by John Long
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.
PHOTO © ROBERT BROWN
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 landfall, 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 surfers 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
Anybody who had witnessed Darryl "Flea" Virostko riding Mavericks in the biggest, gnarliest conditions could see that he was a wild man in the water; one look at the leopard-spot dyed hair and Santa Cruz homeboy tats gave you an idea of how wild he was on land. Over the year prior to the events of this story, Virostko averaged a half-gallon of vodka a day. This massive consumption was made possible by the "sparks": smoking crystal methamphetamine four or five times daily, sometimes more. But until ace surf journalist Kimball Taylor broke pro surfing's longstanding code of silence with this unflinching Surfer magazine profile, the world had no idea just how wild-and ultimately how self-destructive-Flea's ride has been.
Thirty-seven-year-old big wave champion Darryl "Flea" Virostko and I stood on a cliff above the gray North Pacific. The wind howled.
The surf spot we'd come to check folded in upon itself far below. Flea unburied his golf bag from the bed of his Toyota Tundra. Barely two years old, the pickup belched white smoke, bled steering fluid, and ran unevenly on seven of its eight cylinders. The right-hand door and mirror were mangled from when Flea was driving wasted and side-swiped a tree. "Tow Fag" was etched on the windshield by Morro Bay groms unaware they slandered the current poster boy for the Eddie, the world's most prestigious paddle-in contest.
The truck's interior was brimming with remnants of his former three-bedroom house. No longer able to make his mortgage, he'd lost big by selling during a recession and paying back taxes but still stood to pocket a fraction of his principal. Waiting on that check was tough duty. Flea, his girlfriend, and their two dogs had spent time living out of the truck. They'd recently found a cabin in the hills above Santa Cruz, but they might be hiking in and out of there. Letters tossed on the floorboard of the Tundra threatened repossession.
We took turns driving balls into the wind. Flea knew the surf would be crap, yet activities were essential-hiking in the woods, building a dam in a creek bed, smashing golf balls into the seaanything to occupy his mind. There was surfing, too, but these days he might catch a wave or two, whereas in years past his sessions could stretch through night and day.
Three-time consecutive winner of the Mavericks big wave event, Flea was closing in on four months' sobriety in a twelvestep program. Hovering somewhere between steps 4 ("a searching and fearless moral inventory") and 5 ("admitting ... to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs"), Flea somehow remained buoyant. There were the darker moments, of course, and the just plain being-Flea moments-like rolling down the windows to blare "Eastside fags" and getting in the face
of a Steamer Lane surfer who'd been dropped in on by one of Flea's buddies and had the gall to raise his arms in protest. Despite "slips" of such public posturing, the candor with which he now framed his life was courageous to the point of endearing.
This was a mission. Rambling upcoast from Santa Cruz, Flea was determined to assemble his story and drop straight in on his fifth step-to get it all out and come clean. He'd been high for the last big chunk of his life, so the details and the sequence were fuzzy, but not the painful bottom line.
"My contracts were up," he said. "The recession hit. And I was, basically ... a drug addict."
Over the past year he'd averaged a half-gallon of vodka a day. First thing every morning, if he'd slept at all, was to grab a Gatorade, pour out half and top it off with vodka. His "little sipper" accompanied all his surf checks. This massive consumption was made possible by the "sparks": smoking crystal methamphetamine four or five times daily, sometimes more. On the morning of the '07-'08 Mavericks event, Flea hadn't slept a wink. Surfing high was nothing new, nor did it boost his game. He fell out in the first round.
During the paddle-out for this year's Mavericks opening ceremony, when asked by Jeff Clark to say something to celebrate the event, Flea said, "My name is Flea, and I'm an alcoholic." His battle with methamphetamine-a substance that's plagued an entire generation of Santa Cruz surfers-has remained the gorilla in the room for most of the past decade.
"It got dark up here. Dark, dark, dark. . . . It got grim," said former WCT competitor Adam Replogle. "The partying started in high school and continued on, until that substance hit."
That January afternoon, Flea and I visited another white rock cliff just down the coast, nicknamed "90 Degrees" because the track descending to the beach is vertical for over 100 feet. At the bottom of the goat trail is a mangle of steel, the only remains of a pier that serviced the nearby cement factory. Last year Flea was partying on the beach with other friends. In the early evening, while climbing the cliff trail with his dog, about two-thirds of the way up, in response to a friend yelling down from up top, Flea gazed upward, grew dizzy and blacked out.
Witnesses say his body completed a full backflip before striking dirt and stone. He eventually found himself sprawled on the metal leftover from the pier-60 feet below. His arm was shattered and his face cut up, blood streaming down in dark ribbons. Once he came to, he went to scale the cliff once more, but friends stopped him and called for a medevac. Flea recuperated in a nearby hospital for four days. "I was dead," he said. "I mean, I should have been."
When we visited the white cliff overlook on our upcoast tour, he pointed down at the ledge far below. I descended, expecting him to follow, but Flea Virostko wouldn't budge.
"So you're not coming down?" I asked.
"No way. I haven't been down since."
The cliff is impressively steep. It's difficult to imagine a human being surviving such a ragdoll fall to the gathering of steel below. I considered this drop in terms of Mavericks at its biggest. Perhaps Flea hadn't bailed from such altitude while paddle-in surfing, but he must have pitched from even greater heights while towing in. He soberly remembered the perils of his storied Mavericks career: "I know that every time I paddle out at Mavs, I'm going to get worked bad at least once. It's just part of the program. There are guys who won't face that fact, but they're fooling themselves."
Now recovering from his own addictions, Peter Mel recalled that when high on meth and surfing maxed-out Mavericks, he could take two-wave hold-downs, pop up, and never think through the baptism of death he'd just endured. Sober, he said, those holddowns "sit with you. They haunt you."
I looked up to Fleas head peaking over the cliff's edge and hollered, "You ever fallen from a wave at this height?"
"Yeah," he said, "I've probably bailed from this far at least."
Amazingly, Fleas fall was not his "rock bottom" moment. After the hospital stay he spent a couple of weeks "only drinking." Then he was back on the "program," a word that can mean a serious athletic regimen or a spell swilling hard liquor and binging on the meth pipe. In the cases of some of the world's most elite big wave surfers, the term meant both.
Despite the fallout from surfing massive waves while feeding addictions equally huge, "rock bottom" remains a fleeting experience. Seeking a contrast, I considered Fleas fleeting years of glory. Santa Cruz surfers are often late bloomers in the cash game. At twenty, after a disenchanting attempt to relocate to the North Shore, Flea secured his first paying endorsement deal as an aerial phenom. This was the early '90s, and the agreement paid $200 a month, a stipend he supplemented with work as an apprentice plumber. That same year, Vince Collier, a local charger who'd made inroads into professional surfing, began introducing young Santa Cruz rippers to the scene 58 miles north at Mavericks. Flea's performance surfing then merged with a rare fearlessness for the bigger realm, the optimum combination. "He wasn't afraid," said Hawaiian big wave vet Brock Little. "And he was super talented."
Collier can only be praised for introducing the best young surfers from Santa Cruz to the next big deal in surfing. Yet, Collier partied as hard as he surfed, which served as another kind of introduction for the areas youth. "There were two polar influences growing up in Santa Cruz," said Replogle. "Richard Schmidt, clean and sober. And then there was Vince Collier." Flea famously tells the story of his first go out at Mavs as a twenty-year-old, and the half tab of acid that he'd dropped an hour before. As the acid kicked in, Collier drove him up to Mavericks and ushered him into the lineup. In the early days, such a story only magnified Flea's reputation as a badass.
Peter Mel, who rose alongside Flea in the most important generation of big wave chargers since Pat Curren and Greg Noll, pointed to Fleas paddling ability as a prime factor in his success. Whatever the ingredients-boldness, rare athleticism, or paddling skillFlea sufficiently harnessed his talents to dominate in a lineup of committed surfers pushing the boundaries of big wave paddle surfing. He won the inaugural Mavericks event in 1999 (earning 98 of 100 points on a single ride) and backed it up with another victory in 2000, and when the contest failed to run a few years due to small surf, Flea returned in '04 to beat world champion Kelly Slater in the final for a third consecutive win. By comparison, no surfer has won the Eddie even twice. Financially and emotionally, Flea considered this the height of his career. Until late last year, these legendary performances buoyed his market value, and he pulled down ten to twelve grand a month in endorsement pay.
Eighteen years and a harrowing hellman career beyond his first session at Mavericks, much of that success seemed to have vanished through a glass pipe. After his hospital stay and return to drugs, Fleas broken arm failed to heal, and the arm went gimpy-a debilitating injury for a surfer known for his paddling prowess. By fall of '08, friends and family gathered for a surprise intervention. It wasn't the first one, but this time it stuck.
"What was Fleas bottom moment?" asked Mel. "Walking into a room and seeing all of those faces, that's what it was. Everyone's bottom occurs when you realize you're not just killing yourself, that you're affecting the people who love you-because the people who love you are the last ones to leave."
The night before committing to rehab, Flea smoked speed and drank through the wee hours. He emptied the tobacco from a pack of cigarettes, combined it with weed, and repacked the cigarettes to smuggle in. On arrival, he blew a .28 on the Breathalyzer, a sometimes-fatal blood alcohol count. Even though his girlfriend accompanied him, inside the facility Flea announced his presence with, "Where are all the bitches?" The staff pounced, quickly discovering the weed cigarettes. And because of his hammered state, they pushed a little red detox pill on him, chemically landing the high-flyer to the ground.
By January, more than one hundred days sober, filling out physically and surfing again, Flea appeared to be growing younger. He busied himself rebuilding a life, a big part of which was work on an ambitious new plan that just might set things right.
"Still," he said, "I wish
I would have felt like this ten years ago. I think there would have been a lot more success than there was."
The meth epidemic gained a hold on Santa Cruz County around 2002, and by 2005 more than half of the local sheriff's arrests were meth-related. A 2007 Santa Cruz Sentinel piece estimated that the epidemic still hadn't peaked. Housewives, people with day jobs, and teenagers were caught up in it. Although members of Santa Cruz's big wave community fit a sheriff's study of dominant users-male, Caucasian, over twenty-five-as professional athletes at least midway through their careers (supported by contracts largely dependent on their public images), the decision to begin using made no sense.
"Bottom line, doing drugs was just fun and acceptable among my friends," Flea said.
"You add what we were doing [surfing big waves] on top of that, and we were high-lit up like marlins on a double shot," said Mel, two years sober at the start of the year.
Flea and Mel had shared nearly everything-from doing solitary go-outs at Mavs in which they traded bombs, spun under lips, and pushed the sport further in singular rides to chasing the raucous surf party into addiction. More than once they ended up surfing giant waves while high. "Fuckin' crazy," Mel admitted, his face in his hands.
"We were a peer group. We all pushed each other in whatever we did," he said. "We spent a lot of time together, surfed every session together, called each other every morning. Who got the best barrel? Did the biggest air? Who's partying the hardest? We were pushing each other, but we weren't helping each other. We partied, and it seemed innocent at the time. But it got out of hand, and then some drugs came out that took a hold of us. The drugs that brought me to my knees are the same drugs that brought Flea to his knees. It just took him a little longer to figure it out."