17
A lot of people tell me I’m living the dream. I am living the dream: I make money as a surfer, and I travel to a lot of great spots. I can get up, eat, sleep, and surf whenever I want. I have been doing it since I was fifteen. Kids try to surf like I do. I want them to surf like I do and be better than me someday, and live their dream. That really makes me happy. When you live your dream, you get to be happy.
The hardest part of staying out there is that it’s a lot more uncomfortable than just being alone. A lot of guys really like the exposure—and I like photos and videos. But I’m talking about how and why people come up to me. I’m not that way. Being famous isn’t my thing. Sometimes, though, that’s what gets you the big money—being famous and surfing well enough to get there.
Do I want to keep living the dream? For sure. I’ll do anything to keep living it for as long as I can. But it gets harder every year. I just hope I can keep living it.
Late in 2012, while already struggling to appease sponsors who wanted him to get off Maui more, to cope with life situations that baffled him completely, and to make money decisions he was incapable of making, Clay’s life took yet another sharp turn into the uncertain . . . which is every Aspie’s enduring nightmare. Mitch Varnes, Jill, and Clay learned that Quiksilver would not renew his endorsement contract.
Whaaaaat? He had been a member of the Quiksilver family for more than a decade, as a professional and an amateur. Quiksilver officials had intentionally used the term “family” with Clay, understanding his deep need for and psychological reliance on roots, an anchor, and a presence beyond a business relationship. They had also stated that he would be treated as such, beginning with their decision to produce Just Add Water in 2008. As Jill requested after their marketing and promotions team announced his diagnosis to the world, they had assured him that they would always consider his best interests. To wake up every day to the same sponsor, week after week, year after year, was first and foremost. Nothing makes an Aspie more comfortable than predictability and repetition.
Clay and Jill asked the same question: Why would the company release him after eleven years of working together? Jill sought answers in a letter she wrote to Bob McKnight:
From the age of 12, this young man has done everything your company has ever asked of him and more. Not only did you expose Clay’s personal life and PROVE to others that they can overcome obstacles and differences; but also that others will believe in them and could even make a living at it.
Clay has been taken care of by Quicksilver since the get-go, and has always done right by your company. He has gotten other offers but has stayed loyal and never strayed. He has been true, simple, and amazing. He has inspired children all over the world with disabilities, why you did not take more advantage of that marketing? I will never know. But to just drop him . . .
I was told by everyone that Clay would be with Quik till the end, I trusted you, was I wrong? The worst part is that Clay was told that he would be a lifer. If you know Clay and his disability, he is a literal thinker; he believes everything to be true. He trusts. Now when I sat Clay down today, he looked at me in the eyes, “Mom, I surf good” . . . he said confused, “I am a family with them. They said that!”
This is what is needed today, for one to make a difference to another person and for that person to make a difference to the world, someone to acknowledge their abilities and to not focus on their limitations. Because of your sponsorship of Clay, he was able to compete and to have press that showcased both his talent and his diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome. Watching his skill and artistry, people can see that just because someone has a hurdle others do not have does not mean that they are not capable of performing feats that are impossible for other people. Clay has taken his opportunity of fame for his accomplishments to inspire children.
True to form, McKnight responded quickly, promising Jill and Clay he would set up an in-house meeting to discuss the decision with his staff. In the meeting, sports team managers and the executive team reaffirmed their decision. Jill wrote again, but it didn’t matter. Quiksilver did not renew his deal when it expired in the spring of 2013. “We had counted on the Quiksilver sponsorship for a few more years, to spend the next three to five years budgeting him for a simple life,” Jill said. “That didn’t happen.”
Clay took the nonrenewal personally. He fell into a depression that abated only during a five-month trip to the Western Australia home of his new girlfriend, Jade Barton. “I surfed good, I took trips, I competed in their contests, and we got my Asperger’s diagnosis as part of what Quiksilver wanted,” he says. “I was in all of their other movies. They came out with a Clay Marzo line of board shorts too. Then they cut me. They just let me go.”
Tough as it was for Clay to stomach, and as much as he and Jill struggled to believe it, Quiksilver’s decision was purely business and nothing personal. Like many other companies in the surf industry, Quiksilver struggled mightily during and after the Great Recession of 2008–2009, cutting most of their endorsed athlete payroll. As Peter Townend, the 1976 world surfing champion and owner of Active Empire, a surf industry consulting firm, put it, “In the surfing industry, it wasn’t a Great Recession. It’s been a bloody depression.”
“There was a bubble of kids that were really, really lucky with the contracts, the hot newcomers on the scene from 2004 to, say, 2008,” Jill says. “Clay was one of them. They all came up in the money time for surfing. There was a group before them, my son Cheyne among them, but they were getting a couple hundred thousand dollars a year below Clay’s group.”
Clay’s fall was particularly tough. Overnight he went from a six-figure annual salary to nothing from his chief sponsor. “A lot of us got let go. It was never anything personal,” Jamie Tierney says. “That’s the hardest thing for Clay to understand, because he was family. He did surf well. The movie was made around him. Quik was family to him. But the truth is, Quiksilver dropped nearly all of their sports team, and management as well, including Strider and me. The recession almost sank them.”
Tierney felt that in letting Clay go, Quiksilver relinquished one of the most distinctive personalities in surfing, a throwback to another era. “People are interested in Clay and what he’s doing,” he says. “He’s got a mystique and an aura. Seems to me those are the kind of guys you want to help your company, the guys that stand out. You don’t want fifty guys who are interchangeable. And then you hear from companies, ‘I want someone who’s gonna do interviews well, and I can take to trade shows, and who can do autograph signings . . .’ Right, but don’t you want some guy out there that kids point to and go, ‘That’s my favorite surfer?’”
Then Tierney turned the tables. As Clay’s professional career progressed and the Asperger’s diagnosis became common knowledge, many in the industry accepted it and felt that the diagnosis answered some long-pressing questions. However, Varnes and Tierney believe that others used the diagnosis as an excuse to part ways with Clay, often citing one of his behavioral characteristics—such as his awkwardness in business settings—as a strike against him rather than looking at the bigger picture. Such tactics would embitter anyone, let alone a young man somewhat dependent on and fully trusting of the adults around him.
“I feel that with Clay, people who make decisions have gotten thrown off,” Tierney continues. “They’re like, ‘I can’t even talk to this kid. I don’t know if I want him on a trip, because I’ve heard these stories . . .’ It bums me out. I’ve gone on a bunch of trips with him, and I’ve always been happy with the results. Every time he travels, it ends up on a cover or in a spread or a movie. And it’s been happening for ten years. What other surfer can say that besides Slater? He always gets the job done.”
Varnes’s feelings are mixed. On the one hand, he now understands the need for Clay to operate in a tight, secure environment he can control. On the other, appearances are part and parcel of being a professional athlete. When Varnes described one missed photo shoot, he touched upon Clay’s sensitivity to off-the-cuff, flippant remarks—another Asperger’s characteristic. Clay takes in all remarks literally, while being left to wonder what any accompanying facial expressions and body language mean. Most times, he can’t make any further connections.
“Right after the [2011] Japanese earthquake and tsunami that wiped out the [Fukushima] nuclear power plant, we had Clay going on a trip to Indonesia,” Varnes recalls. “It was a magazine boat trip, all lined up, and he was the marquee surfer. We commanded a lot of money, $10,000 or so, for Clay to be there. It was for both magazine media and a movie.
“People started telling Clay the water in Indo was radioactive. When you tell him something, he not only assumes it’s true, but it’s gospel to him. That’s how he’s wired.”
“I knew it was radioactive. If it’s radioactive, I’m not paddling out. I called Mitch [two days] before the trip and said I wasn’t going,” Clay remembers.
“Of course, it wasn’t radioactive,” Varnes says. “Clay is very influenced by what people tell him, and it really affects him.”
Clay sought refuge in the two places he calls home: Jade’s house along the desolate Western Australia coast, and Maui, where he parked his car and boards until he began to extend his promotional reach again through Surfers Healing, Autism Speaks, and Little Tikes in the winter of 2013–2014. As Clay grew into adulthood, autism and Asperger’s groups began reaching out to him to become involved with their groups as a spokesperson or to make appearances; Clay was slowly warming to the idea.
“The hardest part of staying out there is that it’s a lot more uncomfortable than just being alone,” he says. “A lot of guys really like the exposure—and I like photos and videos. But I’m talking about how and why people come up to me, just ask for my autograph or take a picture with me. I’m not that way. Being famous isn’t my thing. Sometimes, though, that’s what gets you the big money—being famous and surfing well enough to get there.”
His comments remind Klevin of a situation in California. “One day, out of the blue, he turned to me and said, ‘I’m famous,’” Klevin recalls.
“‘Yeah, you are. No doubt. You’re famous.’
“Clay just shook his head, like it was the most unbelievable thing in the world. ‘Famous . . . huh.’
“I don’t think Clay ever wanted to be recognized,” Klevin continues. “We’d go to California, and he wouldn’t surf any of the places where people were. I’d have to talk to him for thirty minutes just to get him to walk across the beach with his board stickered up, because he didn’t want people to look at him like they thought he was Kelly Slater or something. He didn’t want that. He never wanted the fame and glory, any of that. That’s not his thing.”
In another instance, Klevin and Clay were shooting footage for The World According to Clay, a series of videos for Rockstar. While Clay was surfing, the Latin American sales representative for Quiksilver stopped by. “He knew who I was, and he saw the kids looking at me, but he didn’t act like I was famous,” Clay recalls. “We talked for a minute, and I told Adam, ‘All right, cool. Right on.’”
“There’s a scene where he surfed wide,” Klevin says. “The kids in the water started showing up after school, he was surfing this break, and basically he goes wide, around everybody, behind everybody, all the way around the perimeter of this park. Then he gets to where the kids are. They stare at him, and he gestures back, like, ‘I’m just another surfer out here,’ but they knew who he was. So they kept staring.”
Tierney sees Clay’s situation as symptomatic of the industry’s inability to adequately endorse the majority of pro surfers (whose popularity and media attention help to sell their products), let alone a surfer who needs to be handled differently. However, he also sounds a clarion call to Clay. “To be honest, I’m bummed out,” he says. “I think that Clay has made quite a few mistakes in his career, but the industry has changed a lot. I’m not sure where Clay fits in with the industry today. It’s gotten so much harder for surfers to make a living, especially if they’re not competing. They’ve got to be so proactive at promoting themselves, and that’s not Clay’s strength.
“There’s got to be a motivation that comes from him. He’s got to learn to play the game a bit more. The surfing industry’s not going to change for him. He’s got to change for the surf industry if he still wants to do it. I certainly hope so. He’s at the prime of his career. It doesn’t make any sense to me that he shouldn’t be supported in doing that. His surfing’s not the problem.”