Laird Hamilton Rides Peahi: Laird Hamilton’s wife Gabby told People magazine her husband was “beautiful when he’s in motion,” and she wasn’t just blowing smoke. Laird is a big man who manages to look right at home in the tremendous power of the wave called Jaws off the island of Maui. (Photo © Ron Dahlquist)
Big-Wave Riding, 1930s (Voyageur Press Archives)
People had ridden big waves before. Way back in 1957, Greg Noll, Mickey Muñoz, and gang overcame the kapu and surfed Waimea Bay for the first time. Noll became the crowned king amongst pioneering big-wave riders, braving waves around Hawai’i of which others could only dream, such as his mind-blowing cruise at Makaha during the Great Swell of 1969. Sam Hawk, riding a giant at Oahu’s Pipeline on “Huge Monday” in 1972, was duly immortalized in Five Summer Stories.
It’s less about the one big wave than about your performances. It’s about your body of work. It’s about art.
—Laird Hamilton, Outside magazine, 2004
Fast Forward to Hawai’i and 1985, where Mark Foo, James Jones, and Ken Bradshaw confronted what Foo shakily termed “the Unridden Realm” in the form of a giant closeout wave at Waimea. Foo tried to take off, wiped out, and nearly drowned. All three were rescued by a helicopter.
That same winter, Alec Cooke, who called himself Ace Cool, brought his own helicopter. He and his big gun surfboard were lowered into the water at an Outer Reef to catch a big wave before he was mowed down by an even bigger wave. He too had to be rescued by chopper.
In 1998, Taylor Knox topped them all at Killers on Baja’s Isla Todos Santos, during the K2 Challenge, offering a “biggest wave” bounty of a cool fifty thousand dollars. The old measure of halving a wave’s height suddenly seemed ludicrous as Knox’s wave towered sixty-two actual feet.
Soon there were more big waves discovered and big rides made at Maui’s Jaws, Maverick’s in northern California’s Half Moon Bay, Sunset Beach’s Backyards, Cortes Bank far off San Diego, and others around the globe. The fear factor had been taken over the top.
Dick Brewer 1970s Big Gun: This big-gun surfboard is a replica of a big-wave board made for Hawai’ian surfer Reno Abelliro. (© Malcolm Wilson) SPECIFICATIONS: 10' 10" long; 20" wide; 3½" thick; 25 pounds
And then along came Laird Hamilton.
Tahiti’s Teahupoo is the Tyrannosaurus Rex of waves. It’s big, it’s mean, and it would eat you alive for dinner with nothing but a burp to signal your passing.
Teahupoo is what is known as a “reef pass” wave, meaning it’s formed by a break in a coral reef caused by fresh water flowing from the tops of mountains and out to sea. Teahupoo is the mother of all reef passes, a wave that is as impossibly powerful as Jaws, but in a different way.
In the summer, big swells generated deep in the Antarctic Ocean are sent across the Pacific with great energy. Even after they are slowed by the gradual rise of the continental shelf, these swells can hit the California coast–and as far north as Alaska–with significant muscle. On the south side of the equator, these swells are at full strength, rolling through the ocean, minding their own business when all of a sudden they trip over the reef at Teahupoo, letting out a tremendous roar as they expend all that surprised, angry, ferocious energy at once.
In a word, Teahupoo is nuts.
This is the wave Laird Hamilton went to challenge. Surfing Teahupoo in 2001, he rode a line finer than any surfer had ever done before, getting towed and whipped into a monster slab of water by buddy Darrick Doerner, then using his beautiful motion and instinctive ocean knowledge to carve an incredibly thin path between death and glory.
Because if Laird had not made that wave, he would have died.
Laird Hamilton had made People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People in the World” list in 1996. It was one of his more dubious distinctions, but a pat on his broad back nonetheless–and few other surfers had gained such mainstream visibility before. At that time, Laird was hanging with Gabrielle Reece, an Amazonian death-spiker who had gone from modeling to pro volleyball to acting. Laird and Gabby–all twelve and a half feet of them–were pitching woo at the time, and when People asked her what she thought about Laird, she intoned just about the nicest thing any surfer’s girlfriend has ever said about a surfer, or indeed, any woman has ever said about a man.
“He’s beautiful when he’s in motion.”
Big Gun: One of the most famous surfing photos of all time: Greg Noll with his elephant gun times the sets at the Banzai Pipeline and prepares to paddle out. (Photo © John Severson/surferart.com)
She was right. Laird Hamilton is beautiful when he’s in motion, and his beauty is unique, because there never has been another surfer who can ride big waves like Laird rides them. At forty years of age, standing six foot three inches, and tipping the Toledos at 215 pounds, Laird is twelve years older, half a foot taller, and 50 pounds heavier than the typical super middleweight pro surfer. Still, Laird looks like Mother Nature’s prodigal son. He’s impossibly fit, impossibly tall, impossibly blond, and impossibly tan; he’s almost a caricature of a surfer, like something straight from the pulp pages of a Marvel comic.
That superhero status also applies when he surfs, because when Laird dances around in thirty-foot surf at Jaws, toying with waves that few people want anything to do with…it just doesn’t look real. If Laird in person is like the Jessica Rabbit of surfing, then Laird in motion looks like a special effect–somewhere between a stoned-out fantasy animation from a 1970s surf movie and a state-of-the-art modern Hollywood computer-aided stunt spectacular.
And even when you do believe that a man can actually ride waves that big and that well, you still can’t believe the speed. More than a few people watching Laird surfing Jaws on the big screen in Stacy Peralta’s stellar Riding Giants wondered why those helicopter shots–which do real justice to the size and speed of the waves–were sped up. And when they realize that Laird really is going as fast as forty miles an hour on those waves, they have the same reaction that Captain Cook did when he saw the Polynesians in their canoes and surfboards, being borne along so smoothly and swiftly by the sea: “It is scarcely to be credited.”
Surfing’s a trip—you better have your bags packed.
—Surfer Herbie Fletcher, quoted in Allan C. Weisbecker’s In Search of Captain Zero, 2001
Falling Giants, 1950s: As World Champion Martin Potter once said, “If you can’t have a spectacular ride, have a spectacular wipeout. It’s good for the sport.” Good for the sport, good for your head, good for your mind—maybe even good for your back, if you land right. This unknown surfer is getting launched by the infamous Makaha shorebreak, sometime in the Good Old Fifties. (Photo © LeRoy Grannis)
Here in the twenty-first century, Laird stands alone. He is to big-wave surfing what Shaq is to playing center, Tiger Woods to golfing, Lance Armstrong to bike racing, and Barry Bonds to hitting home runs. There have been a lot of waves ridden by a lot of fine surfers before him, but no one else can boast such a combination of brawn and brains, innovation and intensity. Laird may or may not be the greatest surfer of all time, but there is no doubt he is the greatest big-wave surfer.
Get to know Laird Hamilton’s story and it’s easy to get all mysto about things. What supernatural power transplanted this small child to Hawai’i and placed him in the path of ace surfer Billy Hamilton, and what charm did he work on Billy to uncover a dad that gave him a classical education in all facets of surfing from small waves to big? Neither Greek mythology nor modern American superhero legendry have anything on this guy.
Laird Zerfas came into the world in 1964 to a beautiful mother, Joan, and a father who must have been built with a physique like a Roman god. Laird was born in the water in an experimental reduced-gravity bathysphere at San Francisco’s University of California Medical Center. Laird’s biological father left the family to join the merchant marines when Laird was five months old, leaving mother and son adrift.
There has been much hoopla and controversy surrounding the question of who has ridden the largest wave ever. The answer? Nobody. Several men hold the record and have successfully made truly huge waves, the type you could safely call 30 or 35 feet. Now that I have seen even larger waves firsthand, I do not believe it is possible to ride them. There have only been rare times when such waves, the ones above all the rest, have even been seen, let alone attempted. Those waves remain in another realm…the Unridden Realm.
— Mark Foo, “Occurrence at Waimea Bay,” 1985
Providence took four-year-old Laird to Hawai’i, then guided him toward Billy Hamilton. Laird and his mother were on a rare vacation, but he was in truth seeking something more: “After my dad left my mom and before I could even remember, I was in search of a masculine figure in my life,” Laird says in Riding Giants. “My mom needed a husband, but I needed a dad.”
And there stood Billy Hamilton: “Here’s this little kid playing around in the ocean, so I dove in,” Hamilton remembers. “I said, ‘What’s your name?’
“‘My name’s Laird.’
“I said, ‘What’re you doing?’
“‘Bodysurfing. You wanna bodysurf?’
“I said, ‘Sure. Why don’t you hang onto my neck? We’ll bodysurf.’
“It was love at first sight with him and I…When we finished he grabbed my hand. He says, ‘I want you to come and meet my mom.’”
With Hamilton and Joan hooked up via this minuscule Cupid, Laird grew up on Oahu. Banzai Pipeline was his backyard, and he was constantly waiting at the feet of two or three generations of great Hawai’ian surfers, from Jose Angel to Eddie Aikau to Gerry Lopez.
Laird was five years old when the legendary Giant Swell of December 1969 ransacked Oahu’s North Shore, driving many residents from their homes as unbelievable waves from a Pacific “Perfect Storm” lifted houses off their foundations and boats from the harbor, scattering them far inland. That ’69 Swell closed out the North Shore, driving Greg Noll and a small group of valiant men around the bend to Makaha to challenge the largest waves ever encountered—and live to talk about it. The Swell was truly the end of an era. At the time, Noll was a bit like Odysseus. He saw the writing on the wall, witnessed younger men with shorter boards and different ideas, so he picked up his oar and began walking inland. Laird remembers the days and the changes: “I was young and impressionable in 1969,” he says in Riding Giants, “so I understood the volume of what was possible. I understood there was stuff out there that hadn’t been tapped and that the ocean was capable of producing places and things that no one had really done.”
Billy Hamilton was one of that next generation of Hawai’ian surfers—smaller and more graceful, intent not just on lion-taming the Hawai’ian waves but in performing atop them. Billy was one of the better shapers around the North Shore, making boards of all kinds for some of the Old School surfers of the 1950s and 1960s, and some of the New School surfers of the 1970s. Laird grew up at the ankles, then the waists, of these guys. “I grew up with men,” Laird told The Men’s Journal. “I was a kid surfing with hardcore guys, and they’re dead serious. I screamed, yelled, just to make people conscious of me. They’d be like, ‘Get out of my way, punk!’ You got to be competitive with the men! Even my dad told me, ‘When you can ride behind me, then I’ll stop taking your waves.’”
Two years after the ’69 Swell changed the zeitgeist of big-wave surfing, Laird began to challenge and prove himself any way he could. Too young and too small to paddle out on a big day, Laird showed that he loved the drop when he jumped off a forty-foot waterfall. “That was in me,” he says. “That was my personality. A proving-yourself thing, too. Trying to outdo your dad.”
Billy Hamilton was one of many surfers who led an idyllic North Shore life through the 1970s, but grew sour at the ever-increasing hype and competition that encroached on the area. He moved his family to another island, looking to continue the old dream. By his teens, Laird was living on Kaua’i’s North Shore, attending Kapaa High School. If you think he had a peaceful island upbringing, you’d be wrong. Kapaa was the third most violent school in the United States, dominated by massive Hawai’ian and Portuguese youths—and skinny, blond-haired Laird was at the bottom of the food chain: “Every day it was confrontations and fights,” Laird remembers. “Every day.”
“Makaha the Bowl”: John Severson’s watercolor painting of big-wave riders challenging Makaha. (Artwork © John Severson/surferart.com)
These weren’t just your typical teenage bullies; this was a race war, and Laird symbolized Archenemy No. 1. “Being a blond Caucasian, I kind of represented the stereotypical person that destroyed the culture of Hawai’i,” he remembers. “A lot of people hated me, wanted to fight with me, just because of my skin color.” As his future wife, Gabby Reece, explains, “He wanted to be Hawai’ian. He used to dream of wishing he had brown skin, to be Hawai’ian because for him, that is what was beautiful and strong, because that is what was around him. Couldn’t get girlfriends. Didn’t have a lot of friends. What did he do? He spent and put all that energy into the water.”
Laird was out of high school by sixteen, working as a mason, carpenter, and plumber before moving to California and finding a part-time stint as a model. In 1983, he was “discovered” by a photographer for Italian Vogue, leading to a photo shoot with Brooke Shields.
By the mid-1980s, Laird was back on more familiar territory on Oahu’s North Shore, now determined to make a name for himself in his childhood haunts. At the time, competitive surfing was pretty much the only avenue available to a talented surfer, but Laird was too big to compete against the increasingly smaller pro surfers riding small surf, and he really didn’t like competition, anyway. He had seen his father struggle with judges and he wanted to avoid those same hassles: “How do you judge art?” Hamilton scoffed to Outside magazine. “I would snap if I was letting someone other than the audience determine my fate.”
Mark Healey: Mark Healey grew up on Oahu’s North Shore with waves like this in his backyard—and in his dreams. Here, Healey surfs Waimea Bay, doing it the hard way, with his back to the wave. (Photo © Jeff Divine)
As a waterman, Laird was something of a polymath, a world-class sailboarder and one of the first to experiment with kiteboarding–using a parapente as a sail to get dragged around the oceans of Oahu, Kaua’i, and Maui. At twenty-two, he entered a speed-sailing competition in Port Saint-Louis, France, beating the French champion and setting a European speed record of thirty-six knots.
Life is just like surf. It comes up, it goes down, but there’s always something happening. Perhaps the greatest lesson of surfing is the gift of spontaneous reaction—flowing with it on a wave is much easier than flowing with it back on the beach.
— Gerry Lopez in Drew Kampion’s The Way of the Surfer, 2003
In 1987, Laird had a memorable role as a buff, egomaniacal dickhead named Lance Burkhart in the movie North Shore. Laird/Lance was the bad guy, and he was believable. Some people said Laird was acting, some people said Laird was being Laird. He was an ever-growing young man with a love of the ocean and something to prove. He and his friends had spent the 1980s surfing, sailboarding, jumping off cliffs, snowboarding, and riding bigger and bigger waves. Their happy hunting grounds were becoming overloaded with surfers, and they began to look for new pastures and different ways to mow them.
In 1990, Laird was bumming around Europe with Buzzy Kerbox, a talented surfer from Oahu who also worked as a Ralph Lauren Polo model. Laird and Buzzy were like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid–movie-star handsome and on the prowl for adventure. They found it when they attempted to paddle the English Channel. And like outlaws, they didn’t bother telling anyone what they were up to or get official clearances; they just dreamed it up and did it. And nearly got killed. “When a huge freighter or tanker or oceanliner is coming at you, it’s hard to get out of the way,” Kerbox remembers. “There were a couple of close calls, but we made it to the other side with only a little bit of hypothermia.”
After that misadventure, Laird and Buzzy got the wild hair to paddle from Corsica to Elba: “This was Laird’s idea,” Buzzy says. “But I was game. We looked at a map and saw the number ‘27’ between Corsica and Elba. We figured 27 kilometers, no problem. So we took the ferry from Marseilles to Corsica and checked it out and even found a high cliff to jump off. We looked at the map again and saw that same 27 and thought, ‘No problem.’ We started paddling from Corsica followed by a French film crew in a helicopter. They were going to shoot our adventure, then meet us on Elba with our clothes, money, and a bottle of champagne for my birthday. We paddled for hours but Elba wasn’t getting any closer…Turned out it was 27 nautical miles, not kilometers.”
Back safely home in Hawai’i, Laird, Buzzy, and fellow wildman Darrick Doerner were looking for the next big thing. Laird remembers in Riding Giants, “We were freeboarding behind a boat in the summer and then there was a little swell and we were using swells for ramps and then we started like taking speed and catching waves and that was when a little light went off one summer day and we were like: ‘Oh wow, we can catch waves. We might be able to ride bigger waves.’”
They might, just might, be able to ride much bigger waves.
In December 1992, Laird, Buzzy, and Darrick motored out in a sixteen-foot inflatable Zodiac to a surf spot called Backyards, just beyond Sunset Beach on Oahu’s North Shore. Backyards is a grand piece of ocean real estate with lots of giant, shifting bluebirds that are beauties to observe, but not easy to catch when the surf gets huge. Laird and gang went after them on their traditional big-wave boards from a towrope behind their Zodiac. They swung into those waves from way, way outside, got into them early, and streaked all the way through the Boneyard that usually keeps surfers from making the connection to Sunset Beach. The pack at Sunset were shocked as the trio came flying past them at flank speed, then kicked out into the channel to be picked up by the boat and taken out to the back of Backyards to do the whole quarter-mile ride all over again.
Where past big-wave surfers were content to catch maybe a wave an hour, Laird, Buzzy, and Darrick were catching as many waves as they could handle–ten giants an hour. They gorged where, for so many years, big-wave surfers had gotten scraps. The boat was wrong and their boards were too long and they didn’t yet have straps on their feet, but the times were about to change dramatically for big-wave riding.
Andy Irons: The island of Kauai has always had great surfers, but from the 1990s into the twenty-first century, the Garden Island began harvesting world-class wave-riders like World Champion Andy Irons. (Photo © Jeff Divine)
C. J. Hobgood: There was a time when East Coast surfers were the Rodney Dangerfields of surfing. Now, guys like C. J. Hobgood get plenty of respect for their surfing in danger spots around the world. (Photo © Jeff Divine)
After that one afternoon on Oahu’s Backyards, surfing would never be the same again.
Dale Velzy 1990 “Malibu Express” Longboard: A retro longboard, Dale Velzy’s “Malibu Express” was the best of old and new. (© Malcolm Wilson) SPECIFICATIONS: 9' 2" LONG; 22 1/2" WIDE; 2 1/2 THICK; 20 POUNDS
Laird and company were not riding waves significantly bigger than what Greg Noll and other guys had ridden in the past. It was how they were surfing those waves. Riding big waves was limited not by the size of wave, but the need for speed to catch the wave. Laird put on his Dr. Science cap in Riding Giants to explain: “As waves increase in size, they also increase in speed. So the bigger the wave, the faster it’s moving, the faster you need to be going to catch it.” Now, trading in their Zodiac for a Jet Ski, they had the speed to catch even larger waves, and this radical new way of being whipped into a wave came to be known as “tow surfing.” Darrick Doerner explains the allure: “You get the slingshot from the towrope and you let go of the rope and there you are, on this beautiful wave with no one anywhere near you!”
Through the rest of 1992 and into 1993, Laird, Buzzy, and Darrick were quickly getting the hang of it. They were now towing behind WaveRunners, giving them access to more intimate parts of the wave, but they were still using traditional big-wave boards. At some point, they got hit by another lightbulb.
Snowboarding provided the impetus. On sleek, tiny snowboards with their feet strapped in for control, they were riding snowy mountains–why not do the same on mountainous waves?
Surfboard-builders Dick Brewer, Gerry Lopez, and Laird’s dad Billy cut the trio’s big guns by three feet. Then Laird, Darrick, Buzzy, and the rest of their crew bolted on footstraps. Now, they had the control for the supreme speed and tremendous turbulence of riding waves that towered over thirty feet. As Laird explains in Riding Giants, “The small board was really the big breakthrough. I think that’s really where we shifted gears. All of a sudden now we really had the speed.”
Back at Backyards, the entire North Shore crowd and all the lenses and pens of the surf-industrial complex could see what Laird, Buzzy, and Darrick were doing. With too large an audience watching, they moved their show to the relative privacy of Maui. But the game was too exciting; others saw what was happening and wanted in, and they were soon joined by a group of guys who called themselves the Strapped Crew: Rush Randle, Pete Cabrinha, Mike Waltze, Brett Lickle, and Dave Kalama, the son of Hawai’ian legend Ilima Kalama. Laird and gang had their PWCs wired, they had surfboards that were somewhere between water skis and snowboards, and they were riding them using footstraps derived from snowboarding and sailboarding. They were doing flips, twists, and full rotations in small surf and they had gone well beyond the limits of paddle surfing in the big stuff. Now they were looking for something even bigger.
Be careful what you wish for.
Garrett McNamara: Oahu’s Garrett MacNamara emerges from the “spit” at Jaws, daring to ride the tube at the surfing world’s equivalent of a T Rex. This ride set the world on its ear, as MacNamara ventured into bigger, more-dangerous waves than others had ridden before. (Photo © Ron Dahlquist)
My dad used to tell me that surfers are bums and that I would never make any money. So, from the first time I ever tried to surfing, I knew I wanted to go all the way with it.
— Sunny Garcia, 2005
One day, Gerry Lopez pulled Laird aside and whispered in his ear, “I got something you might wanna see.” Lopez’s secret was a promised land for big-wave surfing, a wave that any other generation of surfers would have watched in disbelief and written off as unrideable even in their wettest dreams.
The wave was named Peahi, but better known by the aptly descriptive moniker of Jaws. Sited off Maui’s northern coast, Jaws broke like rolling thunder far out at sea. “The biggest difference between this wave and Waimea is that this wave is about five Waimeas,” Laird says in Riding Giants. Adds surfer Brian Keaulana, “You take Makaha, Sunset, Pipeline, Kaena Point, Maverick’s, put them all together and mix then in a pot and that’s what you get–and more!” For Darrick Doerner, it was a dream come true: “We knew that we had discovered the real unridden realm.”
Riding out far into the ocean on a PWC to catch the wave, Laird dropped his towrope and dropped into Jaws. He skimmed down the front at speeds estimated above thirty-five miles an hour, the curl chasing after him like the jaws of a monstrous beast wanting to eat him alive.
When films and still photos of this newfangled surfing circled the world to an unbelieving crowd of surfers, tow surfing had come of age.
In 1994, the world watched what the whole Strapped Crew were up to on the big screen in the movie The Endless Summer II. Rumors and whispers and sneak peaks came true when Laird and Darrick and Buzzy and Pete Cabrinha exploded out of the ocean, doing things no one had ever seen on a wave.
On one of the first waves, Laird and Cabrinha got crossed up on the same peak. Laird was behind, Cabrinha couldn’t see him, and Laird had two choices: Turn and run and maybe take Cabrinha out, or take the pain.
Laird took the pain, straightened out, and got the el kabong from one of the meanest waves in the world: “I couldn’t believe how hard it hit me, and I couldn’t believe I lived,” Laird said later, when the bells were no longer ringing and the tweetie birds had stopped circling: “It was like getting hit by four dump trucks at once.”
In 1995, Laird again used a PWC to put himself in mortal danger while working on the Kevin Costner megafeature Waterworld. Laird, Buzzy, Brian Keaulana, and practically every other talented waterman in Hawai’i worked as stuntmen on this show, because they needed guys who knew how to drive PWCs on the water to do stunts as the villainous Smokers—the disciples of Dennis Hopper who operated from the hulk of the Exxon Valdez.
In 1996, the Strapped Crew released a movie called Wake-Up Call and gave just that to the surfing world. This movie showed how far tow-surfing had progressed in just four years. In small waves, the Strapped guys were using that thirty-five-mile-per-hour boost to do flips and full rotations. Featuring some amazing helicopter photography from Dave Nash, it gave the world a God’s-eye view of just how big these waves were—and how fast Laird and all of his adrenaline-junkie friends were traveling.
When Laird Hamilton isn’t out slaying dragons, he becomes something of a dragon himself. Endorphins are a stronger drug than heroin, and that can turn an extreme athlete like Laird into something similar to a manic-depressive. His big body and big philosophical drive need a lot of fuel, and when he doesn’t get that from the ocean, he begins to feed on himself and everyone around him. When he is challenging himself and getting his kicks, all those liqueurs of fear soothe him into the nicest guy in the world. But when those thrills are not forthcoming and the chemicals are left to stew, the result is a witch’s brew. By summer 2000, Laird and Gabby Reece’s marriage was heading for the dry reef.
Laird, meanwhile, was standing alone by the ocean, looking south over the horizon. He had heard word of a new kind of dragon that had reared its head on a reef in Tahiti, in the old Society Islands where Captain Cook had first seen someone sliding a wave so many centuries before. Now, Laird set sail, crossing the equator on a quest that would either thrill him or kill him.
Teahupoo is a freak. Other big waves like Jaws, Maverick’s, and Waimea break in deep water. Teahupoo crashes onto a shallow, razor-edged coral reef, making a wave that is gracefully cylindrical yet so thick and so powerful it’s like a tsunami breaking again and again. While not as high as Jaws, it’s much more ferocious. And if the wave doesn’t get you, there’s always that treacherous reef waiting.
On a gloriously sunny Tahitian day in 2001, Darrick Doerner towed Laird into Teahupoo—and then had a moment of doubt where he regretted his action. “It was to the point where I almost said: ‘Don’t let go of the rope!’ Doerner remembers in Riding Giants. “And when I looked back, he was gone.”
Ross Williams: Hawai’ian surfer Ross Williams feeling right at home over a reef deep in the Tahitian Islands. (Photo © Jeff Divine)
Laird rode Teahupoo as if the end of the world was chasing him down. The wave is the apocalypse, a maelstrom biting at his heels, seemingly gaining on him all the way. The hydrodynamic power was so intense, so hungry, that Laird was forced to drag his back hand along the opposite side of his board to keep himself from getting sucked down the wave’s immense gullet. As he explains in Riding Giants, “I had a little voice going, ‘Jump off right now. You’re not gonna make this wave. You should jump off.’ And another side of me was going: ‘Well, I can’t make it unless I just stay on.’”
It wasn’t a ride he could practice a couple times to get the hang of it—but then again, his whole life had been practice for this one ride.
Laird’s Teahupoo wave was the single most significant ride in surfing history. Surfing could now be classified as Before or After Teahupoo. It was mind-blowing, epoch-shattering—a wave of change, forever redefining our perception of surfing’s limits. It suddenly seemed that riding any wave, anywhere, of any size, was possible.
That single ride at Teahupoo made Laird arguably the most famous surfer since Duke Kahanamoku. He earned acclaim from inside and outside the surfing world. In Riding Giants, Laird was Act Three and that Teahupoo “Millennium Wave” was the Grand Finale. As surf historian Matt Warshaw noted, “What could be heavier than that?”
In the dozen years since the Teahupoo ride, specialized big-wave surfers have been chasing that question, from Teahupoo to Mavericks to Dungeons and at outer reefs and “slabs” around the world. Every year, the Billabong XXL Awards bestows $50,000 for “Ride of the Year,” but Laird has never taken an interest in the acclaim or the money. As the big-wave world followed in his manly wake, Laird went on to other things. Beginning around 1997, he discovered that standing up on a big surfboard and propelling himself with a paddle got his legs ready for big surf—standup paddle-boarding was simply a good workout. Since then, the sport of standup paddling has taken off and is sweeping the nation.
Meanwhile, Laird is still married to Gabrielle Reece, a woman taller than he is, and together they have two lovely daughters—who are being watched carefully by the United States Olympic Committee and the Coast Guard.
