5

A Surfing Family

Roots are really important to me; it’s good to know your roots. They say you take after your father’s father, the second generation. Cheyne took after his dad, Tony Magnusson, who was a pro skateboarder, and I take after my dad, but I also take after both of my grandparents. They were good surfers. I also think I’m a good surfer because I always surfed with my dad and Cheyne, and I watched Cheyne a lot as he became a professional surfer himself.

 

I learned and tried out maneuvers Cheyne showed me, or that I saw in magazines or videos. I was getting barreled, and trying to do the things some of my favorite surfers were doing. There are photos of me when I was eight or nine at the Pools, right by my house in Puamana, getting barreled, grabbing the rail of my board while going backside, getting air. All on one page of a scrapbook.

 

People asked me why I kept going for barrels. They still ask me. Why? Why do you need to ask? It’s the best part of surfing. It’s the time I feel most away from the world, in my own world, where it’s really quiet and it’s just me and the ocean. If my life could be one big slab, I’d be really happy.

 

By the time Clay began competing regularly, Cheyne had risen up the ranks to become one of the best amateur surfers in the country. All family weekends were spent at beaches in Maui, Oahu, or Kauai, with Gino coaching Cheyne, Jill filming him, and Clay studying his moves, then trying to mimic him when he paddled out again. The Marzos seemed to be integrally involved with every aspect of each other’s relationship to the wave or the contest, right down to spotting tendencies—one of which thoroughly surprised Jill and makes sense to her only now.

“I think one of the first tendencies Mom and Dad noticed about me was that I always went right,” Clay says. “I surfed with my back to the wave, to my right. I didn’t care—I just wanted to catch waves. Mostly, you go on your front side, facing the wave, but I went the other way.”

“I think it’s because he watched Cheyne all the time and modeled what he was doing,” Jill explains. “Since Cheyne is a regular footer—he faces the wave when he surfs to his right—Clay became a goofy footer. A mirror image of his brother. Someone once grabbed frames from videos, showing Cheyne and Clay surfing similar waves when Cheyne was thirteen or fourteen and Clay was seven. Their styles were exactly the same—right down to foot positioning on the board and the way they held their hands. When I thought about it, I realized that the way Clay understands things sometimes is to literally model the person, gesture for gesture, and then try to figure out what it all means.”

On the other hand, it also meant that a new star was rising up the star-studded Marzo family tree—at lightning speed.

“Clay didn’t know how to go left,” Jill recalls. “He was at the Beaches, a safer break, a little bit of a mushier break than Puamana, until you get to the inside where it’s a whip-it break. He would go right, right, right. He felt awkward going left. So his strength was definitely going right. To this day, he’s insane going backside. When the others said, ‘Oh, bummer for Clay, the contest is being held in a right,’ like at Honolua Bay, Clay would surprise them by always doing really well. And he did. When he went to South Africa with the World Amateur Team [in 2002], he did really well with the rights at Jeffreys Bay, a very famous and classic spot. It was what he learned first.”

Clay’s innate ability to model and emulate others turned into a great asset. And what better person to emulate than your older brother, who’s knocking off the top amateur surfers in the country and getting plenty of sponsors to notice while positioning himself for a professional career? “Cheyne was really successful as an amateur, and then as a pro, so I tried to learn from him all the time,” Clay recalls. “When you have a big brother who is doing the thing you want to be doing, and winning contests, then you try to learn, right?” His eyes grow big and open, his expression flat as island surf in summer, clearly spelling out his follow-up with no words necessary: What’s so hard to understand about that?

Clay’s career began hitting warp speed when he turned ten. In the period from July 1999 to July 2000, he won the thirteen-and-under division of Legends of the Bay and Puamana Surf Contest, finished second to Dusty Payne in the Shapers Keiki Surf Contest, took fourth in the Maui Surf Ohana Championship Series, and then surprised his home state by taking second in the National Scholastic Surfing Association (NSSA) Hawaiian Regional Championships, which Kekoa Cazimero won. He’d face Kekoa many more times, in much bigger events.

“I really liked surfing with my friends and doing well in contests,” Clay says. “It’s a lot more fun when you do good, and you’re with your friends. I always got such a rush from seeing them kill it on a wave, then it was my turn, and I just went for broke and tried to kill it too, so they’d notice. So my mom and dad would notice, and say something to me about it afterward.”

His runner-up finish in the NSSA Regionals qualified him for his first NSSA Nationals—and a flight to California. The brainchild of the late Chuck Allen, who brought in Australian surf stars and promotional experts Ian Cairns and Peter Townend, professional surfing’s first world champion, the NSSA has been the largest and most prestigious school-age amateur surfing organization since 1978. Besides cranking out future world men’s and women’s champions (as of 2014, NSSA alumni have won twenty-three world titles, including eleven-time men’s world champ Kelly Slater and three-time women’s titlist Carissa Moore), many NSSA members excel in other career aspirations, owing in large part to the organization’s emphasis on academics and character building as well as competitive surfing prowess. Matt Warshaw, the best-selling author of The Encyclopedia of Surfing and other books, is an alum. So is former NSSA national champion Richard Woolcott, the multimillionaire founder and CEO of Volcom. An early women’s champion, Janice Aragon, now runs the NSSA. Folk music star Donovan Frankenreiter, once a national amateur surf star, bypassed the prospects of a professional surfing career to take his guitar and melodies around the world. Countless former NSSA stars now hold major positions in the surfing and board sports industries as executives, team managers, sales reps, marketing directors, event directors, and more.

None of that entered Clay’s mind when he qualified for Nationals. What did connect deeply and clearly was that he’d join his older brother on the plane ride to Southern California. Cheyne could trace the trans-Pacific flight in his sleep—he competed in seven consecutive NSSA Nationals before turning pro. “I used to draw these pictures of Cheyne flying away on the plane, wishing it was me,” Clay says. “He went to California all the time and kept telling me about how good the waves could be in summer. Here the waves suck [in summer]. I wanted to go to California more than anything. That’s all I would think about: California—California—California. California!” A huge smile crosses his face, as though he’s right back at Lower Trestles, reliving his best waves. “So I just ripped some more in the contests to get to California.”

 

As Clay started rising up the ranks, he ran into an unforeseen but formidable obstacle: his mother’s innate fear of drowning and sea creatures. It may seem bizarre that an expert swimmer born and raised in swimming pools and waves would boil over with concern about her son’s surfing, but motherhood can turn the most freewheeling adrenaline junkie into the poster child of protectiveness. When you throw in a mother’s own ADHD, susceptibility to panic attacks, and sense of what could go wrong distilled from her own experiences, then you have the recipe for tight control. Quite simply, according to Cheyne, “Mom freaked out over the silliest things, like if the waves were more than three feet.” Mix in a kid who showed no understanding of fear or recognition of situations that would induce fear in others, and you have a mother who became apoplectic at times. Concern over Clay grew into paranoia, then full-fledged panic in close tandem with Clay’s growing skill and propensity for tackling bigger surf. Jill started to picture rogue waves, sharks, rock reefs, and any number of other potentially lethal tragedies befalling Clay. With her fears refusing to subside, she decided to impose a condition on Clay: If you want to surf bigger waves, you’re going to become an expert swimmer first.

“I got him into competitive swimming because he was starting to surf bigger waves, and I was worried about him being held down and not able to hold his breath,” Jill says. “So I told him, ‘If you’re gonna surf, you’re gonna swim.’ He didn’t want to swim—he didn’t want to wear the Speedos. So I let him wear surf trunks, but I made him do the sport with other kids, even though it’s still an individual sport. But the relay was a team event, and Clay needed that.”

Crossing Honoapi’ilani Highway from their Puamana home, Jill took Clay to where the Lahaina Swim Club met. Her condition on Clay’s surfing unleashed a sleeping giant—his swimming prowess. “Clay did his first swim, and the coach came right over to me, amazed, and asked, ‘How long has he been swimming?’

“‘Well, he hasn’t. He surfs.’”

In Clay’s first-ever meet, the 1999 Coach Sakamoto Invitational, he won the 50-meter breaststroke and took home a blue ribbon. A year later, in the same meet, he racked up points in every discipline short of diving, placing second in the ten-and-under 100-meter breaststroke, second in the 200-meter freestyle (2:40.96), third in the 100-meter butterfly, third in the 100-meter freestyle, second in the 50-meter breaststroke, and second in the 200-meter individual medley. He scored fifty-seven team points, the best individual total of any boy in the seventeen-team meet.

“The feeling of competing was kind of like surf contests, only I had to wear these stupid Speedos,” Clay recalls. “I did it because Mom and Dad made me, but I was kind of into the swim club thing. It was right across the street from Puamana, so that was cool.”

Clay was an instant star, one of those prodigies who show up at local swim clubs and within seven to ten years are fighting it out for Olympic medals. None of the half-dozen nonfamily members who had seen Clay swim and who sat for interviews disputed that assertion. One, behavioral counselor Carolyn Jackson, says, “If it wasn’t for surfing, if Clay focused only on swimming, he could have been Hawaii’s best all-around swimmer since Duke Kahanamoku [a 1920 and 1924 gold medalist]. Period.”

However, Clay put surfing first, just like the legendary Duke, who used his Olympic fame and celebrity to introduce modern surfing to audiences worldwide, especially Australia and California. Whenever swim meet and surf contest schedules conflicted, Clay always opted for the surf contest, a decision that frustrated his swim coaches because of his massive point-scoring capabilities. Later, when he stopped competing regularly for the Lahaina Swim Club, they would invite him into the statewide championship meets. He’d show up as an X factor, the wild card, and an ace at that. “They would put me into the relays, and the other teams would say, ‘Who is that? Why didn’t we see him before?’ I was our team’s secret weapon.” When Clay relives the memory, a sly grin sweeps across his face.

“In swimming and in surf contests, he would always say, ‘I’m gonna lose,’ and that made him win,” Jill remembers. “He’d already accepted he was going to lose, so in his mind, he had nothing to lose. Then he won, or came close to winning. Especially in swimming. He always got nervous when he stepped on the block, and said, ‘I’m gonna lose.’ Then he’d be the quickest one off the block. The coach, Tom Popdan, said he was the quickest young kid off the block he’d seen.”

“You have to be fast to whip your board around and catch a wave,” Clay explains. “You have to be fast. If you’re not, you miss what might be the greatest ride you’ll ever get. So I guess when you start fast, you can swim the greatest.”

In his first all-islands championships, at age ten, Clay won the 50-meter breaststroke and 50-meter freestyle and took second in three other races. When he was eleven, he won the 200-meter freestyle in the 2001 Short Course Age Group Swimming Championships. He attained a high national ranking as a swimmer, “but the big thing was that Quiksilver sponsored it,” he says, referring to the billion-dollar surf clothing behemoth. “They saw me—and right after that they saw me again.”

“They did a Quiksilver camp challenge in Oahu,” Jill explains. “They had surfing, swimming, and running. [Two-time world surfing champion] Tom Carroll was one of the camp leaders, and Cheyne was there as a Quiksilver team rider. Clay got first or second in the swimming portion. Everyone was blown away by his swimming. He could’ve been an Olympic swimmer. It looked like he floated through the water, but he was very fast.

“In one heat, he was wearing the Speedos, and didn’t tie them right. They came down, but he knew that if he touched his trunks, he would be disqualified. His butt was showing the whole way . . . but he won.”

Right after that, Jill and Gino decided to scratch competitive swimming from Clay’s life. He wanted to do nothing but surf contests, and his career was continuing to rocket on a national level. “I guess I proved I could swim well enough to surf, because I never had to swim in a meet again,” Clay says with a shy chuckle.

 

The contest scene became a bigger and more important part of Clay’s life, as it already was with Cheyne. In the same NSSA Hawaiian Regional Championships in which Clay finished second in the Mini-Grom and Explorer Menehune Divisions, Cheyne won the Men’s Open. Clay received an all-expenses-paid trip to the Nationals in Southern California. Jill and Tonya Larsen, whose son Granger was part of the emerging boy group of fledgling Maui stars, held fund-raisers to help several others travel to Nationals too.

That summer, in his first NSSA National Championships, Clay reached the finals—a most significant feat, since the field comprises the best age-group surfers in the country. They surfed at Lower Trestles, near San Clemente on the northern edge of the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base. San Clemente is a bucolic beach town, one of nearly two dozen between LA and the Mexican border, with its own surf scene, distinct community character, and quickly growing population. In the early 1970s, it was nationally known as the location of President Nixon’s Western White House—which, to surfers’ chagrin, took a mile of prime waves out of play for five years.

Just south of town, surfers make the half-mile pilgrimage down a dirt path toward the beach. When embarking on dawn patrols, those refreshing sunrise surfs, they inhale the sweet smell of sycamores and castor bean plants along the path, then pass under the Amtrak train trestle that gives the spot its name. They reach Upper Trestles, a southwest-facing beach with a large rock reef and a wave machine between June and October, when swells arrive from hurricanes and other large storms off Baja California, the Southern Hemisphere, and the Mexican mainland. A hundred yards to the south of Upper Trestles is Lower Trestles, which splits the incoming waves into prime left- and right-hand breaks—take your choice. When Trestles is on, between six and eight feet, it is a sight to behold, the sweetest summer surf spot in the state.

Unfortunately, Trestles can also become the most crowded wave up and down the coast. During a swell, it is not uncommon to see two hundred surfers jostling for position, trying to outmaneuver each other for the peeling set waves. Hassles? All the time. Threats and fistfights? They happen.

That has never been Clay’s path. He has never liked to surf with a crowd unless it consists entirely of his friends. However, for one of two weeks the entire year—the Hurley Pro of the Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) World Tour is the other event—the water at Trestles is cleared of all people but the six Nationals competitors per heat, and that made competing there all the sweeter. “I met a lot of my favorite surfers and surfed with only a few other guys,” says Clay. “I was lucky to surf Trestles like that, because it’s crowded most of the time. I’ve seen a hundred people out there before. Not me. I hate that shit. I get really nervous and it’s like I’m over it; I just paddle away from everyone else or get out of the water and go down the coast. What are they gonna do to me? Why are they hassling me? Why can’t you catch your wave and I’ll catch mine? It pisses me off. That’s why I won’t surf [Honolua] Bay anymore.”

“Even then, even when he was with his friends, we could start to see the beginnings of his nervousness around other people,” Gino says, “especially people he didn’t know. What do you do? Every surfer I’ve ever known wants that soul session, out there all alone, but you’re not going to be alone very often. I kept telling Clay to just get used to it, because he’d always have to deal with crowds, but he would sometimes give me that blank stare and go off and surf by himself . . . even in contests. Yeah, that’s when I started wondering about him.”

 

When it came to throwing down the throttle and actually catching waves in heats, Clay’s growing reticence in crowds didn’t seem to matter. He placed second in the twelve-and-under division of the 2000 NSSA Winter Nationals behind Kai Barger. Granger Larsen was fourth. Kai, Granger, Wesley, Dusty Payne, Kekoa Cazimero, and Clay had dominated Hawaiian contests for three years; now they’d taken their game onto the national stage. They started to make every final together, then essentially take turns winning and placing. “People say now that we are one of the most talented groups of kids to ever come up together, anywhere in the world. Maybe we are. But we were having fun,” Clay points out. “Contests were fun. Just me and a couple of friends. We kill our waves, then we talk about them and get shaved ice. That’s how we do it in Maui.”

Meanwhile, the older and more established half of the rising Marzo family surf show, Cheyne, traveled to the International Surfing Association (ISA) World Surfing Games in Brazil. He placed thirteenth in the Open Men’s Division, a showing that shines more impressively considering he faced many of the world’s top pros.

The following year Clay returned to the NSSA Nationals and placed third in the Open Boys’ Division, then won the United States Surfing Federation National Championships—beating Dusty Payne both times. “He wants to be a pro surfer more than Cheyne did,” Jill told a newspaper interviewer. “He eats, sleeps, and dreams about surfing. He talks in his sleep about waves.”

By now, surf manufacturers started taking notice. One of the first to sponsor Clay was Spy Sunglasses. After watching Clay briefly, the team manager, John Oda, sent an unusual and remarkable email to Jill, remarkable in that he was talking about a thirteen-year-old kid:

 

What I really admire about Clay’s surfing is his mature style. Clay doesn’t surf like a grom. He already has a sense of using his rail and proper weight distribution while turning. Basically he surfs like a mature surfer. Most groms will allow their board to slide or drift from turn to turn. Groms usually figure out how to use their rail to turn in their late teens. It’s visually obvious, when watching Clay surf. He’s very powerful. Clay’s way ahead of his peers. I feel he is underrated. But watch out, his surfing is screaming, it’s all a matter of time before he gets the recognition he deserves.

 

As Clay improved, Gino’s old competitive fires picked up. If he could get Clay focused on winning rather than surfing every wave like it was his last—the ultimate high-risk, high-reward mentality, not always conducive to good contest strategy—he saw what the boy’s enormous talent could deliver. “He wasn’t a dick about it, but he preferred winning to losing,” Clay remembers. “He would get upset if I caught the wrong wave, caught shitty waves, or missed a wave. Sometimes I’d get scared to paddle in, or I’d just stay out there and catch some more waves if he was angry. Or if I went for a big move and wiped out. Dad would turn his head when I went for it and missed the move and wiped out and went out to get another wave and tried to go big and wiped out again. When I catch a wave, I do everything I can. Why bother if you don’t go for it?”

“The amount of heats I’ve sat through on the beach . . .” Gino says. “When Cheyne would go out in his heats, I didn’t worry about him, because he had a pretty good strategy. He knew how to build a foundation and get a couple good rides. Clay was just so reckless, possessed with so much reckless abandon. It was a little different watching their heats. Clay’s the kid that says, ‘I’m just gonna go out and surf for fifteen minutes, and the judges can watch.’ Cheyne’s attitude was, ‘Okay, I need to get a good one at the start, stay safe, do some turns.’ Clay acted like every turn was his last.

“When he was a kid, Clay didn’t feel the pressure,” his dad says. “He didn’t feel the pressure until he got older. Back then, he never saw himself as the top dog who had to go out there and win. If anything, he always felt a little bit of the underdog. Most of all, he saw it as fun . . . and then, a few years later, the fun aspect of competing became lost on him.”

While Gino got upset when Clay lost or missed a big move on a wave, he never fell down that rabid rabbit hole that turns caring parents into win-at-all-costs adult maniacs. He often turned away, walked down the beach, kicked the sand, or cursed under his breath to Jill or himself, but he kept his wits when he was around Clay. “He never told me, ‘You have to win.’ He never said that,” Clay recalls. “He wanted me to win, and I know I pissed him off when I did stupid things on waves, but he never yelled at me like other fathers sometimes did.”

Still, Gino’s intense, aggressive approach to competitive sports met its polar opposite in Clay’s hypersensitive, surfing-for-the-fun-of-it mentality. As Clay’s success started to grow, so did the uneasiness in the Marzo household when it came to expectations at every event. Jill wanted Clay to have fun and do well, to feel good about his performance. Gino wanted him to win; after all, winning begets more winning, which begets championships, which leads to more sponsors, which delivers major endorsement contracts—and ultimately a high professional ranking or a world title. This is the dream of countless young surfers and their families, just as it was Clay’s dream. By his own admission, however, Gino focused on Clay’s dream more than Clay did.

 

Clay found out firsthand, however, how much more mellow and restrained Gino was than some of the other parents. He and Gino island-hopped to Oahu for the Rell Sunn Makaha Invitational. The event was hosted by one of surfing’s most beloved women, Rell Sunn, whose class, charm, and gracefulness earned her the title “Queen of Makaha.” She wasn’t a bad competitor either, having been among the top eight in the world during the first decade of the women’s pro tour. Her radiant smile, the ever-present flower in her long, flowing brown hair, her engaging personality and way of making everyone feel at home on the beach, from the most informed surfing expert to a tourist just off the plane from Des Moines, reflected the love she exuded toward everyone. She embodied the aloha spirit in a way that made her death from cancer in 1998, at age forty-eight, a deeply saddening experience, not only for her friends but for the surfing world at large. Hundreds arrived from all over the world for her paddle-out at Makaha, a surf culture memorial service in which people paddle surfboards beyond the waves, form a massive circle, and toss flowers as a kahuna, a Hawaiian spiritual priest, performs a brief ceremony. Since Rell was Christian, a minister was on hand as well.

Because of her stature, Rell was a godsend of levity for young, ­eager, and aggressive competitive surfers, as well as for the countless number of troubled Hawaiian youths she steered toward better lives. “I felt like she got me,” Clay recalls. “She just always gave me a big hug, and you look in her eyes and you know she gets you.”

For that reason, among others, Clay and Gino always looked forward to their father-son visits with Rell. “All my surfer friends came and stayed in the same hotel,” Clay recalls. “Every night we went down to the recreation room and played Ping-Pong or went outside to the pool and Jacuzzi. The last day we went to a water park and had a lot of fun.

“Then there were the aggro dads, the ones who only cared about their kids winning . . .”

He thuds into silence and his eyes drift toward the ground, as though a large cloud has encased his face. Even more than a dozen years later, the incident bothers him to the point where he avoids further explanation.

“All of us Maui people—the Larsen family, the Paynes, four or five Maui families in all—were staying at one of the very few places in Makaha you can rent, a little condo with a pool. It was a two-day comp [competition],” Gino says. “After we went to the comp the first day, we came back to the pool, and all the kids are running and playing Marco Polo in the pool, splashing around, being eight- and nine-year-old boys. Then one of the parents says, ‘Come on, guys, let’s go! We’re going to the North Shore, we’re going to practice.’ This is at two o’clock in the afternoon, after they’d just been at the beach all day. They’re tired, and they want to swim in the pool and throw water at each other. ‘Come on, we’re gonna go practice, we didn’t come here to play in the pool, we came to win,’ the dad says again.

“Clay looked over at me, confused. ‘Dad? I thought we came here to have fun.’

“‘Clay, you’re right. We did come here to have fun,’ I told him.

“That’s why we were there. I mean, that’s why Clay surfed comps—to have fun. It was fun. Though I always liked it when he won, it wasn’t only about winning. For him, it was a case of ‘I get to go have fun, I get to surf for fifteen minutes, hopefully the waves are good.’”

The incident calls to mind Jill’s astute observation of her son. “You know how therapists and psychologists will say that it takes a positive comment or vibe about you thirty seconds or so to sink in, where it takes a negative comment only three seconds to stick? Well, with Clay, you say something negative to him, or if he’s around it, then he never forgets it. Ever. And he thinks he’s whatever the person says, because he doesn’t have a filter, and those negative comments stay with even the healthiest people, at least for a bit. So when he saw this at Rell’s contest, he had no way of dealing with it. So he just stayed away from those dads, never got near them.”

 

When Gino talks about the way parents can overreact or live vicariously through their kids’ athletic performances and potentials, his eyes simmer with the same anger Clay recalls seeing when his dad dealt with other parents on the beach. While Gino has his strong opinions on Clay’s successes and failures, his comments are pats on the back compared to the darts he throws at parents who encase their kids’ childhoods and adolescences in their own halcyon or bypassed dreams of athletic success without considering what their children want or need.

“My dad always put a lot of pressure on me to excel. It came to a point where I said to myself, Is that what I want, or am I doing it for him?” Gino remembers. “I think that that helped me. When I was bringing Cheyne and Clay to contests and seeing these other dads out there screaming at their kids things like, ‘Paddle over, you pussy, it’s a perfect wave,’ it pissed me off. I might not be the most affectionate person in the world, but I knew I wasn’t going to be that guy who drives his kid into the ground because he’s missing something in himself and needs to relive it through the kid.”

For all of the friction between Clay and Gino in later years, Clay always points out Gino’s unwavering support for his amateur surfing career and his ability to take his foot off the gas pedal when some other parents were throwing it down and gunning their kids into their own expectations.

The youngest Marzo, Gina, observed her brothers’ rising careers while playing in the sand or sitting next to Jill as her mother shot home videos of the boys. She, too, noticed how relatively laid-back her parents were concerning their sons’ growing prowess in surfing and how they emphasized fun and fulfillment over competitive achievement.

“The thing I like most about our family, even with two great surfers in it like Clay and Cheyne, is that we do what we do because we love it. For all the other stuff we’ve been through, we’re not this hard-core competitive surfing family, where the dad’s going, ‘You’ve got to do this perfect—you got to get out there and surf for two hours every day and catch this amount of waves—and film every single wave—and you’ve gotta win this contest—and if this kid cuts you off, people are going to disown them . . .’ People get gnarly!

“We didn’t grow up in this environment where there was so much pressure to be the best—but unfortunately, a couple of Clay’s friends did. That’s why I think my brothers became among the best at what they do, because they didn’t get that kind of pressure. You know how a lot of kids grow to hate their sport when they’re adults because of how much pressure their parents laid on them? Well, my brothers will love surfing until the day they die, because my parents did not push them like that. They promoted passion. They wanted us to be passionate about what we did. If I were to quit volleyball tomorrow, or my brothers quit surfing, Mom and Dad wouldn’t try to push us back in.

“Both of my parents encourage us to find out what our best is. They show that they’re proud of us, in their different ways. That’s a lot different than pushing your kid to be the best—or else.”

 

For all great surfers, especially in Hawaii, good waves usually mean big waves, well over the rider’s head—and then some. Like all other hard-charging Maui kids, Cheyne and Clay sought out bigger and better surf as they grew older. Gino and Cheyne knew that it was the best way to bring out all skill sets and become fearless in the water (while respectful of it), and they were determined to share the experience with Clay once he became old enough to ride the big stuff at Honolua Bay or Windmills, the best big-wave spots on Maui’s west coast.

There was just one problem: Jill. Her deep-seated fear of big waves and ocean dangers reared up most forcefully on big-wave days.

“I remember her being so freaked out that she would always try to pull Clay out of the water. She’d even get nervous if it was three feet sometimes—and she was always worried about sharks,” Cheyne says. “Clay really wasn’t allowed to surf the big stuff until I got my driver’s license—when he had a ride. That’s when he really started charging it, when he was eight or nine.”

After Clay started competing regularly, Gino took him and Cheyne on outings to Honolua Bay, a beautiful bay with a right-hand break fifteen miles up the coast from Lahaina. It was the most famous surf spot in Maui until Laird Hamilton, David Kalama, and Derrick Doerner brought tow-in surfing to Pe’ahi (Jaws) and started riding the fifty-foot monsters on the northeast side of the island for the world to see. Jill’s fears would build every time Gino told her that he and the boys were off to Honolua, because she knew that Honolua doesn’t show its greatest strength and beauty unless the waves are overhead.

“Whatever was big and closed out, he, Gino, and Cheyne—and Cheyne’s friends—would just go out and dive-bomb,” Jill says. “Straight down. I remember the first time Clay went out at Honolua with Gino and Cheyne. He was seven or eight. It was a huge day, one of those days when they’re honking the horn on the cliff when a set was coming, because you have to paddle into the channel or you’re going to get stuck inside. I was an anxious wreck. He was out there and did okay, but I was panicking.

“His dad would push him. His dad would give him a lot of credit for being aggro like that. Even when it closed out at Puamana, he’d go out there. I couldn’t watch, I was so scared.”

One of Clay’s school journal entries describes his earliest big-wave experience, an entry that must have left his teacher, Patricia Akiyama, shaking her head—and smiling:

 

The waves were so good I got so barreled and I came out. Then I did a big snap and ate it so hard then a set came and I duck dived then I got held under for so long I thought I was going to die. Then when I was underwater I was on rocks then I got scraped then I came up then another wave came and I got held under again, so then I was really scared so I came in then got ready for school. Then the next morning my mom said it was too big.

 

Part of Jill’s fierce protectiveness of Clay stemmed from his difficulty both in school and in dealing with many social situations. But her fearfulness stemmed from a harrowing experience several years earlier, when Gino paddled into Honolua with Cheyne. “It was a big, big day, and you don’t really wanna scare the hell out of your kid. I didn’t mean to do that,” Gino says. “Cheyne was maybe ten—he was definitely the youngest person out. We had to paddle from the boat ramp on the inside. You could just jump off and go. So we decided to take the longer, but safer, way out from the boat ramp and paddle all the way out. It was just Cheyne and me. Jill wasn’t there at first. Then she came up later and freaked out. She was on the cliff and saw what was happening. Finally, Cheyne paddled in, and after catching a few waves, I followed him.

“When I got in, she was waiting. ‘Why’d you take my kid out there and try to kill him in twelve-foot surf?’

“‘You know,’ I told her, ‘I’m sorry, but I didn’t know it was that big until we got out there.’

“Clay was different. He had no fear. He never even took half a step backwards. He even thought, Oh wow, that’s a big wave. I don’t think the size of a wave ever affected him.”

Another frightening big-wave moment popped up at a 2001 HASA (Hawaiian Amateur Surfing Association) competition at Ho’okipa, best known as the world’s premier big-wave windsurfing locale. Facing due north, it catches both the howling winds and thunderous surf from Gulf of Alaska winter storms. For years O’Neill Wetsuits hosted the top ocean-based windsurfing contest in the world at Ho’okipa, and Maui was home to twelve-time world champion Robby Naish, as well as Hoyle Schweitzer, the inventor of the windsurfer. Waves of up to twenty feet break at Ho’okipa when the conditions are favorable.

The conditions were favorable, though not if you were the parent of one of the competitors. Facing twenty-foot faces, the other competitors in the twelve- to fourteen-year-old age division settled for inside waves, which were still well overhead. Not Clay. He felt he had to get the best waves so he could pull off his best surfing—always his goal. “I had to get those big waves!” he remembers, rubbing his hands together, his mind and body feeling the buzz of that day all over again. “Dad was stoked that I charged it, but Mom got really worried and sick.”

“In the morning, Wendell Payne [Dusty’s dad and the contest director] called the contest off—it was too big. It was huge,” Jill explains. “I’m thinking, Yeah! Thank God! It’s not on! Then, just as we were about to leave, they called it back on—but the contestants were told to surf the inside section.”

She shakes her head, rolls her eyes, and flashes the troubled smile that’s universal among mothers of mischievous kids. “What do you know? There goes Clay—outside. Everyone’s trying to follow him, but none of the other kids could get out. I was on the beach, nauseous—I couldn’t see him between the waves. The lifeguard in the Jet Ski had gone to Paia [the nearby town] for gas. I went up to the tent and asked, ‘Where’s my son? I don’t see my son!’ The commentator calls out, on the mic, ‘Clay, your mommy’s on the beach and worried about you.’

“I was so mad. A couple of the mothers were saying, ‘Don’t worry, he’s fine, Clay’s fine in the water.’ But I could see they were all nervous. Even the contest directors knew Clay wasn’t supposed to be that far out.”

As far as he was concerned, Clay was exactly where he was supposed to be: ready to tackle the biggest and best waves at Ho’okipa. He took off on one of those huge waves—and wiped out while going for a huge reverse throw-tail, a move in its infancy that would later become internationally identified as Clay’s patented maneuver. His board leash snapped because the waves carried so much force. Then there were successive “hold-downs.” He endured. When a rider plunges beneath a small wave, three or four feet, the wave and its turbulence pass by in ten seconds or so and the rider can pop back up to the surface. When it’s ten feet or bigger in Hawaii, however, those little dips underwater turn into lung-burning hold-downs that can last up to a minute—or, in the case of the monster waves at Jaws or Waimea Bay, two minutes or more. Few people besides deep-­water skin divers, Navy SEALs, and big-wave surfers can survive such lengthy hold-downs. Some surfers have “seen brown,” technically the first stage of drowning. Others have breathed the oxygen bubbles within ocean foam, or whitewater, to sustain themselves on the way back up. Several have died.

“I got physically sick,” Jill recalls. “I had to leave, and I didn’t watch another surfing event for at least a year. I thought he was dead, but he was fine. The Jet Ski guy got his board, brought it back out to him, and he won the contest. Even Matt Kinoshita, who’s highly respected as a surfer, told me, ‘I wouldn’t go out in that. It’s too big, too gnarly.’”

The entire experience left a bruise on Jill’s heart, which was not soothed by the troubling realization that followed. “From that point, I had to realize, the way Clay is wired, that he doesn’t have any common sense when it comes to the ocean. In my opinion, I had to realize he could die out there at any point,” she says. “I realized he has a primal attachment to the ocean, where it’s his safest environment. No fear at all. He jumps into these blowholes where people have died. I’ve seen him jump off the rock at Windmills with a raft on a huge day. Really? On a pink blow-up raft? Even his friends—Casey Brown, Granger Larsen—are like, ‘You’re crazy, Marzo!’ He has all this reckless abandon, but makes it look like it’s good, safe, and easy.

“As a mom, it was horrible. I don’t think he does it as much anymore, because he’s gotten hurt a few times since then, but he still does it.”

By no means is Clay oblivious to the ultimate price he could pay for his fearlessness in charging big surf. As he grows older, he seems to be gaining deeper respect for the sea and the price it extracts now and then. “I know guys who die every year surfing,” he says. “The guy they made the Chasing Mavericks movie about, Jay Moriarty, didn’t die at Mavericks, but while surface-diving in the Indian Ocean. I like to dive all the time. In the winter of 2013 a guy on the North Shore [Kirk Passmore] snapped his leash on a huge avalanche wave and they found his board but not him.”

 

The discussion brings Clay to one of his most harrowing moments, which turned into one of his most defining experiences: a wipeout at the Tahitian break of Teahupo’o (pronounced Cho-poo). Accessible only by boat, Teahupo’o is a demon of a wave that rises from the bowels of Poseidon, hollows out everything beneath, and then throws itself onto a razor-sharp reef three to four feet beneath the water’s surface. It doesn’t break softly or gently, and it doesn’t peel, feather, or in any way conjure up a Gauguin tropical image or a tourist brochure; it explodes. Surfers are left with huge barrels if they make it, and lips thick as waterfalls if they don’t. Injuries are an essential part of challenging the wave. Everyone who has surfed Teahupo’o has been injured, many seriously. The ASP World Tour holds the annual Billabong Pro Tahiti at Teahupo’o, where the waves range from eight to fifteen feet.

Or bigger. The day Clay became a man in the eyes of the man, he completed his rise to international stardom not just with a great ride, but also with the wipeout that followed. He took off on a Teahupo’o growler that left other surfers and onlookers gasping, just like he’d left his mother and fellow competitors gasping at Ho’okipa, and he paid the price, getting thrashed on the reef. “That was such a sick wave,” Clay says. “What a rush! I had to have it. Sometimes you get hurt but you have to smile, because you know you went for it and you and the wave communicated for a second and shit happens when you go for it.”

When he reached the boat, there to greet him was Laird Hamilton, the most famous big-wave surfer in the world, whose ride on a Teahupo’o beast in 2005 stands in surfing lore as a true David-and-Goliath moment. Hamilton is not easily impressed. This is a man who rides fifty-foot waves routinely and who, on an early December day in 2007 when the Pacific Ocean threw a huge-wave party from Japan to California, took off on a monster that a National Weather Service oceanographer known for his conservative estimates pegged at 110 feet on the face. What could impress him? As it turns out, the sheer guts his fellow Maui resident displayed.

“Some of the other guys were going, ‘You’re crazy, Marzo! You’re crazy!’ but Laird was there to rub lemon into all my cuts and scratches,” Clay recalls. “He’s the man at Teahupo’o and Jaws. While I’m sitting there, yelling and shit from the sting of the lemon, he’s going, ‘You’re the man! You’re the man!’ for even going for it. That made me smile. Laird . . . yeah, it made me feel really good.”