THE BIG JUICE

It was February of last year. The swell he had been waiting for his entire life had lit up the California coast the day before, but it did so at night, leaving him on land and predictably outraged. The next day was sunny and warm, and Greg Long and I sat in the uncrowded enclosed patio of a plastic-tables-and-chairs Mexican restaurant in San Clemente, where he trembled with frustration.

“We would have caught the biggest waves ever ridden at Todos Santos,” he lamented between pulls off a lunchtime beer, “if the timing had been just a little bit different.”

Greg was downright gracious with his “we.” I just sat, and watched, and listened. He drummed the table nervously and looked out the window of the restaurant before launching into the facts, without prompting, as I knew he would. “When Brad Gerlach caught his 68-footer out there two years ago, the buoy was reading 17 feet, and the swell direction was 270 degrees. Yesterday the buoy peaked at 20.9 feet, and the swell direction was 270 degrees. You do the math.”

I had already done the math, which was exactly why, were it not my job to get a sense of Greg Long’s disturbing commitment to big wave surfing, I wouldn’t have even considered being anywhere near Todos that day. For one thing, a storm was battering the entire West Coast with 20-knot south winds and rain projected for the next two days. So foul was the weather and so rough the ocean that the harbormaster at Ensenada closed down the harbor and wouldn’t allow boats out to Todos. “Not to worry,” Greg said, “we’ll lift up the chain blocking access to the water, slide the skis under, and get out that way.”

For another thing, the swell was supposed to hit late in the afternoon on a Sunday, peak at night, and be gone by first light, which meant that there was little to no chance that we were even going to see the big waves if they arrived, and if they were rideable, in the storm. I mentioned this on the phone to Greg.

“Well, here’s the thing,” he said. “I could surf Uppers—maybe go down to Blacks—but if I did that I’d go crazy. I’d much rather go down to Todos and see that it’s no good. At least then I tried.”

So it ran for the past two months. A glossy mainstream men’s magazine tapped me to shape a shotgun-riding profile on Greg Long, and I was thusly thrust into the puzzling and hard-driving orbit of a no-bullshit twenty-five-year-old focused on discovering and taming the world’s tallest waves at the exclusion of anything else.

The Todos Santos mission, for example, was hands down the most energy I’d ever put into not going somewhere. Greg and I spoke on the phone a dozen times in a matter of hours the day before the swell was to hit, followed by another dozen times over the next twelve hours. We spoke so many times, amid the updates on swell direction, wind speed, and buoy readings (“Buoys are massive up north!” Greg texted between phone calls), that his name spontaneously appeared in the “Favorites” list on my cell, a feature I didn’t know the phone had. Meanwhile, while we were speaking at eleven at night, it was pouring rain and howling onshore wind. Not to worry. We spoke again at 4:30, when it was still raining, still windy, and Greg was still raring to go.

Over the last month, with every hint of swell Greg would call with possibilities: to make the ten-hour drive from his San Clemente home to Mavericks, where we’d sleep in his van and be up at dawn; to motor 105 miles out to sea to Cortes Bank, where 100-foot waves could conceivably be ridden, maybe; to steam out to a handful of island breaks that Greg said he might be able to take me to but that I could never write about; to investigate a heavy-water slab that he said a bodyboarder in Huntington Beach once told him about but that he wasn’t sure was really even a wave; or to wake up hours before first light to drive to fetid Ensenada and sneak jet skis out to Todos Santos for a swell that sounded like it would never be anything at all.

One Friday afternoon, Greg was in his van driving to Mavericks when he stopped on the side of the 101, took out his laptop, and called me. He told me that he was headed to Mavericks but that there was a change of plans and that now we had a boat booked for Cortes and that we’d leave in the morning. “Okay,” I said and started to get ready. He called fifteen minutes later. “We’re going out to Shark Park.” Fifteen minutes later: “Mavericks.” An hour later: “Todos.” An hour after that: “Mavericks” after all, and lucky for him, he was already halfway there, “but it probably wouldn’t be that good, so don’t bother coming.”

Such is the hurry-up-and-wait, tightrope-walking life of the modern big wave rider, and so went the entire big wave season, until the only swell that showed full promise decided to appear at night. Greg went to Todos Santos that day, regardless. I stayed back. He and Mike Parsons had a paddle-in session and then stayed at a harbor motel in northern Baja, where Greg presumably lay in bed and listened to giant waves crash in the distance, the waves he had been waiting for his whole life breaking in lonely explosions, Greg trembling with fury.

The next day he and I surfed the tail end of that swell at a crowded beachbreak near his house. There is almost nowhere in the world that he would like to surf less.

Greg Long grew up in Orange County in the 1990s and became a professional surfer, which makes you wonder. He is neither insufferable nor obnoxious. He has absolutely zero sense of entitlement. And he’s uncannily focused on what he wants and pursues it with dogged enthusiasm regardless of his circumstances.

What Greg wants, very simply, is to surf big waves, the biggest in the world, in fact. Twelve months out of the year if he can. And, hopefully, if things go well, he’ll push himself into situations that cause others to rethink the limitations of big wave surfing.

But in a big wave world sometimes co-opted by opportunists looking to extend their sagging surf careers, Greg isn’t interested in the trophy-hunting element that seems to have overtaken the sport. Instead, he pursues his surfing thoughtfully, with purpose, and in the tradition of previous generations.

It’s in this sense that Greg is as much of a purist as one is going to find in the modern big wave scene—as adept on a gun as he is on a ski and willing to put in an uncanny amount of time and energy to score waves regardless of the financial rewards or in-print accolades.

This, to be sure, is refreshing in modern surfing but particularly in big wave surfing, where self-promotion has taken deeper root than in any other arm of the modern scene. Much of Greg’s outlook can be traced back to his upbringing. He was raised in the surf industry’s backyard in Orange County, yes, but he was as much a part of that world as he was removed from it. He was brought up in the state park employee housing alcove, steps from the sand in San Clemente. It’s a small cluster of houses that’s easy to miss, and when you’re inside the tiny, wooded neighborhood, it’s hard to believe that Interstate 5 is there at all, let alone a tenth of a mile from your back while you’re focused on the sound of sea directly in front of you.

For Greg and his older brother, Rusty, it was the proximity to the ocean and the people who understood it, rather than the proximity to Lower Trestles and the people who ripped there, that seems to have had the most reverberating impact through the years.

Their father was a celebrated lifeguard captain and local surfer (he recently retired and skipped town after thirty-plus years of service), and he passed down his knowledge to his boys through the years.

Greg’s first taste of big wave surfing came as a teenager with a trip to Todos Santos, and it immediately threw him into the conflict by which the rest of his life has been shaped—follow the well-worn path of professional surfing or do what you want and ride big waves.

“I was sixteen when I went out to Todos and caught my first really big wave,” he remembers. “And after that, that’s all I wanted to do. I remember one contest in Newport that I went to rather than going down to Todos with my friends. They came back and said it was the biggest in who knows how long, and I was in tears. I was up at the contest in tears—literally crying—when I got the voice message. I was just devastated.”

Still, Greg eventually became the dark-horse winner of the NSSA nationals at the age of eighteen when that title still carried a lot of weight. It’s a feat that’s hard to reconcile with Long the big wave surfer today, but even after he’s eschewed jersey-surfing, Greg still relishes this as one of the proudest moments of his surfing career.

“I’ll always count that as one of the things I’m most proud of,” he says. “There wasn’t a person on the beach who thought that I could win that thing, and I worked hard, and I did it.” But that taste of contest victory seemed to have been enough. After high school, when most of his friends set off on the formulaic route laid out for them by the ASP, Greg decided to make his own path.

Along with Rusty, the two made names for themselves in two ways—as big wave surfers and as peripatetic searchers willing to poke around for weeks and months in search of a wave to themselves. They succeeded in both regards. On the big wave front, early accomplishments included a slew of scores, perhaps most notably a stealth Cortes mission with Gerlach and Parsons that established the Longs to anybody who hadn’t been paying attention. And, as searchers, Greg and Rusty seemed to have an uncanny knack for disappearing for days and then coming back to town clutching photos of themselves in the treacherous barrels of heaving waves that nobody had seen before but that were supposedly right under our noses.

But it was always just that: the Longs, the Long brothers. It seemed impossible to talk about Greg without talking about Rusty. Magazines ran profiles on both brothers together. Companies sponsored and marketed them together. Until recently, when Greg set off with fierce determination to ride the biggest waves in the world, come what may. He drove his van to Mavericks every weekend and slept in it, and he motored off on his jet ski at any sign of a major swell. Rusty, meanwhile, had devoted himself to travel. He continued to prove his worth as one of the world’s hardest-charging barrel riders, but he spent time building a house on a plot of land he bought in Mexico. He took up organic gardening. He fully immersed himself in the slow pace of travel. There’s no discord, Greg says, just two brothers pursuing divergent interests.

For his part, 2008’s big wave season (which Greg turned into a twelve-month-out-of-the-year affair) was a coming-out party for Greg, an announcement of his solo tour, and a vindication.

The defining moment of that year, no doubt, came in January 2008, when Greg, along with Grant “Twiggy” Baker, Parsons, and Gerlach, braved a bracing storm and 15-foot seas to head out to Cortes Bank and surf the biggest waves anybody had ever seen. Getting to that moment was vintage Greg Long.

Twiggy was in San Francisco, hanging out after a Mavericks session, when Greg told him to get to SoCal in a hurry. Baker couldn’t reconcile Greg’s enthusiasm with the fact that throughout northern California power lines were down and the forecast called for only more storm. He came anyway.

Long, earning yet another Billabong XXL Global Big Wave Awards nomination, charges off the bottom of a 65-footer at Dungeons, Capetown, South Africa.

Greg and Parsons saw something they liked in a forecast that called for one fierce storm to die with another one directly on its back. It looked like there might be a small, slight window of time that they could surf between the two storms. One hundred five miles out to sea. Alone.

Today Long recalls thinking that there was only a 30 percent chance that he’d surf that day, but the risk paid off. “I’ll remember that day until I die,” he says. “I’ll tell that story to my grandkids, even if it wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever done. If you wrote it in a column—safe versus unsafe—there was nothing really telling you to go out there. If one of us had wiped out at that top peak and had to take a couple waves on the head—I don’t know if you’d find us. The whole inside of the reef that day was Armageddon if you fell.”

At Mavericks in 2008, Long hefts the winner’s check, which he later splits with his fellow finalists.

A week after the score at Cortes, Long drove his oversized van up to Mavericks and won the Mavericks surf contest, checking another accomplishment off his list.

And yet, while he was as intrinsically satisfied as he can remember being in his surf career, he was beginning to worry. He wasn’t making any money, and he couldn’t get a sponsor. He and Rusty had gotten dumped from the OP surf team along with the rest of OP’s athletes when that company was sold in late 2006. For a year and a half, Long, who had cemented himself as one of the top three big wave surfers in the world—at the height of the big wave surfing boom, no less—had as his only sponsor a sandal company.

And it wasn’t for lack of trying. Greg had taken meetings with every major surf brand during that time—many of them two and three times—and had still found it all but impossible to get a deal. On this point, though, Greg was pragmatic: “Kelly Slater, Mick Fanning, Andy and Bruce Irons—they’re the surfers that are selling boardshorts. I like my trunks high and tight so they don’t get caught, not below the knee. Nobody’s going to look at me and go, ‘Wow, Greg Long wears those shorts. I want a pair.’ ”

Greg thought about going back to school, getting a job. But he fended it off. He spent all of his savings, and when he was about to make a rash decision, the Mavericks contest money (about nine grand, which could have been thirty had Greg not suggested splitting it with the other contestants at the start of the final heat) bought him some more time.

“I know I could’ve signed a couple of different deals throughout the year but far below what I would have felt comfortable letting them use my image for. I’m a pretty proud individual, and I wouldn’t have felt right selling myself short.”

His solution? Keep surfing, keep doing what he loved, and let the money work itself out. And it did. In June 2008, Greg finally broke through, signing a deal with Billabong that has made him a very happy big wave surfer. Not that he was around to enjoy it. He was off to South Africa to spend the winter surfing Dungeons and other breaks on the African coast, where he scored yet again some of the biggest waves anybody had seen down there.

Which brings us to this moment. What’s next for Greg Long is fairly obvious: His life, for the foreseeable future, will be dictated by swell models and the search for big waves at the cost of almost anything else. And he’ll continue to be a refreshing dose of pure stoke in an increasingly misbegotten big wave world.

“This is my absolute passion in life,” he says. “Surfing big waves. And it’s my personal goal to be on every big swell at the best place at the best possible time. The way I rationalize it is simple—I mean, what else am I going to do?”

ALMOST TOO BIG TO COMPREHEND

California. September 1939. A hurricane originating off the coast of Panama broke away from the standard northwest storm track and became the only tropical storm to ever make land in California, heading straight into Long Beach. The day it made land-fall, forecasters had predicted clouds but no heavy weather, and the storm went completely unnoticed until it brushed past San Diego—killing thirty-nine people in a deluge of rain, wind, and waves. Surfers had a heads-up, as a rising swell moved out in front of the storm.

A few hours before the rain hit, PVSC (Palos Verde Surf Club) member LeRoy Grannis drove to Malibu with some friends and later recalled that the surf was well overhead, rising, and much louder than usual, thanks to a vaultlike atmospheric stillness. The waves came up steadily. By noon, only a half-dozen surf-ers were left in the water, and they were streaking the entire length of the point on double-overhead set waves, all the way to the end of Malibu Pier. Then a gale-force southerly wind hit and chopped the waves to bits. Grannis and a friend were the last two surfers in the water; when the other surfer lost his board, the two men draped themselves over Grannis’s plank just outside the lineup, paddled in as best they could during a lull, and allowed themselves to be churned to the beach by the next set of waves.

Another swell arrived on Thanksgiving Day, out of the west, and big enough that a Santa Barbara surfer at one point counted thirteen distinct and simultaneously breaking lines of whitewater lined up in rows. A New Year’s Eve swell was just as big, maybe bigger.

LeRoy Grannis sat this last one out. At twilight on January 31, 1940, LeRoy walked to the end of the pier in Hermosa Beach, just north of Palos Verdes, leaned against the vibrating guardrail, and watched astounded as a school of dolphins torpedoed through the interior of a huge incoming swell. As the wave fringed, the dolphins all broke the surface at once, arced through the cold air, then disappeared back into the water ahead of the whitewater explosion.

This was how the sport was actually proportioned. The surfer wasn’t anywhere near the center of the action. In fact, he stood at the feathered edge of something too big to see—almost too big to comprehend.

—From The History of Surfing, by Matt Warshaw

ROAD AGENT: GREG LONG’S LIFE IN PURSUIT