8

Perfection

I was getting my reverse throw-tail down. Surf photographers and video guys were starting to shoot it. I tried it in contests because I scored a lot of points, but I really liked doing it on every wave I could at home, where it was just me and the wave . . . a lot more comfortable. What you do is come up on the wave, slide out the tail of your board so it looks like you’re in a stalling airplane, and then snap! snap! snap! and throw water out the back. Then you swing the board around so that you’re surfing on the face of the wave again.

 

A lot of people say I’m the one who came up with it. I have seen other people do something similar to it, guys like Ry Craike and Julian Wilson, two of my favorite Australian surfers. I was starting to land this move every time.

 

He stared at the sparkling new Toyota Matrix, which sat in an unlikely spot—Lower Trestles. He could not keep his eyes off the red car. He imagined himself cruising the roads in Maui, pulling up to check out the surf, hip-hop and rock blasting from the speakers . . . always in this car. It belonged to him. He had to possess it. He could feel it. I know I have to win it so I’ll have a car to drive when I get my driver’s license, and Mom and Dad won’t have to buy me a car.

The Matrix awaited the winner of the 2005 NSSA Nationals Open Men’s Championship. When Clay, his family, and teammates flew to California for his fifth NSSA Nationals, no one expected the fourteen-year-old to move up one age group and seize the grand prize from the nation’s greatest amateurs, several of whom would turn pro immediately following the event. It would be like a middleweight champion trying to oust the heavyweight.

However, his focus changed when he saw the Matrix. Game on.

 

Clay had already tasted victory in the NSSA Nationals. In 2004 he won the Open Juniors’ Division, his first national title. He entered the event ranked number one in the Explorer Boys’ Division in the NSSA, his second top seed for the tournament, and he also captured two Open Juniors’ events. Then he finished second in the Hawaiian Amateur Surfing Association Championships in both the Open Boys’ and Open Men’s.

In the 2004 NSSA Nationals, Clay found all the right waves at Trestles, a shifty, tricky peak that can make a knowledge of how to read waves of paramount importance. On this day he read them masterfully, with a little Merlin thrown in. It seemed like the waves came to him when summoned. He ripped one after another, unleashing the moves that would practically sign his contracts down the line. Best of all, he didn’t fall, even scoring a “perfect” on one. Freesurf magazine publisher Mike Latronic, a top big-wave pro surfer in the 1980s and 1990s, had this to say:

 

Marzo destroyed his early round heats so thoroughly that by the time the quarterfinals, semis and finals came around, he was pulling off hard tailslide snaps and making it look easy.

 

After accepting his Explorer Boys’ and Open Juniors’ championship trophies on the awards scaffold, Clay jumped down and prepared to celebrate with his friends and parents, but his fellow surfers surprised him with questions. “They asked me what my strategy was.” He responded with a laugh that as much as said, with typically blunt honesty, Don’t you know? “Strategy? I just go out there and catch waves and throw it down and see what happens.”

In the surfing world, new maneuvers are celebrated almost as much as the wave warriors who develop them. They are named, dissected, featured in magazines and videos, emulated, and then incorporated into the sport’s colorful lexicon. You know you’ve made an impact when your moves show up in major contests for years, blasting from the boards of other surfers. Moves such as rail grabs, aerial floaters, roundhouse cutbacks, snaps, re-entries, floater re-entries, and getting slotted (tucking into a barrel) are as colorful in name as they are in practice. Iconic wave riders such as Gerry Lopez, Matt Kechele, Tom Carroll, Tom Curren, Shaun Tomson, Mark Richards, Cheyne Horan, the late Andy Irons, and Rob Machado spent years experimenting, falling off, and refining these moves to get them right. Then they raised the bar of performance surfing one rung at a time, none more so than Kelly Slater.

It is exceedingly rare for a surfer in the twenty-first century to come up with an entirely new maneuver. Especially when he’s a young teenager. What permutation of style, contortion, and action on a wave hasn’t been tried? For a fourteen-year-old to innovate a maneuver that catches the world by storm? Almost unheard of.

For that reason, the beach was abuzz over Clay’s searing snaps—everyone talking about how his board seemed to switch directions beneath his feet at the most critical part of the wave, then how he’d recover, his reflexes quick as a cat’s, his flexibility that of a longtime yoga practitioner. “I’m in my place, where I work with the wave and I don’t care if anyone else is around, because it’s just me and the wave and I have to have my greatest ride on every wave,” he says. “When I pull it off, then I like to see people’s reactions . . . I just want them to like what I did.”

After the event, the sport’s top two magazines, Surfing and Surfer, gave him glowing appraisals. The Surfing staff wrote:

 

14-year-old Clay Marzo was setting the standard with his speed, power and gouging turns. He was one of only two surfers who nailed a perfect 10 in the championships when he destroyed a Lowers beauty in Juniors round one. All week long you could hear the whispers on the beach: “That Clay kid rips!”

 

Meanwhile, Surfer wrote:

 

Clay Marzo won . . . with a textbook approach, mixing combos like an all-time sesh at a low-key home break.

 

What amazed the throng as much as Clay’s reverse throw-tails was the fact that he won not one but two national titles. After Clay ­captured the Explorer Boys’ final, as expected, no one anticipated that he would double in the Open Juniors’ against older surfers—including Clay. “When they said over the PA that I won, I was so surprised that I dropped to my knees,” he says. “Then I found out I was the first surfer from Maui to win an NSSA National title. I thought for sure my brother Cheyne won when he was surfing NSSAs, but he always seemed to get shut down on waves at Trestles, which happens when Trestles goes flat—but it wasn’t flat for me. The waves came when I needed them.”

It was a perfect week. Between the two divisions, Clay surfed in eight heats. He won all eight. Chris Cote of Transworld Surf noted:

 

Clay showed fluid style, a deep bag of tricks, and the stamina. Clay showed the crowd an amazing array of speed and flair on his way to domination in both divisions. Look for this kid to smash some pros on his way to the World Tour.

 

Only one NSSA mountain remained to be conquered: the Open Men’s.

Shortly after the Nationals, Clay and his fellow Hawaiians traveled to Huntington Beach, known as “Surf City USA” ever since Jan and Dean sang the phrase into American culture during the early 1960s, when surf music, sidewalk surfing, and the Hollywood-depicted beach scene were all the rage throughout the country. Clay and his friends turned out for the American Surfing Championships, a team competition. They dominated, and the reward was a wild card entry into the Open Juniors’ event of the world’s best-attended pro event, the US Open of Surfing, which draws crowds akin to the Rose Bowl.

Close to 100,000 people watched the contest from the beach and pier. Given Clay’s deepening disdain for crowds of any kind—in the water, on the beach—it wouldn’t have been a huge surprise if he had wilted under the floodlights of so many eyes and faces. Not this time. He relished the chance to surf Huntington Beach Pier’s fabled south side with only three others in the water, about 5 percent of the wetsuit-clad masses who bobbed in the lineup on any given ­morning. He didn’t win, but it didn’t matter. He put on a show. The crowd roared. Many pros watched him, not at all liking this glimpse into a future when they might be supplanted.

If that wasn’t enough, Clay’s 2004 season ended with a true “to the victors go the spoils” moment: Surfing magazine named him one of the “Hot 100” up-and-coming surfers in the world. What a perfect year . . .

The next year would be even better.

 

Clay began 2005 in Indonesia, where he joined a trip to shoot a new movie Quiksilver was producing, Young Guns 2. Even though Clay was still an amateur, Quiksilver invited him after seeing the home videos he produced. The biggest thrill for Clay wasn’t so much the fact that a couple million people worldwide would eventually see the movie—he finds it very difficult, if not impossible, to project outcomes—but the chance to surf with some of his personal favorites and maybe get one or two rides in the new movie. “I loved surfing in Indo . . . all these different kinds of waves!” he later told his dad.

In April, he traveled to Australia for Camp Hobgood, an invitation-only adventure in which veteran ASP World Tour stars C. J.and Damien Hobgood instructed top juniors on how to succeed as professional surfers, presenting new approaches to strategy, performance, and developing a professional attitude. The identical twins organized the camp with their manager, Mitch Varnes, who would later handle Clay’s endorsement deals and manage his career. Surfing magazine called Camp Hobgood “the pre-eminent training camp for America’s most promising surfers.” Clay attended with Dusty Payne, California surfers Nick Rosa, Chris Waring, and Dane Gudauskas, and Florida’s Jeremy Johnston and Eric Geiselman, all of whom he had defeated in past competitions. Surfing and Fuel TV provided substantial media coverage.

The Hobgood brothers have been recurrent faces in and out of the world’s top sixteen since 1999—an eternity in a sport in which careers peak at ages twenty-five to twenty-eight and few win after thirty. (Although that has changed since the ASP World Tour began to focus its schedule on big-wave venues, where experience and big-wave moxie often triumph over sheer youthful athleticism.) C. J. brought home the world championship in 2001, but the 9/11 attacks, which truncated the schedule, prevented him from capping it off at the season-ending Pipeline Masters. “What I really like about C. J. and Damien is they surf goofy-foot like me, and they rip it and love big tubes. So do I,” Clay said after the camp.

As the camp participants surfed great waves all week, the Hobgoods continually schooled them on the steps they needed to take to become solid pro surfers. Since the subject was surfing and the idea was to create a livelihood wrapped around his favorite sport, Clay was locked in. He absorbed the week like a six-foot-one sponge, impressing the Hobgoods. “I really wanted to be a great pro surfer, and the waves were so good that I got to do the things that bring out my best performance. The waves worked with me so much.”

At the end of the camp, the Hobgoods held a contest; the winner would receive the “King of the Camp” award. For the first time, Clay found himself in an event in which more than a title and trophy were on the line. When he saw the king’s crown, a sword, and an iPod shuffle in the mix, he locked into super-focus—that exalted place that sports champions and the most successful summon when it’s time to win. The same place he went to when he saw the Matrix. Clay loves his swag, and if getting it requires kicking everyone’s ass in the water, then so be it. “I still have the iPod shuffle, with all my songs from back in the day,” he says. “I also won $1,000 in cash, but I couldn’t really do anything with the money since I was still an amateur. I had to give up the cash a few times. I didn’t care, because I had the iPod shuffle.”

C. J. Hobgood came away with one question: how good and dominant could Clay Marzo be? “By the end of the trip, you watch Clay Marzo surf and feel without a doubt in your mind that he was the best 15-year-old surfer on the planet,” he told Surfing.

 

He had all the moves, crazy airs, quick on the backhand, and a forehand to die for. He was so barrel-savvy frontside it was crazy. Plus, he blew the tail and pretty much caught air on every one of his off-the-tops. We actually nicknamed him “go-go gadget fin” at one point, because he did this thing where he’d hit the section, grab the tail and spin real quick—so fast, you’d be like, “wait a minute, does he have fins in?”—and then go down the line like it was normal again.

 

Two months after Camp Hobgood, Clay returned to Lower Trestles for the 2005 NSSA National Championships, where expectations were now very different than in any previous event he’d ever surfed. He was the defending champion in two divisions, and the other surfers and the magazines continually asked him how it felt. Predictably, he shut down. The colorful descriptions that machine-gunned off his lips when only a few friends were watching him lacerate two hours of waves turned into one-word answers. “Get him one-on-one, no matter the interviewer, and he sometimes doesn’t shut up,” his manager Mitch Varnes says. “He’s great. Put him and a reporter in a big crowd and . . .”

As Clay recalls the moment, his shiny eyes try to bury themselves in the ground. His smile vanishes. “All I wanted to do was see my friends again and surf with only a couple more people out at Trestles.”

The surf was cranking—five to six feet, with a bit of morning offshore wind and midday onshore breeze, the waves peeling both right and left. It was an ideal week at Lower Trestles. Perfection.

Then he noticed the Toyota Matrix on the beach. “When he saw that car, he turned to me and said, ‘I have to have that car. If I win, that’s my car! I wanna get the car,’” Gino remembers.

Every year Gino accompanied Clay to the NSSA Nationals, which they turned into father-and-son time, surfer style—catching waves on their own and eating junk food at places like Surfing Donuts and Pedro’s Tacos. Jill helped out on the planning side. She organized plane tickets, made sure Clay stayed healthy, and kept his mounting victories and successes in perspective—that is, when she wasn’t clipping every article, photo, and advertisement tear sheet to put in what became one of the more comprehensive scrapbook collections possessed by a professional surfer.

In the Open Men’s final, Clay threw down his magic full-force. He opened with a perfect 10-point ride, his third such score in a 2005 NSSA event. Earlier in the year, at Pinetrees in Kauai, he had planted two perfect 10s in the Open Juniors’ final of Regionals.

It is exceedingly difficult to post a perfect 10. Competitors are subjectively scored by five judges, all highly knowledgeable and experienced watermen, who use a variety of criteria: wave selection, difficulty of maneuvers, length of ride on the best part of a wave, how well the surfer connects maneuvers, overall style, and an “X” factor—how the performance matches up against the combined potential of the conditions and the surfer. The high and low scores are thrown out, and the other three are averaged. A 10-point ride is as infrequent in a high-level surfing event as a 10 in national, international, or Olympic-level gymnastics.

Clay found that out in a hurry. On his next wave, he managed only a 6.0. While Gino was exhorting him to dig deeper, to connect his maneuvers better, Clay shrugged and turned his board around to distance himself from his father’s voice. Instead, he listened to the ocean as he always did—with his hands in the water, feeling the subtlest of currents and shifts of water before paddling into the places where he felt the next good waves would break.

Everyone in the final was ripping, but none more so than Torrey Meister, against whom Clay had competed before in HASA events. Meister, who lived in Haleiwa, the entry point to Oahu’s fabled North Shore, opened with a sizzling 9-point ride. Then he threw down another big score, an 8.

“You’re down! You’re down! You need an 8!” Gino yelled at Clay from shore.

Clay heard that one. “I didn’t really think about being down, but then I remembered something: no victory, no car,” he later said.

Late in the heat, a big set came. Clay turned around and dropped in late and deep, impossibly late, an abrupt one-way ticket to the painful rock reef for nearly every other surfer on the planet. But that was where his hands, eyes, and instinct led him, and by God that was where it was either going to happen or not. He somehow stayed on his feet, his cat-quick reflexes matched by practically unfathomable balance, and found himself far back in the barrel. Several seconds later—an amount of time so long that some surfers call it “camping in there”—he shot out at blazing speed, launched into a reverse throw-tail, nailed it, and threw his arms high into the air. “Yeahhhhhhh!” Every person on the beach heard him. They also saw the greatest ride of his amateur career.

They went crazy.

A minute later, the judges’ scores were posted: 10-10-10. Another perfect 10! The NSSA Nationals score only the two best rides, no matter how many a surfer catches during the heat, so Clay now sat on a perfect score of 20—the first in the organization’s twenty-seven-year history, and still unmatched (as of 2014). There was no way mathematically that Meister could catch him.

“The car was mine!” Clay exclaims, instantly flashing back to that moment. “Everyone cheered and came up to me when I got out of the water. I usually hate it when lots of people I don’t know come up to me, because you don’t know who likes you or who hates you and there are a lot of hateful people out there, but this time I knew almost everybody, so it was really cool.”

One of the people who cheered as he worked was Alan Gibby, whose company, DynoComm Productions, had opened the floodgates for regular surf programming on ESPN, network affiliates, and other networks worldwide in the 1980s, providing a steady stream of shows for the next twenty-five years. Gibby has seen and filmed hundreds of contests, including most NSSA Nationals and major tournaments at Lower Trestles. Even now, nearly a decade after Clay’s perfect performance, the surf broadcast pioneer marvels at what he saw.

“From my view, Marzo’s NSSA performance is right up there with Tom Curren’s win in the Stubbies Surf Trials in 1982 and Kelly Slater’s Star-Trunks win in 1990, before Quiksilver signed him,” Gibby says. “As Clay came to the beach and as his buddies lifted him into the air, the crowd energy and excitement was something I will never forget. He knew he had done something special.

“Clay’s surfing in that contest was so effortless, though he does have power when he wants to turn it on. I saw him pull off the first move in the final and thought to myself, Did I really just see that? Am I seeing things? Then he did the same maneuver again, perfectly. I knew it was history-making. I rushed back to our studio that evening and watched his final wave fifty times.”

Meanwhile, Jill’s amazement over Clay’s accomplishment soared through the roof—and she’s not one to understate either of her sons’ surfing prowess. “He wasn’t even supposed to be in that final, because of his age,” she points out, “and the other funny thing was, he now had this car but he was too young to drive it! So it just sat in our driveway until he got his license. All these years later, despite the money he’s made, he still has that car. He’s still as obsessed with that car as the day he won it. It’s starting to get a little banged up, but you can’t tell him that. He feels like it’s a waste to get rid of it.”

Clay won the car, the Governor’s Cup as the Open Men’s champion, and an award he still cherishes: the Kalani Robb Most Inspirational Award. Robb was a world-title contender in the 1990s, part of the amazing Next Generation that also included Slater, Machado, Benji Weatherly, Conan Hayes, and Shane Dorian. “Kalani Robb is one of my favorite surfers ever—the dude rips! I even named my dog after him,” Clay said while petting Robb’s furry namesake.

Later the Marzos learned that Clay was only the third fifteen-year-old to win Open Men’s. When they heard the news while surfing a World Tour event, C. J. and Damien Hobgood must have thought, What else would anyone expect, after what we saw at Camp Hobgood?

Clay not only won his title but also led a full-throttle Hawaiian onslaught at the NSSA Nationals. They won four of the six open divisions with a cast now familiar to the surfing world. The Open Girls’ belonged to Carissa Moore, who later won the 2011 and 2013 ASP World Tour titles after capturing a record eleven NSSA National Division crowns. She also was named the 2013 Glamour Magazine Woman of the Year. Barger won the Open Juniors’; later he became pro surfing’s Junior World Champion. John John Florence beat Kolohe Andino in the Open Boys’; today they are among the world’s top-ranked surfers. Mason Ho, who finished fourth in the Open Men’s, won the 2013 Hawaiian Island Creations Pro. His father, Michael, was a top-five surfer in the World Tour’s early years.

One other performer set the motivational and inspirational tone for Clay and the Hawaiians. Their fellow competitor and good friend Bethany Hamilton finished fourth in the Open Women’s, her first NSSA Nationals since losing her left arm to a tiger shark. Her resulting memoir, Soul Surfer: A True Story of Faith, Family, and Fighting to Get Back on the Board, was a bestseller. In addition, her NSSA performance was depicted (somewhat accurately) in the 2011 biopic Soul Surfer, which starred Dennis Quaid, Helen Hunt, and Carrie Underwood. Hamilton served as a consultant.

A few months later, the Hawaiians returned to California for the Quiksilver ISA World Junior Surfing Championships at Huntington Beach. They kept their feet pinned to the accelerator. Clay relished every moment, joining his friends and unleashing his best surfing while feeling pressure-free in the twenty-seven-nation competition. He finished second to Tonino Benson in the Under-Sixteen Boys’ Division, Carissa Moore took third in the Under-Eighteen Girls’, and Payne and Granger Larsen both made their finals. Hawaii captured the world team title by a wide margin over Brazil and the United States. (In surfing, Hawaii is considered separate from the US mainland.) One of the coaches told the Honolulu Advertiser, “Those two guys [Tonino and Clay] carried us to the team win because we were the only team to get a first and a second in any division—that’s a lot of points.”

After reminiscing and viewing scrapbooks and videos from his remarkable 2005 season, Clay grows silent. He locks into his distant glare, then returns his concentration to the room a minute later. “I don’t like looking back,” he says. “Right after it happens, I’m over it. I move on. But at the 2005 Nationals, it was like winning the Olympics. My life changed forever.”