The Way I Heard It

by Mike Rowe

  Partially embedded in the curl of the surge, Wally eased himself into the pipeline while extending one hand in a “stop” gesture. His upturned palm carved into the great rumbling wall of water while his other arm remained tucked behind him. With white foam shooting off his chest and green water breaking over his head, Wally flew toward the shore like Superman. No one had ever seen anything like it—surfing without a board! As the mighty wave began to crash in around him, Wally stroked hard, staying just in front of the thunderous crash that sent him flying toward the beach like a human missile in a sea of foam, skimming across the surface before sliding gracefully onto the sand, where the locals greeted him with wild applause.

  Wally stood, took a modest bow, and turned to the Manly Man who had yet to win a gold medal.

  “You’re up, champion. Ready?”

  The big man nodded. “I am.” A simple answer to a simple question that wound up changing the course of his life.

  The Manly Man confronted the big sea with manly confidence, imitating everything he’d seen Wally do. He swam hard against the riptide for a hundred yards. He waited for a wave as big as Wally’s had been. When it came, he dove into its base, pushed off the shallow bottom, and burst out of the white water—at which point he began to fly, just like Wally.

  But here’s the thing: if you’re going to go toe-to-toe with the big sea, you’ll need more than manly confidence; you’ll need perfect timing. And when the wall of water began to fall apart all around him, the Manly Man was out of position. Thus his manly body was propelled with great velocity not toward the beach but rather, straight toward the shallow bottom.

  Over the crashing roar of the surf—over the muted sound of his own screams—he heard the sounds of his future vanishing before him. The snap of his collarbone, the crack of his arm, the crunch of his shoulder as it popped out of its socket. Those were the sounds of a football scholarship coming to an end, along with his college education at USC and the law degree he had hoped to graduate with. All of it gone. Taken away by the really big sea.

  In the back of the ambulance, broken and lucky to still be alive, the Manly Man lit another Camel. Did he foresee that the only job he’d be able to find in the course of that year would be in the props department at 20th Century Fox? Did he foresee that schlepping those props back and forth between sets would lead to an audition, which would ultimately require him to change his name to something more… masculine? Probably not. But one thing is for sure: the Manly Man could have never imagined the press conference he would hold in his living room thirty-five years later. The one conducted just four days after his surgery.

  There, in his Encino home, the Manly Man, now with his Manly Name—but still no gold medal—gave an Oscar-worthy performance. Smiling bravely through unspeakable pain and talking with great confidence to the Hollywood press, he assured the reporters who’d gathered that he was ready to get back into the saddle. He didn’t show them the giant purple scar around his left side. He didn’t discuss the lung that had just been removed or the four ribs that he was now missing. He didn’t mention the sutures that kept breaking open every time he coughed or the bucket of phlegm and sputum upstairs by his bed. As for the disease itself, he didn’t even mention it by name.

  “I’ve licked ‘the Big C’ before,” he told the reporters. “And I’ll lick it again. Trust me, fellas, when I go out, it’ll be on both feet.”

  The reporters were delighted. No one had called it “the Big C” before. No one had ever dismissed it as nothing more than a mere nuisance. Surely, if anyone could beat the disease, it would be the Manly Man who’d reduced it to a nickname. And sure enough, he did, completing two dozen feature films over the course of the next twelve years—including the one that finally won him an Oscar.

  But here’s the thing—if you’re gonna go toe-to-toe with the really Big C, you’ll need more than manly confidence. You’ll need to stop smoking. Unfortunately for the Manly Man, that was simply too much to ask. And so the man who had beaten the Japanese, the Mexicans, the Nazis, the Viet Cong, the Mongols, and too many Indians to count, in too many westerns to recall, was ultimately vanquished by a deadly horde of unfiltered Camels: five packs a day over the course of four decades and then some.

  In the end, the man who’d shot Liberty Valance didn’t possess the true grit to quit smoking.

  Today, there’s a cancer foundation that bears his Manly Name, along with a park in Newport Beach, an airport in Orange County, and the credits of more than two hundred films. It’s the same name that’s on the back of the gold medal he finally did get, in the hospital, one month before he died, in 1979: a Congressional Gold Medal embossed with the name that we all know today, thanks to the Manly Man’s run-in with the really big sea—a run-in that changed his life—and the really Big C that ended it.

  It was a shame but a pretty good run, all in all, for the kid who was born Marion Morrison and died a Manly Man named… John Wayne.

  * * *

  I was in Seattle filming the first round of After the Catch—a talk show that takes place in a bar. The setup was simple: captains and crew from Deadliest Catch gathered to chatter, confer, sometimes confabulate. I was the moderator. Picture a pre-hashtag Charlie Rose but with cigarettes and whiskey.

  We were recording the show in real time (or something close to it), as though it were a live production. Producers, directors, and cameramen were milling about, positioning cameras around a big table, and setting up all kinds of lights. But I got the sense that nobody actually knew what was going to happen once shooting began—and that turned out to be the case. The captains sat down at the table; they didn’t know what was happening, either. I wouldn’t have called them nervous: these were manly men, too, after all. Let’s call them “fidgety” and full of questions about how the day would unfold. I had no answers to give them. Unlike ship’s captains, I prefer states of confusion—I think they make for good television—and I said as much. I also suggested that, given the setting, there were any number of remedies on hand that would take the edge off.

  Only one of the captains seemed completely at ease: Phil Harris, who’d arrived at the last minute and done so in style, aboard a brand-new Harley-Davidson. He’d walked into the bar with a gargantuan smile on his face and said hello to each of the captains in turn before turning to me.

  “Hey, Phil,” I said. “How’s it going?”

  “I got nothing to say to you, Mike, until you ride my hog.”

  Resistance was futile. When Phil wanted something done, it got done—and his enthusiasm for whatever it was that had grabbed his attention was contagious. At sea, he focused on catching crab. At home, he focused on his boys, Josh and Jake. At the moment, he was focused on his new motorcycle—something that gave him so much joy he just had to share it with me. And he did. He insisted upon it. By the time I rode back into the parking lot, the other captains were in very good spirits.

  Mind you, Phil wasn’t perfect. He had a temper. He rode fast and drove fast. Like John Wayne, he smoked like a chimney, and—needless to say—he cursed like the sea dog he was. He’d been the captain of his boat, the Cornelia Marie, for close to two decades, and he liked to do things his way. But his way left a lot of room for other people. Once I ran into Phil in Las Vegas. I was speaking at the Conexpo Convention, and Phil happened to be there, manning a booth for a pulley company. During a break, I wandered over and watched him talk to his fans. There were many of them, Deadliest Catch fans who were delighted to see Phil in person. They wanted autographs, handshakes, a word or two with their favorite captain. The line grew and grew, but Phil had all the patience in the world for them. Standing behind a display, unobserved, I saw him focus completely on the person in front of him. He found something new and original to say every time. He answered questions that were way too personal and stayed well beyond his required time, waiting until the very last fan—an elderly gentleman—had gotten his turn. The gentleman called Phil “an American hero.” Phil blushed, signed the man’
s hat, and talked to him for a long while.

  Some people are better than others at this sort of thing. Phil was a natural. He handled the measure of fame that TV had brought him in the most genuine way: he acted as if he’d always had it. No matter who you were, you always got the same Phil.

  Once, in LA, I attended some event the Discovery Channel had sponsored. Most of the captains were there, along with the Mythbusters, Bear Grylls… in short, all the usual suspects. Discovery Communications’ CEO, David Zaslav, was there, too.

  David Zaslav oversees the largest provider of nonfiction content in the world and does so with an attention span that rivals that of a fruit fly. It’s true: he calls meetings that might be adjourned a minute or so after they’ve started. He’s scary smart and not terribly patient with folks who don’t keep up. He never sits still—he’s always in motion and always surrounded by a human force field: a group of assistants whose primary task is to keep away those who might suck up his valuable time.

  I watched him rush through the room; his retinue followed like the tail of a comet. He had already reached the back door when Phil walked in through the front, and what happened next is the honest truth.

  David and Phil shook hands and started to chat.

  Thirty seconds later, they were still talking.

  A minute later… still talking.

  People stopped what they were doing and started to stare, but five minutes later, David and Phil were still at it. Phil was doing most of the listening—David was talking intently—and we were all wondering: What could the crab boat captain and the media mogul possibly have in common? We watched in amazement as David and Phil wandered off to a corner, away from everyone else. There they sat down and continued to talk.

  That was unprecedented. Every few minutes, an assistant slid over to give David an excuse to depart. Every time, David waved the assistant away. When Phil took out a cigarette and made as if he would light it indoors, David walked him outside. They stayed outside for more than an hour. Standing there. Talking. Just the two of them.

  Eventually, after they’d said their good-byes, Phil joined me at the bar. “You know who that was?”

  “Tell me,” I said.

  Phil threw back a poorly made duck fart. “That was the president of the whole damn channel.”

  “Actually,” I said, “he’s the CEO of the whole damn network.”

  “Is that right? Well, whatever. He seems like a nice guy. Kind of chatty, but his heart’s in the right place.”

  For me, it comes down to this: we know a real thing when we see it and crave it because it’s in such short supply. We seek it out, stand in line for a chance to be near it. Fans, fishermen, CEOs—they all saw Phil Harris for what he was. The real deal: flawed and human and decent and kind. When a monster wave sent him flying out of his bunk during a crucial run toward the end of the show’s fourth season, Phil cracked a few ribs.

  “I can’t breathe,” he kept saying (while smoking one cigarette after another).

  There he was, toe-to-toe against the big Bering Sea. He was in terrible pain, but with 34,000 pounds left to catch, he dragged himself back to the cockpit, where he started coughing up blood—a fact that he kept from his sons and most of his men.

  “Please don’t say anything to my kids,” he said to Todd Stanley—the cameraman who’d spent years filming Phil.

  “Why?” Todd asked.

  Pointing to the Bering Sea, Phil said, “Because I don’t want them thinking about anything else than that. Or one of them will get hurt.”

  Phil ended up finishing his northern set, then made an hour run to his western strings, where he told Todd, “It’s different when it’s yourself and you’re sitting here. Believe me, this isn’t like a crew member getting hurt. I’ve got an obligation to the people I work for. To these guys, their families. The whole ball of wax is riding on my shoulders.”

  Twenty-four hours after that, he finally called in to a hospital. “I can’t get in for a couple of days,” he said.

  By the time that he finally pulled into St. Paul with his men and their catch, he’d been in pain for sixty continuous hours. Down at the hospital, he was given a one-in-ten chance for survival. Along with the cracked ribs, he was diagnosed with a pulmonary embolism—a blood clot that had traveled up from his leg to his lungs. It should have killed him. I suppose you could argue it did, a few years later. The “Big C” didn’t get him. Neither did the Big Sea. But those “little c’s” he’d been puffing on since he was a kid hadn’t done him any favors.

  Anyway, back in 2008, Phil Harris recovered. He didn’t quit smoking. Maybe he couldn’t. But what he did do was continue to take care of his sons and his men. Steven Spielberg told David Zaslav, who told me, that the way Phil had acted after his injury was one of the bravest things Spielberg had seen. But the way I look at it is, Phil was just trying to get to the end of his story his way—and bringing his viewers along for the ride.

  He really was one hell of a captain.

  A TALE OF TWO PUPILS

  George Underwood was fifteen years old when he punched his handsome saxophone player. His motivation? An unforgivable display of skulduggery that simply could not be ignored. A completely unacceptable betrayal made worse by the fact that the handsome saxophone player in question was George Underwood’s best friend.

  Here’s what happened: In the spring of 1962, George and his best friend were pupils at the Bromley Technical High School for Boys. They played together in a band you’ve never heard of called George and the Dragons. The Dragons had real potential, though everyone agreed that George was the most likely member to find real fame. He had the looks for it, that’s for sure. George was also handsome, remarkably so, and bursting with charisma. His personality leapt off the stage, he had a strong voice, and his Elvis impersonation never failed to make the young girls swoon.

  Anyway, George had arranged for a date with Carol Goldsmith, the pretty schoolgirl he’d been eyeing all semester. But a few hours before they were supposed to meet down at the youth center, George’s saxophone player pulled him aside.

  “Hey, George, I just saw Carol down at the record store. She said to tell you she wouldn’t be able to make it this evening. Between you and me, I think she’s seeing someone else.”

  George was disappointed, obviously, but he appreciated the heads-up from his loyal bandmate. Future rock stars shouldn’t be stood up in public by pretty schoolgirls. They had images to protect. But in reality, it was Carol Goldsmith who wound up waiting for George Underwood that night. She waited for over an hour and probably would have waited longer if the handsome saxophone player hadn’t arrived in George’s place.

  “Hey, Carol! How’s it going?”

  “Oh,” Carol said, “I was just waiting for George. He was supposed to be here an hour ago.”

  The saxophone player assumed a pensive expression and sighed deeply.

  “Sorry, Carol. I saw George earlier today, and he told me he had other plans tonight. Between you and me, I think he’s seeing someone else.”

  Carol Goldsmith was disappointed, obviously, but she appreciated hearing the truth. She also appreciated the saxophone player’s sympathetic gaze.

  “Thank you for telling me,” said Carol. “By the way, you have pretty eyes.”

  The saxophone player smiled. “Thanks. Hey, you wanna go get some ice cream?”

  The next day at school, George learned of this treachery and reacted as any young man filled with testosterone and righteous indignation would. He confronted his traitorous bandmate, confirmed his duplicity, and delivered a roundhouse: a mighty blow that left his best friend flat on his back with a black eye and a swollen face.

  Actually, the fallout was worse than that. George Underwood’s temper earned him the contempt of everyone at Bromley Tech, including that of his teachers, his best friend’s parents, and Carol Goldsmith. Sucker-punching the saxophone player led to the demise of George and the Dragons, as well. Why? Because with that one blow, Geo
rge had forever changed his best friend’s appearance—and in the process, the appearance of countless magazine covers: Time, Esquire, GQ, People, Vanity Fair, and, of course, Rolling Stone.

  But all that would come later. On that particular day in 1962, George’s saxophone player was rushed to the hospital, where he remained for several weeks as doctors tried to correct the damage George had inflicted. Fortunately, they did not succeed. The official diagnosis was “anisocoria,” and after two surgeries, doctors said the damage was irreversible.

  George would live with the guilt for the rest of his life. But he would not be unforgiven. In fact, a few months later, George and his saxophone player wound up in another band you’ve never heard of: the Konrads. After the Konrads, they formed the Hooker Brothers—which you’ve probably never heard of either—and then the King Bees, which also might not ring any bells. Along the way, though, George came to realize that no matter what they called themselves, people were not coming to hear him sing; they were coming to see his deformed but still handsome saxophone player. The best friend whose face he had permanently altered.

  The King Bees went their separate ways, too. Most bands do, and George Underwood shifted his focus to painting and drawing. Not as glamorous, perhaps, as being a rock star, but one plays the cards one gets—and, all things considered, George had some pretty good cards. Today you can see his artwork all over the world, and on the covers of more than a few albums. Albums from bands that you probably have heard of: T. Rex, Procol Harum, Mott the Hoople, and the Fixx. But, of course, his most famous album covers are the ones he did for his old friend—who, sadly, no longer plays the saxophone or anything else for that matter.