16

Why Contests Stopped Being Fun

Contests are the hardest and most uncomfortable part of surfing for me. I don’t like the games people play with each other in the water. It confuses me. It’s not like when I was a kid, when Kai, Granger, Wesley, Dusty, and I always surfed the same contests and hung out and beat each other and then went home and went surfing. I loved contests then. Now no one really hangs out with each other. You fly to an airport, surf in the contest, then go to the airport and fly again. Why can’t we just catch our waves, ride them as good as we can, and whoever surfs the best wins? Then go hang out?

 

My dad thinks that Mom and I used the Asperger’s diagnosis to pull away more from contests, but even when he talks about it, you can tell that he kind of gets it. I started getting more into free surfing a long time ago. For me, competition surfing is black-and-white, and free surfing is color. I can surf all day in front of a camera, and try to get my best ride ever on every wave so that the camera guy gets it and I make the kids watching at home really stoked. But I’m over the whole thing about wearing a contest jersey.

 

Following the release of Just Add Water and the resulting hoopla, Clay rode atop the surfing world. One magazine after another heralded him not only for being the next great superstar but also for pursuing a bullet of a career despite the Asperger’s diagnosis. Now when he went to contests or showed up for video shoots, people didn’t give him as many fixed, quizzical stares. Their bemusement over his idiosyncrasies and antisocial tendencies were replaced by admiration for not only his ability but his courage. Surfing is a very image-conscious, social sport. What you say and do goes a long way toward defining your legacy—especially when you’re a competitor closely followed by kids and teens around the globe.

Beneath all of this, however, loomed a growing problem, the shadow in the room that threatened to swallow everything whole: Clay’s deepening discomfort and growing withdrawal from social situations, and his continued difficulty—sometimes bordering on inability—to take care of even the most routine tasks or responsibilities that are second nature to young adults whose brains are conventionally wired. His greatest challenge, living daily life away from the water, was about to manifest for the world to see.

Surfer and shadow collided in the 2010 World Junior Championships in what had all the glitter and gold of a crowning moment. Not only had Clay traveled to Australia for the tournament during a performance peak, but his head seemed completely in the game. He fought off his demons, his fear about surfing against hungry, opportunistic opponents. He wanted to win. He wanted to become officially recognized as the hottest “Under 21” surfer in the world, even though photographers, surfers, and fans worldwide already considered him exactly that.

The World Junior Championships has been the largest tournament in the world for young upstart pros since the mid-1970s, when it began in Sydney as the Pro Juniors. Not only did a victory bolster a surfer’s reputation, but it also served as a springboard to competing for the ASP World Championship Tour crown. “If you win, you get seeded into every single World Qualifying Series event the following year,” Mitch Varnes says. “It really gives you a jump-start. If you just make it through a couple of heats in some of those big, six-star events, you could be on the World Championship Tour.”

If Clay won the World Juniors, his competitive career would rocket into the stratosphere from its already elevated place. “Once I made it there, maybe I had a chance to win the world title,” he says. “I wanted to win that event for everyone who cared about me.”

Clay surfed like a man possessed. He reached the semifinals without losing a heat, battering his opponents with his jaw-dropping maneuvers and ability to stay on his feet, no matter the degree of difficulty. He stalked waves like a cheetah and finished them off with hoots and hollers, his body supercharged with adrenaline and excitement. How much more fun could any athlete have? It was a showcase performance with all the dynamics that surf fans had come to expect from all the video releases and magazine photos. “It was awesome. I pulled off every sick maneuver I tried,” Clay says.

So electrifying was Clay’s early-round performance that his Maui friend Kai Barger, the 2009 World Junior champ, would declare, “He’s the best surfer in the world in our age group right now. Hands down.”

Victory seemed inevitable. Clay needed to show up for the semifinal heat, come in first or second, and move into the finals. No one wanted to face him, which created an immediate psychological advantage. Head games? Clay’s opponents were playing them on themselves. Once in the finals, Clay felt supremely confident he would take it all. He had the perfect arsenal for championship round surfing, no matter the contest, and he relished the chance to show it off. “Clay was on a roll,” Varnes says. “He was on fire. He should’ve been World Junior Champion.”

There was only one problem: Clay never reached the finals. Or the semis. In fact, he never even paddled out.

He showed up at the beach twenty minutes after the semifinals started. Shea Perkins, who coordinated Clay’s Australian schedule and shepherded him through the World Juniors and assorted promotions, apparently forgot to wake up Clay, a notoriously late sleeper. “Shea’s main function was to fly with Clay from Hawaii to Australia, drive him to a good place to stay, and drive him to the contest,” says Varnes, who is frustrated to this day. “That’s it. And Clay misses his heat. It was because Shea let him sleep.

“Clay should’ve gotten himself up, but remember: this is Clay, we all knew what the Asperger’s diagnosis meant, and part of it is, he has little sense of time or urgency. And he likes to sleep. I mean, Shea Perkins . . . the guy’s getting paid to fly to Australia and hand-hold this guy, and can’t get him to his heat on time?”

The significance of the gaffe was huge. Varnes, Wasilewski, and Clay’s parents would find it more difficult to motivate him for competition, for slugging it out on the World Tour grind—which, given Clay’s challenges, felt many times more cumbersome to him than it did to other competitors. What would it take to win? Why was it so hard to dominate like he used to? Why do I care anymore? “I didn’t really like contests, but if I won or did really well, and I could get on the World Tour and give that a try, then yeah! But after the [World] Juniors, I didn’t really care anymore. I was over contests.”

Normally, when you’re twenty and a star, you let the attitude pass and refocus on the larger goal. Instead, Clay relaxed, thanks to a recently negotiated four-year deal with Quiksilver that paid him six figures per year. He decided to settle for the letter of the contract—free surfing wherever he wanted and taking photographers and videographers along to shoot for magazines and surf films.

Clay had experienced an “I’m over it” moment. “Clay’s right. That’s another defining moment in his career,” Varnes notes. “He was surfing better than anyone else down there. A lot better. And from there, it may have given him another taste of winning, like the NSSA Nationals. I think it may have launched him towards the ASP world title. Now we’ll never know.”

 

The writing had been on the wall for more than a year. When Varnes, Gino, and Clay negotiated his four-year contract with Quiksilver in 2008, shortly after the Asperger’s diagnosis, Clay told Varnes, “That’s what I want to be—a free surfer. Can you get me on boat trips and media trips?”

“There were still a lot of guys being paid enormous amounts of money, $300,000 to $400,000 per year, to be free surfers,” Varnes says. “They just traveled around the world to surf. That was it. They didn’t have to surf contests. The reason was that a lot of real surfing purists, guys who grew up during the height of soul surfing in the 1960s and 1970s, now ran the companies. In 2008 some of the companies were being publicly traded, so they had to answer to boards and shareholders. I think they looked at free surfing as their last bastion of freedom, rather than just selling out to everything. You had guys like Ry Craike, Dane Reynolds, Bruce Irons, and Clay Marzo who justified what they earned. Every company had one or two free surfers under contract.”

Varnes preferred sticking to his master competition plan, according to which Clay would soon find himself in world championship contention—if he followed it. However, he went along with what Quiksilver proposed. “His job description and duties said, ‘Athlete will travel the world and surf,’” Varnes says. “There were no other obligations. He didn’t have to do contests; he didn’t have to do PR. It was just, ‘Athlete will travel the world and surf.’ Can you imagine having a job description like that? I think everybody in the world would like that one! They’re paying him well into six figures to do this. I couldn’t argue with it.

“That eventually became our plan, along with a handful of contests every year. I was disappointed, because in sports, and sports sponsorship, everything comes down to competition. You’re the best, that’s how you earn your keep, and that’s how you create value for yourself. I was disappointed, but I couldn’t disagree, because that’s where he wanted to go. He was making a lot of money and getting a lot of attention for it.”

Meanwhile, Gino traced the roots of Clay’s growing aversion to competition further back, to a pair of events that happened within weeks of each other in 2006. Clay returned to defend his NSSA National Championships title, knowing it would be his seventh and final Nationals, the grand finale of his scholastic career. He initially fought the idea, but when Gino, Quiksilver, and others pointed out that no one had ever successfully defended an Open Men’s title, Clay seized the challenge.

However, an entirely different experience transpired at the once-magical Lower Trestles, which had provided the milieu of his ascent to competitive greatness. “When we got to the little house [in San Clemente, the beach town nearest Trestles] people were telling me, ‘You don’t even need to do it again. You already won. Why would it matter if you won it again?’ I listened to them, and said a couple of things, which upset my dad a bit,” Clay remembers.

“I thought he was crazy,” Gino recalls. “I asked him, ‘What do you mean, you don’t need to win it again? You could win this thing for four years in a row if you want to. Nobody’s ever done it.’”

Gino had a strong point. Clay was finally as old as his chief competition, plus taller and blessed with those “Michael Phelps lats for superior paddling,” as Adam Klevin famously put it. He thrived on joining his friends for what, in his mind, was an expression session: everyone fires off his best and most radical moves, high-fives or flashes shaka-brah hand gestures, and may the best man win. With Casey Brown, Kekoa Cazimero, Dusty Payne, Granger Larsen, and Tanner Gudauskas in the water, could it be any better? All but Gudauskas were Hawaiians, Larsen and Payne were his age-old friends, and Brown was fast becoming one. (They still surf together occasionally.) While they drove down the slithery dirt road along the sandstone bluff overlooking Trestles, Clay turned to Gino and said, “This is gonna be so much fun! I get to go out there and surf for half an hour with my friends.”

“I knew for sure he was going to repeat,” Gino says. “He was pumped, he was focused, and he had friends in the water. He was a lot better than all of them.”

It didn’t work out that way. Rather than trade waves and match skills, the others resorted to hard-core tactics and conspired to deprive Clay of waves. Clay was stunned by their mean-spiritedness. “My friends ganged up on me and hassled me. They didn’t let me catch anything.”

Gino believes the plan was hatched before the heat. He saw the others huddled on the beach and took a guess as to what they were discussing. “They must have said to each other, ‘Don’t you let Clay get a left out here, a four-foot left, he’s gonna throw a [perfect ten-point ride], and we’re all gonna lose. We can’t do what he does on those lefts.’ That’s because Clay raised the bar with his throw-tail moves.”

The resulting heat moved Gino to the point of disgust. “They didn’t even care about surfing or how long they’ve been friends. They cared about stuffing Clay,” he says. “The Cazimero kid caught a couple insiders and won the Nationals. Dusty, Casey, Gudauskas, and Granger just clamped Clay’s butt. Two on one side, two on the other. The set would come, and they’d bury him. And to think these guys used to stay at our house for sleepovers!”

Two months later, they returned to Lower Trestles for the 2006 Boost Mobile Pro (now the Hurley Pro), a World Championship Tour event. Clay drew a wild-card entry by virtue of his 2005 NSSA Open Men’s title and his soaring popularity. His initial excitement at competing in a World Championship Series event vanished when he and Gino arrived. It was flat as a lake, always a risk during the summer in Southern California. The area relies heavily on hurricanes off Mexico, as well as the Southern Hemisphere storms that send swells thousands of miles over open ocean. When the storm window opens, Trestles lights up like the Golden Palace at sunrise. When it slams shut, the waves diminish to three feet or less. Which was what Clay saw.

A few days later, the competition began. After sitting on the beach and waiting for the official signal that it was game-on, Gino drove back to their rental and rushed through the door. “Clay, let’s go, the comp’s on.”

“Is it any good?” Clay asked.

“No, it’s flat.”

“Awww.”

They drove to Trestles and left their car in the parking area, then walked past the bamboo stands on the long dirt path. The twin reactors of the San Onofre nuclear power plant peeked over their shoulders. Clay turned to Gino, his mind spinning from the fuel of frustration and trashed expectations, never a good mix. “This is flat this is flat I can’t surf this it’s too flat . . .”

He paddled out for his heat against a couple of unheralded rookies, neither at his performance level. One caught a tiny wave and rode it until it fizzled out, then another opponent did the same thing. Clay sat and watched, feeling cheated that the waves were less than thigh-high, his desire to even stand up waning by the moment. “Ah, Clay, catch one, you just gotta catch one. That’s all you gotta do!” Gino yelled from the beach.

Clay sat on his board, nonplussed. Why bother if he couldn’t unleash his moves? Why not just go home and catch a summer swell on Maui, or the Big Island? “What was there to catch? Nothing. I sat outside waiting for a good wave. I waited for the whole heat. I hated it because it was flat,” he said later.

On the beach, Gino’s impatience grew. “Clay, you gotta go, you gotta catch one.”

He caught one wave. It took a minimum of two to win.

After the heat, Gino met Clay after he’d floated over the rock reef to shore. “Did you see yellow catchin’ one? And white? Didn’t you look in and see them going?”

“Yeah, Dad, but they didn’t do any turns. They didn’t do anything.”

“But you know what? They beat your ass.”

They gathered Clay’s boards from the competitor racks, and then talked with several Hawaiians who were in other trial heats. Gino stood by, dejected, because their expensive getaway from Hawaii ended after Clay caught one wave in a twenty-minute heat.

“Okay, let’s get on the plane. This just cost us how much, and we didn’t do anything. This is lame, we’ve been here for four days . . . let’s go home,” Gino said.

Go home? Clay perked up.

As they left, one of Clay’s friends noticed Gino’s frustration. He turned to Clay and said, “You have to wanna grovel a little harder than the next guy.”

 

Clay’s opposition to contest surfing reached an alarming stage in 2010. Already smarting from the World Juniors, and the NSSA Nationals and Boost Mobile Pro before that, he suffered through one more ignominious contest experience at the Billabong Pro Tahiti trials in Teahupo’o. Once again, a contest turned on head games—the bane of any person who is unfiltered, openly trusting, and slow to respond.

“I was surfing well enough to win the trials and get into the main event,” he recalls. “If I beat my next opponent, Reef McIntosh, I would advance—but the guy waiting for me was some dude from Spain [Aritz Aranburu] that people were rooting for. He surfed Teahupo’o all the time. He knew everything about it.”

Klevin accompanied Clay on the trip. “I saw [Aranburu] sitting out there, splashing water, feeling it,” he says. “Clay would have to surf his absolute best to beat the dude.”

Clay noticed as well. Plus, he was homesick. He looked over at Aranburu and said to Klevin, “I go home tomorrow. I’m gonna ride it off.”

“What?” Darkness settled in Klevin’s eyes. “Get your ass out there and win the fucking heat!”

Promptly fired up, Clay caught a high-scoring wave to take the lead on McIntosh, a lesser competitor. He was well on his way to “doubling up” McIntosh—that is, posting a two-wave score that would require McIntosh to score higher than a mathematically impossibly perfect 10 to win.

However, McIntosh knew about the 2006 NSSA Nationals, and how vulnerable Clay had been in that contest to hassling and head games. Clay might be the best pure surfer in the world not named Kelly Slater, but he was one of the easiest surfers to beat through psychological warfare. He simply couldn’t fight fire with fire. McIntosh had also heard about Clay’s conversation with Klevin. He paddled next to Clay and taunted him about the great surf awaiting him back home in Maui. “Maui . . . Maui . . . Maui. He only talked about Maui. Now I really wanted to go home,” Clay recalls.

After his monologue, McIntosh caught a small wave, not nearly enough to win the heat under normal circumstances. Clay didn’t take off again, however, “because I didn’t feel like catching three-footers at Teahupo’o to win heats and all I could think about was going home and catching Windmills when it was firing.”

McIntosh’s ploy worked. He won the heat, only to lose in the next round to Aranburu, who went on to finish third in the event, which was won by another of Clay’s Hawaiian friends and contemporaries, Bobby Martinez.

The incident at Teahupo’o underscored the concern felt by new Quiksilver team manager Chad Wells, Strider Wasilewski, and ­Varnes: Clay could handily win any heat when his mind was in the game, but his mind was there less and less. How many more shots to the psyche could he take? “Chad, Strider, and I used to sit down, many times, sit there with napkins, and Chad would lay it out: ‘Clay, all you need are two five-point-fives, or two sixes, every heat,’” Varnes recalls. “He had done the math and calculated what Clay needed to do on a regular basis to get through. Like Cheyne said, Clay could go out there and throw down eights or nines, easily . . . but here’s the Asperger’s characteristic again. It’s all-or-nothing with Clay, on every wave. He’s either going to get an eight, nine, or perfect ten, or he’s going to get a one. Nothing in between. We saw it over and over. In numerous heats, Clay’s already got a six, he just needs a two or three to get through—that’s one very average maneuver and nothing else—and he takes off, goes for this huge knockout move, doesn’t make it, gets a one, and that’s that.”

Then came what may have been the knockout punch: major knee surgery to repair his medial collateral ligament, which he ripped while rearranging the face of a medium-sized wave. Plus, Gino had left the house because he and Jill had begun divorce proceedings to end their twenty-year marriage. Clay sat at home, mourning the loss of his nuclear family unit without any comprehension of the underlying reasons. Jill and Gino had been drifting apart for years, as they failed to see eye-to-eye on many issues.

As someone who lives constantly in the moment and can’t process large series of contributing events—such as those that factor into a dissolving marriage—Clay never saw it coming. He had tuned in to only two sources of parental friction: the infighting over the best way to move forward with his Asperger’s diagnosis, and Gino’s deep dislike for his girlfriend Alicia. Clay watched Lakers games and surf videos and continued his ravenous eating habits without exercising. The result? He gained thirty pounds, more than enough to throw off the center of gravity for his one-man surfing gymnastics exhibitions.

For pro surfers, layoffs of any kind are risky. Career half-lives are short. Instant reflexes, fast-twitch muscles, and elasticity are integral components of successful surfing, and all start to head south after age twenty-five, unless the surfer buttresses his wave riding with yoga, core workouts, or other forms of intense stretching. Not Clay’s style. Those who can stave off the physiological aging process until age thirty are considered anomalies, which is why the list of thirty-something surfing and tennis champions is short. When the mental edge and desire start to wane as well, professional careers falter quickly.

Clay slipped into that mind-set, which led to further tussles ­between him and Gino, him and Varnes, and Gino and Jill. “I got a lot of opposition on the whole contest thing,” Gino says. “My ex-wife was just trying to protect Clay, like any mother would. But as recently as (the summer of 2013), Clay told me, ‘Hey, Dad, I can do this, I know I can do this.’ He watches the contests on TV and his arm cuts through the air, tracing the paths of the competitors’ rides, and he tells me how he can beat these guys. He’s talking and waving his arms, and the strategy he lays out is perfect. My kid scares the shit out of any of them when he’s on. I know he can beat these guys! Almost everybody knows that about Clay. But to beat them, you have to actually show up at the contests and want to win.”

Varnes closed ranks with Gino to try to persuade Clay to increase his competitive schedule, not decrease it. “Gino comes from a competitive background, played competitive sports, and he was with Clay throughout his junior career,” Varnes says. “Gino and I were always on the same page. We saw competition as the path to achieving whatever you wanted to achieve.

“Jill, on the other hand, wanted Clay to be a free surfer, rather than continuing to compete. She felt the pressure Clay felt when he competed. She’d be biting her nails on the beach. When he was surfing away from home, we’d have plenty of phone calls while [she watched] his heats on the Internet, and she’d be upset.

“Then there’s the Asperger’s side, which we all realized when he was diagnosed. People with Asperger’s are hypersensitive to everything about other people and their surroundings—especially when they don’t know the people and the surroundings are unfamiliar. This makes a very big impact on your ability to travel and to be totally focused when you’re in a contest environment—especially when everyone is shooting for you, which happened more than once with Clay.”

During his first media blitz Clay told one interviewer, “If I had my way, I’d be a free surfer. I’d spend all my time chasing perfect waves. That’s it. No people, just waves.”

“I still feel that way,” he says. “I will always feel that way. I don’t like contests [anymore] because it can be all strategy and paddle battles and not much surfing if the waves aren’t good. I probably should do more contests. I know it will help my career, but I’ve done so many, it’s just hard to want to do any more.”

Clay’s older brother, an intense competitor, offered wholehearted agreement with Clay’s viewpoint that surprised everyone. “The contest scene is a very difficult thing to be a part of, unless you dedicate your entire surfing energy and adjust your style to it, just because of the way the points system works, the trials, and building your seed,” Cheyne explains. “It’s like a four-year university. It’s pretty rare today for a young guy to come onto the scene and make it in less than two years.

“Maybe Clay’s attitude toward contests is partly my fault. I did the World Qualifying Series for two years, and I had a hard time coping. I’m kind of similar to Clay in that regard. I go out there, I surf differently than normal, and I get really frustrated when the judges try to keep me in their scoring boxes. I think maybe my frustration and distaste for today’s contest scene rubbed off on him. I wish it hadn’t, because right now he can go out there and not hold back—or even hold back a little—and pull off two eights (out of ten), no problem. When you score eights, you win contests. You become one of the top five or ten competitive surfers in the world. That’s the level my brother is at. But I understand where he’s coming from. We feel the same way.”

If there were any lingering doubt, Clay’s dislike for competition hit home at the 2010 Triple Crown of Surfing, the sport’s most prestigious event. “I was so happy he was on the North Shore, because you do need to be in contests there,” Jill recalls. “That’s where the photographers are in the winter, the whole exposure thing, part of being a pro surfer.”

However, Clay never wanted to leave Maui, where the same winter swell was beginning to show. Within hours of arriving on the North Shore, he called Jill. “It sucks!”

Normally supportive of his free-surfing proclivities, Jill grew angry. If you were a pro surfer with any standing, you surfed the North Shore. It was more than an exposure meter. It was a long-standing ritual, especially for a Hawaiian. “What do you mean, it sucks?” she responded. “It’s really big and really good. I just checked. It’s really good, Clay! Just go out there and catch your waves. All you gotta do is go out and surf.”

“I’m going to go out and I’m going to lose,” he said. “I want to come home. I know it’s going off at [Windmills].”

“Go out and surf,” Jill reiterated. “Go catch your waves!”

Clay surfed—and lost. Immediately after hearing the results, he grabbed his boards and gear, drove to Honolulu International Airport, and caught the island express twin-engine back to Maui. He sped from Kahului to his house, dropped off his clothes, and drove twenty minutes to Windmills with a photographer. While Jill, Wasilewski, Varnes, and media people along the North Shore shook their collective heads, Clay surfed pristine, uncrowded eight-foot waves. A single tube ride on a single wave became the cover shot for six different magazines worldwide.

A few months later, after the covers hit mailboxes and newsstands, yet another exposure boom, Jill said to Clay, “You don’t have to do the contests if you don’t want to. Just surf.”

 

When pressed, Clay says that he remains open to competing in the right tournaments and right environments. After surfing in just one contest in 2013 and 2014 combined—the 2014 O’Neill Coldwater Classic Invitational, for the top sixteen unsponsored surfers in the world—that’s debatable.

“I know what they’re saying, and everyone wants me in contests, but that’s not how I surf,” he says. “Maybe I’ll die tomorrow and not get another wave. I want every wave out there. It doesn’t matter if I eat shit or not. That’s why I love surfing by myself or with a friend so much. That’s why it’s really hard for me to think about scoring points and building a plan and catching certain waves in contests.”

Building a plan . . . in the surf, Clay is a maestro. Out of it, he was finding out just how tough life could be as he struggled to connect socially and deal with adult living at the same time. In fact, the greatest struggle of his life would play out in the apprehensive silence of his inner world—far away from the competitive arena and the pages of magazines.