I rode down the Olympic bobsled run in Innsbruck, Austria. And we have a certificate to prove it!

For several years now, our favorite places to ski have migrated to the mountains of Austria and the Italian Dolomites. The unimaginable pressures on the crashing tectonic plates in the Dolomites have thrust the earth into what I believe is the most beautiful set of mountain ranges in the world. The place is full of history, including caves where the Austrians and Germans hid during World War I. With a five-hundred-lift network, hundreds of trails, big snow bowls, and delicious lunches at refugios high in the mountains, it’s hard to beat.

TENNIS

Tennis playing reminds me of gladiators. You’re out there by yourself until the end of the match.

As a kid in Brunswick, Georgia, I had a wood tennis racquet that I used to play with in a public park. Because I never took lessons, I played poorly. After high school, I never had time for tennis, until I began my career on Wall Street. By then, I’d noticed that sports like tennis could provide an opportunity to mix business with pleasure. I was determined to try it again. This time, I could afford a much better racquet, so my ability to hit the ball hard improved, but since I didn’t make time for lessons, I still played poorly.

As a new bachelor in the Stanhope Hotel in Manhattan, I was eager to integrate the attractive social whirl of clubs into my life. At long last, I did the obvious thing to improve my game: I hired a pro.

Soon a friend introduced me to two great private clubs, El Morocco and the Town Tennis Club. El Morocco (aka “Elmo”) had been opened by an Italian immigrant, Martin de Alzaga, as a speakeasy during Prohibition. Politicians, fashionable society, and entertainers were its regulars in the 1930s to 1950s. Vernon MacFarlane designed the famous blue zebra-striped decor that appeared in movies and novels ever after.

The Town Tennis Club was even more exclusive. It was a traditional, old-school tennis club with a clubhouse looking out over two full-size outdoor tennis courts and one smaller one. Since most of the members had weekend homes, we could always get court time on Saturdays and Sundays. I would cycle over from my suite at the hotel on Fifth Avenue and Eighty-First for weekend tennis whenever I was in town. The club was a real oasis of civility.

During US Open weeks, some of the greatest players in the world dropped by to play each other in a few sets. Countless business deals and romances took place there.

I was at the club at eight thirty p.m. on July 13, 1977, when a bolt of lightning struck the Buchanan South substation on the Hudson River and the power flickered. Then, remarkably, a second lightning strike hit the station minutes later. No one was manning that station, and when Consolidated Edison tried to restart the power remotely, it failed. That’s when another lightning strike took two more critical power lines out in Yonkers, and the infamous New York blackout began. It lasted all night, so I slept on one of the couches at the club. With showers and a kitchen, I wasn’t really roughing it, but it made the evening memorable nonetheless.

The only problem was that the club owner, Sidney Wood, a famous tennis player himself, turned out to be a crook. The club was closed down due to nonpayment of taxes. An emergency meeting was called. Wood explained that the club had lost money and he’d borrowed from a family member, but he hadn’t been able to pay off the debt, so the club was being seized by the family member who lent him the money.

With a show of regret, he explained that the many thousands of dollars in membership fees we’d all paid had been lost. I reminded him that I had asked for a financial statement when I’d joined the club, a few years earlier. He had demurred, saying that the club was in great shape and he didn’t want to disclose his financials. Wood said nothing. Then I made my point. Club memberships in New York State are securities, I explained. Selling them with false representations was securities fraud. I assured him that I would sue him immediately. The other members gathered around me. We made plans together to save our oasis.

Soon afterward, Wood was gone. The club, run by its members, was reopened as a co-op. We took over the lease and the facilities. (It was on the roof of a two-story garage. It was an open secret that that garage was used by the FBI for its own stealthy activities.)

One of the club members, Robert Kerdasha, told me he was the chairman of a charity, Eastern Tennis Patrons (ETP), that helped retired tennis pros. It raised money by selling seats in courtside boxes at the US Open, which it controlled.

I paid for two boxes, which I kept for years. They were in one of the best locations in the stadium. I invited the great jazz singer Bobby Short to join me there for the men’s finals every year. I had met him on a flight between New York City and Los Angeles on one of Kirk Kerkorian’s luxury airlines. These planes were like a private club, where passengers were introduced to each other and mingled.

On that flight, Bobby told me he was flying to LA to meet Robert Graham, the sculptor renowned for his monumental bronzes of the human form. He wanted to commission Graham to do a sculpture of Duke Ellington, to be installed at First Avenue and 110th Street. Remarkably enough, it would be the first statue of a black man in New York City. Bobby was having a tough slog raising the money, but he was talking to the right people! Not only did I love jazz, but I was a collector of Robert Graham’s work.

I suggested that Bobby ask Graham to give him the proof plates from the statue, so he could sell them to raise the commission. I said I’d be the first buyer. Bobby tried it, and the plan worked. The sculpture became one of the most important pieces of Graham’s oeuvre. When Graham passed away in 2008, the first line of his obituary in the New York Times mentioned the Duke Ellington Memorial in Harlem. It stands proudly, thirty feet high, with three tall columns supporting an eight-foot figure of Duke Ellington next to a baby grand.5

On our way to the men’s finals, I turned to Bobby and said, “This is a great day to be black.”

“Why do you say that, Michael?” he asked, in his smoky jazz bar voice.

“Well, these are the first finals matches in the new Arthur Ashe Stadium, and Williams is playing—the first black female finalist!”

Bobby firmly shook his head. “Michael, every day is a good day to be black!”

When he sang at the Carlyle Café in New York, the shows were always sold out, but now and then I imposed on our friendship to sneak in. One night, I was at an event at Daniel Boulud’s new restaurant, Daniel, with Colin and Alma Powell. Colin told me that Alma loved to hear Bobby Short sing. “Why don’t we rush over now to catch his late show?” I suggested.

I called ahead to request a table, and Bobby really came through, squeezing us in at the last minute. It was a night to remember.

WORLD TRAVELS & THE EXPLORERS CLUB

Though traveling the globe can be a dangerous and taxing feat, I have found—more often than not—it is worth the risk.

Ever since our first big trip together to Greece in 1981, Suzanne and I discovered that simply being a tourist in the big cities wasn’t really our thing. That year, we spent only a few hours perusing around Athens, and found our visit to the islands of Santorini, Delos, and Mykonos to be an infinitely more exciting journey.

Since then, we have forged our own way off the beaten path to experience much of what the world has to offer!

We rode a camel on the Mount of Olives in Israel and visited all corners of Jerusalem. Then we went to a West Bank camp and had tea with the camp leader’s family, who told us their side of the story. On our way to the capital city of Ramallah, our driver placed a multi-colored fabric on the car’s dashboard. “What’s that for?” Suzanne asked, and he told us it lets the PLO know we are friendlies. Though seized with an immediate desire to go back to the safety of our hotel, our venturesome spirit prevailed, and we spent the night in the armored camp.

Mount of Olives, Jerusalem—riding camelback.

We went whitewater rafting and jet boating in New Zealand, where I learned to love sitting in the front of the raft. I’ve since gone again in Colorado and the Grand Canyon, where we plowed right into seven-foot high waves. At the peak of a wave like that, you are paddling directly in the air.

Whitewater rafting.

A year before the Wall came down, Russia was still a mysterious and threatening place. We went over on a private peace mission in 1988. I wasn’t sure if we would be free to come home, because of our opposition to Cold War policies. However, we met with Kremlin officials and were given a great amount of leeway. At a military school, I grabbed a cadet’s rifle just to see if he would yield it. He was permitted to do so, and I pretended to inspect it. Really, I was looking for more evidence that the Cold War was actually over.

Grabbing a Russian military cadet’s rifle in 1988.

On safari in Kenya, we took off at dawn in a hot air balloon floating over teeming wildlife—some of which viewed us as potential breakfast. The landing was a bit rough, but we all survived. At one point our open Jeep stopped in between a pride of hungry lions and the gargantuan water buffalo they wanted for dinner. It was equally beautiful and terrifying.

CAUGHT BETWEEN THESE HUNGRY LIONS AND THIS THIRSTY WATER BUFFALO. We were in an open Jeep.

Teddy Roosevelt’s application to the Explorers Club—signed 1915.

We visited wild discos and explored the awe-inspiring caves of the Jeita Grotto in Lebanon; I dined on snake meat and cobra blood in Hanoi; and we became certified elephant riders after one dunked me in the Mekong River. After trips to more than forty countries across six continents, my thirst for adventure still remains unquenched.

Because of all my risky pursuits, I qualified for membership in the fabled Explorers Club. Most of the greatest adventurers of the past years are members. They have ranged from such notables as Teddy Roosevelt to amateurs like me.

One of my year’s high points is the annual dinner in New York City. There we dined on such rarities as fried tarantula, cockroach, ants, and grasshoppers. All good proteins, if you’re lost in the jungle—not otherwise recommended, though.

FRIED TARANTULA!
Reminds me why I don’t eat these the rest of the year.

The best parts of the dinner are the stories of adventure and the fabulous characters you get to know.

Chatting with Jeff Bezos and Jim Watson (discoverer of DNA).