Ghost Wave

by Chris Dixon

  Hawaii increased Mike’s bravery fivefold, and Chris Mauro suffered for it. One day Mike egged the grommet to the outside at Three Arch Bay on a massive wintertime swell. Petrified over paddling in through the slabbing shorebreak, Mauro started crying. One of the surfers, maybe even Mike, called him ‘sis’ for sissy. The name stuck. “Then I felt really bad for him,” says Mike. “He was my little right-hand man. I’d tell him what to do and he’d do it. Chris just had so much talent. He was a real natural. I wanted to encourage him like my dad did for me. So I basically put him on my shoulders and said, ‘If you want this surfing thing, you can do it. I paid for his meals—every meal he ate—and even entered him in contests when he couldn’t afford it.”

  Chris Mauro eventually followed Parsons to Hawaii with the National Scholastic Surfing Association’s (NSSA) National Team. Parsons would order the bug-eyed grom out in the predawn darkness before either Surfer even knew how big it was. He loaned Mauro brand-new boards and ferocious waves broke two in one day. Mauro also worked as Mike’s board caddy during the World Cup contest at Sunset Beach—ferrying out a new stick when Mike snapped one. “I was this little kid,” Mauro says. “I’d take out a board and have to swim in—and it was massive. When Randy Rarick, the contest organizer, spotted me, he goes, ‘That little kid can’t be your caddy!’ We stayed with Peter McGonagle one time—this hard-core San Clemente guy. Back then an 8-foot board was considered a big rhino chaser. Peter had this 10-foot 6-inch gun. I was like, ‘Holy shit, what is that for?’ He looked at me like I was crazy and said, ‘Dude, it’s for outer reefs.’ Those are the guys Mike surrounded himself with. It was heavy.”

  It was around this time that a cocky, witty, handsome, and supremely talented kid named Brad Gerlach joined the National Team. Mike and Brad soon developed an interpersonal rivalry that would define their surfing careers. If you had told Mike that this brash, noisy punk would one day become his best friend and guardian angel, he would have laughed out loud.

  In some ways, Brad Gerlach’s (pronounced gerlock) Aquaman future was preordained. Gerlach was born in 1965 to a stunning water ballerina, while his father, Joe, was a Hungarian high diver who had finished fourth in the 1956 Olympics. After defecting to the United States in the wake of a bloody Hungarian revolt, “Jumpin’ Joe” Gerlach earned a pair of collegiate national championships. He then revolutionized the sport of pole vaulting by inventing a thick series of pads about the size of a Chevy Nova for jumpers to land on. Eventually, he dove into a livelihood by performing spectacular leaps onto these pads from terrifying heights. On the day before he was to be wed, a slight aerial miscalculation shattered his facial bones like an eggshell. “I look much better with this beard,” Joe says today with a laugh.

  One of Joe’s biggest leaps of faith came in 1971 during halftime of a Lions-Eagles football game, an event described thusly by Sports Illustrated writer Sandy Treadway:

  A Sunday night national television audience estimated at 30 million saw a giant red, white, and blue balloon ascend 80 feet above the 50-yard line. A slight man dressed in a white leather jump suit stood precariously on a wooden plank attached to the gondola and directed the placement of a foam rubber mattress—his landing pad. After several minutes of tension-building waving, the man appeared satisfied that the sponge was properly aligned and, at last, he raised his arms and stood on his toes. Helmetless, he left the plank in a swan dive and fell toward the field, landing on his back directly on target. He lay motionless for a moment, “checking myself out, making sure I’m alive.”

  Among those watching on television were Joe’s wife Cheryl and their 5-year-old son Bradley, who asked, ‘Is Daddy dead?’”

  To Bradley, Dad was a true Superman, but he was also gone a lot. If Joe landed, say, a marquee job in Vegas, the family sometimes went along, yet by the time Brad turned seven, the long absences and travel took their toll, and Joe and Cheryl split. Brad became a troublemaking latchkey kid in an Encinitas duplex. He sees some parallels of his early life to that of Laird Hamilton, whose adoptive dad, Bill Hamilton, was a larger-than-life surf hero also AWOL during stretches of his childhood. Brad says he felt “definitely a lot of pride in my dad. But also a lot of anger that he wasn’t around and wasn’t paying me much attention. I know Laird got in a lot of fights when he was younger. He probably could have used a little more attention from his dad, too.”

  Three years later, Brad found an orphaned surfboard on the beach with a big picture of Jesus laminated beneath the fiberglass. He quickly learned to walk on water and was soon emulating the moves of local pro John Glomb. One day Brad paddled over to a budding amateur, who was his elder by a couple of years. “Hey, hey, hey, are you sponsored by those guys?” he asked, pointing at the logos on Jeff Novak’s board. “Umm, what do they give you? Hey, you can come down and surf and stay at my house if you want to. My mom’s always gone.”

  Novak was bemused that this brash little ten-year-old kid would paddle over to a complete stranger without fear of being insulted—or punched. “I’m thinking who is this kid?” Novak laughs.

  Before long, Jeff Novak and buddy Ted Robinson were hitching rides down to Encinitas to stay with Brad. Cheryl worked long hours, but when she was around, there was a lot of laughter. “She was just, just stunningly beautiful,” Novak says. “You know, back then we’re kids, and his mom was hot. She was so cool and just really enjoyed talking to Brad and his friends.”

  Brad fed off Novak’s experience, but awe at his dad’s wildly unorthodox career mingled with resentment over his absences also pushed him to compete. “That anger fueled my drive,” Brad says. “I wanted to be the best guy surfing.”

  Novak and Brad pushed one another hard, and Brad mapped out his plan by age thirteen: compete in the NSSA, then the Professional Surfing Association of America (PSAA)—a sort of stepping stone to the big leagues—and then graduate to the Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) World Tour. His obsession bore early fruit when he was signed to John Glomb’s Nectar surfboards team at age fourteen—a heavy accomplishment.

  A few years earlier, in the winter of 1976 when Brad was eleven, Joe Gerlach shared a Chicago bill with Evel Knievel—a show neither would perform. On the same day that Joe’s plane crashed into a snow bank on its final approach to Chicago, Knievel crashed during a practice attempt to jump over a tank of live sharks, breaking both arms and taking out the eye of an ABC cameraman. Both hellmen took the day as a sign and quit jumping forever. Knieval retired rich. Joe bought an inflatable dome and a machine that projected a mechanized laser light show to Pink Floyd songs and took the show on the road.

  After that, Brad began to travel with his dad during the summers, working as a carny. He visited towns in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Arizona that few Southern California kids ever see. He smoked joints, drank beer, and performed grand swan dives into huge piles of dad’s beanbag jump cushions. When he wasn’t with his dad, Brad and Novak tooled up and down the California coast, with a far-too-young Gerlach tumbling out of Jeff’s VW camper beneath a halo of smoke. “But no matter how hard we partied, we were always up first thing the next morning surfing,” says Novak.

  Brad increasingly found nothing but trouble in Encinitas and moved to Huntington Beach with Joe when he was fifteen. “Boy, he used to get in fights all the time,” says Joe. “One time he took my Leica camera down to the beach and these guys wanted to take it from him. He later said to me, ‘I just can’t imagine what you would have said if I’d lost your camera.’ So he went to do this jiujitsu kind of thing in front of them, and they backed off. I mean, he just made that shit up.”

  A few months later, Brad came home one afternoon particularly frustrated after losing a revered competition called the Katin to guys he knew he could outsurf. “I’m gonna fucking quit,” he told his dad.

  Joe didn’t know jack about surfing, but he possessed an Olympian’s athletic instincts. He grabbed a pair of binoculars and joined Brad on the beach. “We had so many funny arguments,” says Brad.
“He’d be like, ‘Your butt’s all over the place.’ I’m like, ‘You don’t even fuckin’ surf!’ Then we got a video camera, and I was like, ‘Oh, I see what you’re saying.’ He was hands-on, watching me surf, where I was breaking my line, telling me not to turn so hard when you don’t have enough speed. He wanted my surfing to be relaxed and have a beautiful look. Surfing’s an aesthetic. If you look good, you score well. We watched ice skating, gymnastics, diving. He’d go to the beach with me every day, twice a day. He’d come to every contest. We’d talk about me and we’d talk about surfing. I really needed that because I was really learning about myself. He was the only one who wanted to talk to me more about my surfing than I did. He became my best friend.”

  When Gerlach was inevitably invited to join the NSSA National Team, he and Snips were arguably the two most driven and talented guys on the roster. They were also the most different.

  “I’d just see him and be like Parsons,” Gerlach hisses. “Like this guy’s really going to beat me. He was the model team rider, tucked his sweatpants into his Ugg boots, and he’d have his wetsuit on and there’s just not a drop of water out of place.

  “He’d look over at me in exactly the same way. ‘Gerlach. What a disheveled… Probably didn’t even come down to the beach with wax on his board. There’s no way I’m letting this guy beat me.’”

  Parsons agrees, musing, “There was no one I wanted to beat more.”

  Joe wanted Brad’s coaches, Ian Cairns and Peter Townend, to take a more technical approach, and he didn’t mind sharing with Brad that he disagreed with their methods. This stoked Brad into defiance that landed him regular NSSA suspensions. Temperamentally, father and son were not so far apart. “I was very arrogant,” admits Joe.

  Brad turned pro at nineteen, followed shortly by Parsons—each was paid a thousand dollars a month by the nascent Association of Surfing Professionals. Surf magazines of the day hyped duals between Gary “Kong” Elkerton, Tommy Curren, and Mark Occhilupo, but they didn’t pick up on Mike and Brad’s rivalry. Indeed, neither Surfer even realized how much one despised the other till much later on. Yet Mike and Brad both feel that their quiet rivalry was actually the most intense—because it revolved around a validation of their very identities.

  Parsons first served notice in Australia, taking second to eventual world champ Curren at Burleigh Heads. Then, in one of the biggest upsets in history to that time, Gerlach defeated reigning world champion Tom Carroll at the Stubbies Pro in Oceanside, California. Surfer’s prophetic scribe Derek Hynd wrote: “In that instant, watching a young Surfer in form, words from old British punks came forth: the next generation; a revelation.”

  Gerlach ate up the hype and gave hilarious interviews in return. Here is a typical response in a Surfer profile.

  What would a dream date with Brad Gerlach be?

  Well, I think it would start out with just driving somewhere really fast. Me and my date, in my new car. As fast as it could go, like 140 or 150. Headed for…I don’t know…Headed for the desert. To some kind of small nightclub, nothing like hip or trendy. And there’s all kinds of people there, warm people—people who don’t know me… It’s just really friendly, it’s totally happening, and as soon as we get out of the car, the first person we see yells out, “Alright! How you doing?” And from that point on, we’re on a roll.

  …And then—shit, I don’t know. It’s hard for me to plan these things, they just happen. No, okay, then we’d meet someone there, at the club, and they’d suggest something to do and a group of us we would be all, “Yeah! Let’s do it!” And we’re off. Like we’d go slide down a hill on a big piece of cardboard or something.

  So we’re doing this and we’re doing that…It’s constant movement. We’d drive to Vegas. We’d gamble a bit and win a lot of money. We’re on a roll. We’d get married, then shine it on a couple hours later. Just for a joke.

  Then we’d buy skis and equipment and go to Aspen for a couple days, staying in a cabin up on a hill. And the only thing in the living room is a fireplace and a killer stereo. Like a $10,000 stereo system. Music’s key. And then we’d fly to Key West to get a tan.

  My dream date could actually go on for months.

  Gerlach laughs and recalls something he recently told Chris Mauro. “If I met me at nineteen today, I would kick my ass.”

  During their days in the ASP, Gerlach and Jeff Novak reveled in their exotic travels and were baffled at the apparent lack of interest in foreign cultures displayed by some of their peers—notably Parsons. Mike pleads guilty. He and Mauro could be driving through the most bucolic slice of French countryside, but his head was buried in a heat sheet. “I could be in a country where I’d never even been before, and I barely even noticed I was there,” Parsons says. “All I noticed was the beach and the waves and how to win my heat. I had that crazy, like, single focus.”

  You can see Parsons’s nature at work still today—all you have to do is paddle out with him. Not too long ago, I marveled as he surfed at Upper Trestles with his best friend Pat O’Connell, a star of Bruce Brown’s film Endless Summer II. Not only were they dissecting the velvety righthanders, but they seemed to be holding an impromptu contest—critiquing and scoring one another’s rides. Parsons admits, “That’s totally what we were doing. I don’t want my friend to outsurf me—it’s always competitive. I know that sounds weird because sometimes you’re totally enjoying yourself—and sometimes, well, sometimes you’re kind of not. Especially on some of these big wave deals. But when you’re around your friends and guys who surf well, you don’t want to be a kook or lose your edge. If you feel like you’re slipping, even in little waves, it’s the worst feeling. That’s kind of my biggest fear in life—not being able to surf at the highest level. That’s just a horrible thought.”

  In this way, Gerlach and Parsons were true opposites. “I always wanted to win—bad,” Gerlach says. “But Jeff and I also wanted to experience France, for example—to drink wine and eat croissants, try the cheeses, and learn the language. We didn’t go to college, so we were out there just getting educated on, say, Bastille Day. What the hell is Bastille Day? Well, it’s obviously a big deal. They’re blowing shit up and all the French girls are happy. What’s to all this? I wanted to stay with French families—study the way they went about eating. It’s such a great way to get to know people—eating, sharing—breaking bread. I’d stay up with families who barely spoke English telling stories, and it would mostly be charades. We just had amazing times.”

  While Gerlach was making everyone laugh with charades, Parsons developed an ability to disarm his competitors with charm while plunging in the competitive knife. He was so damned nice, and possessed such a savant’s devotion to surfing, that he became one of the most popular guys on the tour. When an Australian surf magazine dared question whether Parsons was a future world champion, the normally nationalistic Aussie pros threatened the writer’s life. “They were like, ‘Fuck you, dude’—totally protective of him,” Mauro says. “That’s in part because Mike was never like Ken Bradshaw, Mark Foo, Brad Gerlach, or any of these guys who promoted themselves. He didn’t and doesn’t claim anything. He earns respect by competing and being out there every day. If he sees someone already getting back to their car after surfing and it’s 6:30 in the morning, that to Mike is the best Surfer in the world—because he’s the most committed.”

  Yet it was that commitment to surf and nothing else that eventually drove Mauro and Parsons apart. Early in what Mauro calls his “flash-in-the-pan surfing career,” he defeated Parsons in Fiji. There, he began to see his longtime mentor and drill sergeant as an equal. He bristled when Parsons treated him like a little brother, and he quickly tired of the endless routine of airplanes, cheap hotels, and nonstop competitions that fueled Parsons’s fire. “He’d be like, ‘I’m driving the rental car,’” Mauro says. “But I’d paid as much for the car as him. I wasn’t his sidekick anymore. I’ve analyzed our thing, and he and I laugh about it today. He was so singularly obse
ssed with surfing—getting his fix—and he’s still that way. Mike hitches himself to the people who are as hooked as he is. He’s obsessive-compulsive, and surfing is his biggest vice.”

  Mauro found his limits, and happily so, both as a competitive athlete and a big wave surfer. He was and has remained a committed surfer, but he reached a point where he wanted to move on, maybe take a stab at writing (which would eventually lead to an editorship at Surfer). This, of course, led to the end of the “Sis” and “Snips” surfing partnership, but they remain close friends.

  Yet really, Parsons’s focus was shifting, too. In a lengthy 1989 Surfer profile, Mike admitted that competition wasn’t “everything.” If I find myself getting disappointed with all the travel and contests—which I definitely do now and then—something right always seems to happen. Like, I’ll take three days off in South Africa and get 8-foot Jeffreys Bay. You get a fix like that, you know you’re on the right track—in life, I mean. And that’s not a competitive thing.”

  Parsons had climbed well into the Top 16 on the ASP World Tour, but rarely actually won a contest. In the ASP’s more typical small wave competitions, he was too calculating, too precise. He performed best in big wave contests, where he didn’t have to think too much. Eventually, eleven months a year on the road took such a toll that even the competitive machine was worn down. Parsons wanted to focus on surfing big waves and competing closer to home. He joined the U.S.-based PSAA Bud Tour in 1991—a contest circuit ironically held at mostly small wave venues—and won the whole damn thing.

  The same year, Brad Gerlach finished second in the world to Aussie Damien Hardman. Many felt Gerlach was robbed. Gerlach had been featured on a few MTV shows—where his looks and hilarious, chatty style suited the network perfectly. He wanted to set off in other direction—–film, music, a move to LA. Jeff Novak thought he was crazy. “We took a long walk,” Novak recalls. “I said, Brad, it’s great you have those aspirations, but you’re second in the world. I did all I could to talk him out of it, but he was like, ‘No, I’ve already made up my mind.’”