by Chris Dixon
This idea was raised most recently in a spring 2011 story in Surfer’s Journal called “Death Trip” by former Surfer editor Brad Melekian. In it, Matt Warshaw, a former professional Surfer and the author of The History of Surfing, is quoted as saying: “Surfers, when you think about it, have always had a lot invested in the idea that what they were doing was deadly. In reality it’s not that deadly at all.” Without question, big wave surfing, as a sport, enjoys thinking of itself in such life-and-death terms; this helps burnish its heroic profile. Yet I respectfully disagree with the implication that, beneath the bluster, big wave surfing is somehow actually safe, or at least inherently safer than other extreme sports. Despite what the statistics say, the constant threat of dying is very real.
In addition, towsurfing with a Jet Ski has blurred the once-fundamental distinction between surfing and other motorized or gear-intensive sports. Obviously, in a sport like motocross, the machine is the sport, and the machine itself is what’s most likely to lead to your shattered body or death. In big wave surfing, the Jet Ski might hurt you, if it runs you over, but its main function is to throw you into the most dangerous waves possible. The Jet Ski is also a rescue vehicle that can yank you out of harm’s way, but if you wipe out and are held down, you still have to reach the water’s surface on your own. If you hit a reef and get knocked out or are stuffed beneath a rock, even a life vest won’t do you any good. And a life vest only increases a margin of safety, anyway. Typically, only towsurfers wear them at all—since paddle surfers find they make it too difficult to paddle or dive under a wave—and a big wave, a really big wave, can submerge even a life-jacketed Surfer for minutes at a time. In short, even with every safety measure in place, a Surfer can still easily drown. And in my mind, short of being burned alive, drowning in big waves is about the scariest thing that can happen to a person.
In fact, to me, this fear is what sets big wave surfing apart and makes the difference. In terms of fatalities, I believe the statistical discrepancy has less to do with the sport’s actual level of danger than with its inherently terrifying nature. Of course, motocross riders and mountain climbers have their moments of terror, but the very ability to surf is predicated on learning how to cope with the simple, primal fear of suffocation—of drowning. The central skill sets of surfing, those basics you need to even catch a wave and stand on a surfboard in moving water, take years to master, and they include countless near-death lessons along the way to scare you straight. Initially, even the least-critical conditions humble the novice surfer, and through these experiences he or she develops the astonishing myriad of physical and neural strengths necessary to negotiate a bigger wave. But as important, this incremental skill-building, and the accompanying brushes with mortality, usually leads most surfers to conclude that they don’t need the heaviest waves to be happy. This fact alone keeps most surfers alive. But then for those surfers who continue into larger and larger waves, they steadily learn how to control their emotions and survive what would otherwise kill them if they panicked.
Let’s look at it this way. Say you’ve been surfing hard for better than a decade. From Santa Cruz to Sunset Beach, you’ve challenged—and been occasionally soundly beaten by—sizable waves, working you’re way up from knee-high peelers to solid 8- to 10-foot, or what most surfers would call double-overhead (a wave twice as tall from crest to trough as the average six-foot-tall surfer). You think, maybe, you’re ready to give Maverick’s a try—on a very small day. Of course, small at Maverick’s is relative. A wave has to be 12, 15 feet—almost triple overhead—to even break. Still, when a mid-period northwest swell hits the California buoy, you swaddle yourself in neoprene and wax up beneath the dramatic headland at Pillar Point. The paddle is long and spooky, but deceptively easy, and soon you find yourself sitting just outside a small, tightly clustered pack of laughing, trash-talking Maverick’s regulars. Some of the best big wave surfers alive are taking drops on waves 15, maybe 20 feet high. Among them are Jeff Clark, Mike Parsons, Peter Mel, Ken “Skindog” Collins, Darryl “Flea” Virostko, Greg and Rusty Long, and Evan Slater.
You spend half an hour in deep water off to the side, just watching, sizing up the waves. Then another set appears, and you take a position slightly to the inside and right of the crew. You hope to ride one of the smallest waves. Just take off on the shoulder. Soon enough, such a wave comes and the regulars let it pass. You line up and dig with all your might as it swells beneath you, but you’ve never felt a swell move so fast or with such power. The wave rolls past you, preventing you from catching it but allowing you to narrowly dive off the back. You kick and stroke backward as hard as you can to avoid being launched over in the wave’s pitching lip—a narrow escape. Your board, though, is carried over the falls, giving your ankle leash a long stretch and your knee a solid yank. You feel it pop, but you’re okay; you don’t get sucked over and into the white water. That was fricking scary.
Just as you finish reeling in your board, whistles come from the pack. A much bigger, more westerly set is stacking up. It loads up farther along the more southerly edge of the reef, and there’s no way you’ll escape it. The veterans dig confidently for the horizon, and you’re granted a filmmaker’s view as Peter Mel makes a picture-perfect drop down the first wave. It then falls on you—a two-and-a-half-story wall of liquid bricks that nearly rips your limbs from their sockets and sends you churning beneath black foam. Your neoprene hood is blown off, inviting the frosty, forty-nine-degree water to squeeze your skull like a vice of solid ice. The feeling is utter powerlessness and stark, airless terror—a come-to-Jesus specter that makes you realize you know nothing about the ocean or surfing and, my God, your children—what were you thinking? You pray you’ll be able to reach the beach and kiss the sand and your wonderful, beautiful wife and kids again. If God will grant that, you’ll never do anything so stupid again.
This is precisely why only the most practiced or hell bent repeatedly head out into truly giant surf, and why once out there, they tend to survive. The typical Surfer at Maverick’s possesses the breath-holding ability of an apnea diver, the flexibility and focus of a yogi, the strength and endurance of an ironman, and the guts of a gladiator. In short, the lineups have already been strained through a .5-micron human filter. Everybody out there knows, once you paddle for any wave and get caught inside and pushed down deep, you can’t rely on a Jet Ski to save you. As you progress in surfing little by little, you decide your limit, which for 99 percent of surfers is something far less lethal than a smallish day at Maverick’s.
In this hypothetical scenario, you are very lucky to surface with little more than shattered pride and a tweaked knee, and you know it. In big waves, every hold down can simply become a fight for your life. Water is of course softer than rock, dirt, or trees, but when you fall from four stories up on a wave, you might as well be landing on cement. That’s why it still remains something of a mystery even to big wave surfers, why more don’t die or become critically injured—because when things do go wrong in giant surf, they tend to do so in a dramatic and awful fashion: faces peeled off on coral outcroppings, spines snapped, bones blasted through skin, muscles hammered into jelly, eardrums bowed inward until they burst. Medium-size Maverick’s has nearly torn off Evan Slater’s right leg, and it once pretzeled big Peter Mel so hard that his feet slapped the back of his head. The simple impact of a wave in 1997 left Ken “Skindog” Collins certain that he’d broken his back. In 1994, a simple, straight-up Maverick’s wave held down and almost simultaneously drowned Mike Parsons and Brock Little. Moments later, of course, it did drown Mark Foo.
So what is it that drives that 1 percent of surfers to willingly and regularly risk life and limb, whether aided by a Jet Ski or not? Why is it, not merely that they do it once or twice, but that they are so often driven to keep surfing big waves that regularly subject them to hold-downs that would scar most people for life?
Of all big wave surfers, Mark Foo was a man who both acknowledged and embraced the dead
ly potential of big waves, and volumes have been written and hypothesized about his death. Surprisingly, though, little of that story has focused on the guy who had the very last living contact with him. When Mike Parsons was drowning at Maverick’s, he assumed he’d been bouncing off Brock Little; only afterward did he realize that Little was nowhere near him, and the person he met trapped on the seafloor was Mark Foo. In the years after Foo’s death, Mike Parsons would go on to earn two XXL awards (the Oscars of the big wave set), two big wave world records (both set at the Cortes Bank), and become the subject of the most downloaded surf video on the Internet. Despite this, most folks outside of surfing don’t even know who the hell Mike Parsons is. He has never garnered a feature on 60 Minutes or graced the cover of Outside, National Geographic, Details, Men’s Journal, or any other mass-market magazine that purports to cover the lives of hard-core adventurers. That’s a shame, really. Parsons is surely among the most fanatical big wave hunters the world has ever seen, and to know him is also to gain an insight into the obsession that drives the sport. The complete portrait of this obsession, though, also includes the crew with whom Parsons shared his earliest Cortes Bank encounters: in particular, his former protégé Chris Mauro, former rival Brad Gerlach, and friends “Skindog”Collins, Peter Mel, and Evan Slater. To understand the addiction to big wave surfing is to know who these surfers were before the death of Mark Foo, and who they have become—or not become—since.
I use the word addiction deliberately. The simplistic view writes off what Parsons and his friends do as somehow optional or voluntary—people assume that what they do is somehow chosen. This leads many to conclude that big wave surfers are either outright crazy or utterly selfish and self-destructive. The truth seems to actually be anything but. Mike Parsons and his friends are prisoners. They just don’t seem to know it.
One fine day in 1973, Robert Parsons was alarmed to find his seven-year-old son perched on a high cliff near their home above Laguna’s Three Arch Bay in Southern California. “What are you doing up there,” he asked young Mike.
“I wanna know what it would be like to take off on a wave at Waimea Bay,” was the reply.
Bob wasn’t terribly surprised. When Mike was three, he knocked out a tooth downhill skateboarding. A few months later, he learned to ride a bike without training wheels. When Mike was four, Bob paddled him into his first waves at San Onofre, and by seven, Mike had won his first contest. “He had such athletic ability and was just so determined from an early age,” says his mother, Jodi.
Mike ran, leaped, and fell with seemingly reckless abandon. He excelled at soccer and little league baseball, and when his parents took him skiing, he would find the best guy on the mountain and follow him down like a kamikaze pilot. But Bob and Jodi soon noticed an incongruity in their little hellman. Mike may have been nearly impossible to track, but he was well-behaved and seemed to generally abide by his parents—sometimes to a fault. One day at Big Bear Mountain, Bob sent his tyke up the rope tow with the instructions, “Don’t let go.” Near the top of the hill, a sharp-eyed ski patroller realized that Mike was moments from having his hands run through the massive pulley at the end of the line. “I said, ‘Mike, you’d have gone through that and crushed your hands.’” Bob recalls. “He said, ‘Dad, you told me to hang on—so I did.’”
When Mike was six, his family moved to Three Arch Bay. Mike’s boyhood home is a small, one-story shake-shingled cottage, built during an era when Laguna was a far less expensive community of artists, hippies, and cosmically tuned wave riders. It’s set just off the Pacific Coast Highway above a thin crescent of desert chaparral, palm trees, blond sand, and azure sea. The waves aren’t world class, but they’re punchy, fast, and perfectly suited to high-performance wave riding. When the swells get big, the outside peak can be downright intimidating. “It was the ultimate spot to grow up,” says Mike. “Almost surreal. It’s hard to believe I had such a setup as a kid. It was the kind of place where parents would just let the kids go, and you could just run around all day and night. When the waves were good, there would only be three, four, maybe five of us out. And in the winter, when it got big, I was always the ringleader—even from an early age.”
During these years, a glitch was revealed in Mike’s auditory processing that made it initially very difficult for him to learn to read. He struggled through elementary school and was heckled even by his friends. He was eventually enrolled in a visual learning program at a school an hour away—a place he hated. Yet he rarely missed a day, and chose instead to channel his anger and embarrassed frustration into bravery and athleticism. “I wanted to do something no one else could,” he says. “It was like, people can say what they want about me, but I can prove that I’m better at something, too—I’m braver than they are. I’d skateboard the highest hill, go the fastest, and crash the hardest. When I started surfing, I wanted the wave of the day. I would be pissed off and completely distraught if someone caught a bigger wave than me.”
In the ensuing years, Mike would go on to enter arguably more surf contests than any person in history, and he has never missed a roll call for a heat. It’s also likely that no father ever watched his son compete more. Bob Parsons developed a reputation among Mike’s friends as a fervent surf soccer dad. When I ask about it, Jodi points out that Bob was also a fanatical mountaineer and highly competitive volleyballer. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she says with a laugh. Then she pauses. “Bob was intense. He’d get mad at the judges. If another Surfer cut Mike off, he’d get mad. God was he competitive.”
Bob admits he could, perhaps, go a bit too far, yet Mike insists that his dad only truly pissed him off once. It was during the 1986 Sunset Beach World Cup—one of the most prestigious events in surfing. Mike was a twenty-year-old pro who had the made the finals alongside powerhouses Hans Hedemann, Mark “Occy” Occhilupo, and Sunny Garcia.
“They were calling the finalists to come up onstage,” Mike says. “Me, Hans, and Sunny were there. But Occy hadn’t shown up. Dad saw Occy kind of run off around a house. I think he was smoking some weed or something.” Parsons laughs heartily and continues, “My dad went up to him and made a comment—something like, ‘It was good of you to finally show up.’ Occy starts yelling at my dad. Then he comes over to me and says”—Mike uncorks a pitch-perfect imitation of Occhilupo’s boyish Australian accent—”‘Hey mate, your dad said this and that. I’m going to fight him after the final.’ I was like, ‘Whatever’s going on with you and my dad is between you guys.’ He’s yelling the whole time. I got third, and I was so mad at my dad that I said, ‘You’re never going to come to another contest.’ My dad was so upset. He went to Occy’s house that night—knocked on his door and says, ‘I owe you an apology. I want my son to win so bad, I was out of line.’ Then Occ was like, hugging him and saying, ‘Aww mate, I love my parents, too. They’re just as into my surfing.’ From then on, he and Occ totally hit it off. He was definitely the dad who wanted me to do well.”
“That was probably the stupidest thing I ever did,” says Bob. “But Mike’s right. I was just so interested in seeing him do well.”
By age twelve, Mike was the unofficial leader and drill sergeant of a crew of young Three Arch Bay rippers. A young disciple named Chris Mauro became his most ardent and terrified disciple.
On a day when Chris’s parents might think he was at the Parsons’s house, he would be in Santa Cruz or Ventura at a contest. “It’s 12 feet and I’m this little guy in the junior’s division trying to sleep with the gearshift in my back—just scared shitless,” Mauro says. “Mike would battle this guy from Ventura named Barry Wilson to see who could get in the water earlier. He’d be like, ‘Come on you little fucker, I don’t want Barry to beat us.’ When we’d go to Trestles, I’d have to show up on the dark front porch of his house at 4 A.M. Freezing my ass off. But if you were five minutes late, you’d miss the bus and you’d be hearing about it. “
Mike’s posse held mock contests, pretending to be surfers like
Simon Anderson, Rabbit Bartholomew, and Shaun Tomson. Mike named his dog Shaun. He sent his friends fake letters, saying that Tomson’s nascent surf company, Instinct, wanted to sponsor them. At some point, for no apparent reason, Mike’s friends started calling him “Parsnips,” a moniker eventually shortened to “Snips.”
Snips’s surf heroes didn’t smoke pot or drink—at least so far as he knew—so he concluded that he would live the same way. He became surfing’s answer to Richie Cunningham—with his freckled Irish complexion, closely cut red hair, and skinny build, he even looked like a young Ron Howard. “My dad just drilled it into me when I was young—don’t take things from strangers, and drugs will take away from your dreams. I don’t think I was a total Goody Two-shoes. I mean, I tried smoking weed once or twice, but I was like, ‘What is this? This is just going to get in the way of my deal.’ I chose my path. I wanted to be the best Surfer in the world.”
Mike made his first North Shore pilgrimage at thirteen. If his fearlessness scared the hell out of Bob, his judgment left his dad somewhat reassured. Walking from the water after a session at big Sunset, a burly Hawaiian relieved Mike of his board, calling it “an aloha tax.” Mike possesses what Bob calls “a high strength-to-weight ratio.” A scrap was debated, but Mike wisely recognized he might invite a world more trouble. “Mike was daring,” says Bob, “but he wasn’t foolish.”
Bob financed Mike’s second competitive journey to Hawaii with a second mortgage on the house. This was when Mike’s surfing began to terrify Jodi. “The first time I went to Pipeline, here comes Mike walking up the beach with his surfboard in two parts,” she says. “I asked him, ‘If it did that to the surfboard, what did it do you to you?’ He just said, ‘I’m fine, Mom.’”