by John Long
But after the initial once-over, she says something I know is well rehearsed. It would have to be, from any mom who's lost steep over her child surfing big waves. She speaks up, as if a higher volume will muffle the tears forming in her eyes.
"Well, we're just going to have to get you better so you can be out there again soon."
We'll see.
One of the more flamboyant of the modern big wave riders, Hawaii's Garrett McNamara (Gmac) isn't shy, not when it comes to riding five-story waves and certainly not when it comes to making sure the rest of the world sees him doing it. But this didn't make Kimball Taylor's job any easier when penning this Gmac profile, having to sift the profound from the promo. Taylor rose to the occasion, revealing a surprising complexity behind the daredevil's bravado.
On October 2, 1978, twelve-year-old Garrett McNamara and his nine-year-old brother Liam arrived on the North Shore of Oahu. As if stepping out of the Hawaiian vacation special of a Partridge Family episode, the boys wore matching white pants and sharp white '70s collared shirts brought together under vibrant orange velvet vests. The boys came in tow to their footloose mother Malia and a long-forgotten musician boyfriend. Malia McNamara had actually made the boys' outfits for the occasion. This arrival was important, even though it represented only one of many new starts. So far the unit had bounced from Massachusetts to California, Mount Shasta to Berkeley, Mexico to Belize-and finally Sonoma County, where the McNamaras developed an impromptu sort of commune. But after Malia spent time at another commune in Kauai's Kalalau Valley, where she earned fame as a cook for the eighty or so semiclothed inhabitants of the valley, she returned to California, collected Garrett and Liam, and made for the Islands.
"We were supposed to go to Kauai and run around naked," Garrett remembered.
Yet, on a fateful North Shore stopover, the family ended up finding an apartment in a corner of Waialua nicknamed "Haole Camp." The boyfriend soon split for greener musical pastures. And the idyll of a '70s Kauai existence quickly faded into islandstyle poverty on what was fast becoming surfing's most important stretch of coast. The McNamaras, of course, held no conception of what that would mean to them or their new home. "'They're surfing,"' Garrett remembered his mother offering-an attempt to settle the boys' fears of displacement. "'It's like skateboarding but on the water"'
"We were urban kids," Garrett said flatly. After the boyfriend left, "We were alone and living on welfare."
Liam remembered that the small family could afford one pair of shoes a year for each of the boys. Underwear wasn't in the budget. When the local kids harassed him because he wore no "Baybee Dees," it took Liam a while to understand that to mean no "BVDs" and only a bit longer to understand where that placed him in this new social order. On his first day in their new school, Garrett fought the biggest kid in class. "Coming up on the North Shore as a haole," Liam remembered, "it's a hard life."
When I contrast this image to my first encounter getting to know Garrett McNamara-on his attempt to surf a wave created by the decay of a 300-foot-tall glacier in a southern Alaskan river-I struggle to join the beginning to maybe the most pivotal moment in an aquatic daredevil's career. In little more than six years, a thirty-something surf shop owner would develop one of the most reputable tow-in careers going. His trajectory followed the insipient rise of competitive tow-surfing itself and continues to beg the question of where it could possibly end. And maybe even how insane surfing can possibly become along the way.
It's facile to draw the Evel Knievel analogy, that once a professional daredevil jumps ten buses, the next step is to jump twenty and eventually a canyon and then the Grand Canyon-which the real Knievel had threatened to do for many years. For professional big wave surfers, the only way to guarantee a career is to keep surfing the next-biggest wave-50, 75, 100 feet and climbing. True, the Alaska stunt may have been a sideline. It appeared ridiculous on the face of it (a barreling wave created by a calving glacier? In a river?). In person, however, it was the most terrifying wave-riding activity I'd ever seen. The mere attempt may turn out to be equally McNamara s V-Day-or his Waterloo. My sense is the distinction will take considerable time to sort out in this new golden age of the big wave radical. For as the forty-one-year-old McNamara said at home again on the North Shore, "I will be surfing massive waves professionally until I'm fifty years old, minimum." But of the glacier attempt, he said, "Alaska changed everything."
In October of '08, a year after Garrett's mission at Child's glacier, I met up with him on the North Shore. Since we'd last met, Garrett had towed giant Teahupoo and survived tremendous wipeouts. He'd made barrels at Pipe and Puerto Escondido on a stand-up paddling (SUP) board, paddled into Mavericks and even long-boarded Malibu. His career and life were diversifying, his big wave career pushing at the limits of the possible-yet his plan for this meeting was a tour back through the years to his roots along the Seven Mile Miracle. Garrett brought along his twelve-year-old son Titus and his thirteen-year-old daughter An. Neither of them had experienced this tour either. Members of a now-extended McNamara family, they're healthy and quiet groms, a little removed from and in awe of their father's boisterous energy and need to connect in social settings. As Greg Long said recently, "I think Garrett's stoke factor is sometimes intimidating for some people."
At the Cafe Haleiwa, while the kids found a booth, Garrett greeted various tables and struck up conversations. When he joined our table, he sat as if he'd carried something heavy across the restaurant. Then he spilt a secret that seemed to have occupied his thoughts since entering the cafe: His wife Connie was pregnant again. Titus and Ari already knew this and also that he shouldn't be telling anyone. Appraising his son a while, Garrett then began to discuss Titus's surfing prospects as if picking up the thread of an old conversation. "I hope he doesn't want to one-up me someday. If he did, I'd be horrified." This pronouncement hung between them and caused me to think Garrett may harbor a bit of horror for the job himself. "But if Titus does want to do what I do," he added, "I'll make him train hard."
Both Garrett and Liam know something about preparation and the power of desire. Despite their relatively late entries into the sport, their unavoidable haole status, and childhood poverty, by the time they reached their teens the McNamaras had become contenders on surfing's toughest proving ground. Admittedly, at that time they weren't the hottest surfers around. Some of the guys their age from the North Shore-Kalohe Bloomfield, Jason Majors, Brock Little-"surfed circles around us." The difference was that Garrett and Liam wanted it more, and they more often employed attitude to get it. "They had each other to bounce off of," said Randy Rarick, team manager with their first sponsor. "To be honest, they were wise-ass little prick kids. I saw that trait in them early on, and I liked it."
The boost to Garrett's development actually came as an economic necessity. When he was thirteen, his mother found a $400-per-month apartment at Velzyland, a semislum fronted by world-class surf. Haleiwa may have been the best possible place to learn, Garrett said, but "Haleiwa was light-years behind." V-Land offered the power and complexity the young McNamaras needed to mature. Liam began to hang out with some of the North Shore's heavies. Garrett hung with another set, a difference of degrees maybe, but as Garrett said, "I was a 6-foot-and-under-wonder guy." A couple of milestones then occurred in Garrett's late teens. In 1985 he placed in the money-making ranks of the Triple Crown. At that time, accepting $250 or more automatically garnered pro status, which pushed Garrett into the professional sphere. But he also found big waves-at Sunset and then the Bay. "Once I got a taste of Sunset, it was all about big waves," he said. By nineteen years old, "My goal was to get a 20-foot barrel at Waimea."
As Rarick pointed out, "Experience on the North Shore makes a huge difference. It gives locals an edge over surfers from other places." Both Garrett and Liam benefited from proximity. But Rarick added, "I think Liam had a little more talent and used his ability to be out in those lineups. He also specialized [at Pipeline] early on."
; Garrett had to work harder, and he knew it. Sometimes this meant going where others would not. Yet, he also possessed an ability to dream of lines where others could not. Out in a by-then familiar lineup at twenty years old, Garrett spotted a Waimea bomb looming that promised to offer the elusive two-story tube. "I airdropped and punched hard for the barrel," he remembered. The single fin beneath his feet, however, cavitated while the board drifted ever straight. The lip smashed him. He felt his ankles and feet strike the back of his head. Pounded fathoms underwater, he believed for a moment that his body had weathered the beating. As he made for the surface, however, a black tunnel enclosed upon the surrounding blue and the sunlight above. This tunnel increasingly pinched into darkness as he reached for the surface. Luckily, fresh oxygen and light snapped him back to consciousness. Garrett didn't know it yet, but the pummeling exploded a disk in his spine. Somehow he drove himself home from that session. The pain had become so intense once he arrived there that Garrett donned a snorkel and mask and climbed into the bathtub just to achieve some of the weightlessness he felt beneath Waimea-an effort to suspend the pressure on his ruptured disk. At some point Liam showed up and tried to lift Garrett to his feet. Garrett blacked out completely.
"I woke up to my brother crying," he remembered.
After two months "on the floor becoming addicted to codeine," Garrett admitted, "I wasn't focused on big waves anymore. I didn't know what the hell I was going to do." A summer and another winter passed before he surfed again. It took five years before he felt himself in the water. "I wasn't a competitor anymore; I lost that. I lost the tour," he said. And that loss "shattered me emotionally."
Over the following years, Liam's career took off. Garrett would keep on charging, and he did compete-in the Triple Crown, Excel Pro, and HIC Pipe events on an annual basis. As Rarick said, "Garrett tried and tried to be a presence on the competitive front." He wasn't a natural competitor, he knew, and felt he had to work harder than most just to be "good." The exception, however, was his prowess in big waves.
On our tour of his life along the North Shore, we eventually came to a little house wedged between Sharks Cove and Waimea Bay where Garrett lived during some of the most important years of his life. It is so close to the bay that its windows tremble during any swell that brings Waimea to life. I wondered what that rattling sounded like to a man whose dream since nearly ending his life there had been an invitation to the Eddie.
Soon enough, however, Garrett's tour led us to another of his loves, Sunset Beach-the wave that began and also reignited his passion for big waves. Around 1994, while checking the surf at Sunset, Garrett spotted Laird Hamilton and Buzzy Kerbox using a Zodiac to pull each other into set waves at an outer break called Backyards. The sight mesmerized him. He ran to grab a board so he could paddle out and be that much closer to the action, but then he just stopped there on dry land and watched. Not long afterward he bought his own Zodiac and began experimenting with this new sport. These were potent times on the North Shore. New generations of surfers boiled up under the old, and older surfers reinvented themselves and surfing itself. Garrett and Liam seemed to realize both sides of this coin; as they evolved their own careers they also mentored local grommets, including a pair of brothers from the Kauai-Andy and Bruce Irons. "They were our older brothers, chaperones, everything," said Bruce of his first stints on Oahu. "Garrett and Liam took us out to big Pipe and Sunset for our first times."
While we sat at Sunset that October day, an older fan misheard a snippet of Garrett's conversation and inserted himself to ask, "What's the goal?" It's hard not to sense that Garrett's charisma acts like a magnet, repelling personalities of a certain charge while unavoidably attracting others. This random attraction occurred several times during our interview, but knowing his own magnetism, Garrett never hesitated to engage.
"The number 1 goal is to keep surfing," Garrett replied to the older man. "How to do that? It's for you to figure out." Through the late '90s Garrett's scrappy, survivalist style in the water earned him the odd photo in the surf mags, which he knew would appease his sponsors a bit longer. "I got to surf; that's all I wanted to do. Financially, it was tough, just barely making it at the end of the month." By the close of the decade, however, Garrett had gained a wife, two kids, and a new venture: a surf shop in Haleiwa called Epic Sports. The business took up all of his surf time. "I barely surfed. I worked the store, and it was all about the family, becoming a nine-to-five guy." The man who feverishly talked about, and searched for, the "rush" suddenly found it only in his morning coffee.
Despite the obvious coincidences that might have led Garrett to an inevitable big wave career-the popular tow spot Hammerheads lay just outside his family's first apartment, and the beach that lured him into big waves, Sunset, also served as ground zero for the insipient tow community-oddly enough, it was the pissy landlord of his surf shop whose nearly two years of needling convinced Garrett. He needed to ditch the shop and give big wave surfing another go. And the timing seemed perfect. The inaugural 2002 Tow-in World Cup at Jaws lay just ahead. The only problem was that neither Garrett nor his new tow partner, Brazil's Rodrigo Resende, had ever surfed Jaws. They practiced towing into 2-footers on the North Shore days before the event (reasoning that accuracy on a 2-foot wave was much more critical). The competition, however, opened with 50- to 60-foot faces.
"I was scared shitless," Garrett remembered. Uncertain of his first wave, he kicked out early, realizing later that he'd thrown a good one. That feeling didn't sit well, so he and Resende began to charge a series of bombs that led to their eventual victory despite a ten-point barrel ride negotiated by rival Mike Parsons. The win ignited a golden year for the thirty-five-year-old. He garnered magazine covers air-dropping into Waimea and spreads featuring his lines through giant Teahupoo. In November he returned to Jaws for what is recognized as one of the gnarliest big wave barrels ever. Needless to say, the surf shop was closed.
"For years there, Garrett had to tell people he was my brother before he got that respect," Liam said recently. "Now I have to go around telling people I'm Garrett's brother."
The elder McNamara solidified his streak in 2002 with a nearmaniacal gamut for big wave celebrity-in Chile, at Cortes Bank, at home. In '07, he landed both the Billabong XXL Big Wave Award as well as performance of the year. In that stretch, though, he'd also taken some of the heaviest wipeouts imaginable. One in 2006 earned the dubious "Golden Donut" award. For a daredevil blessed with a young family, the question of motivation always looms. This is not a big wave surfer unaware of the consequences; he's rescued near-fatalities at Ala Moana and Pipeline. And in 2000, when Tahitian surfer Briece Taerea was caught just inside a rogue Teahupoo 15-footer and thrown over in the lip, Garrett held the unfortunate distinction of performing mouth-to-mouth on a man who'd lost portions of his face and neck. "I worked on Briece as hard as I could." He remembered seeing a man who looked a lot like Marvin Foster suffering before him. "I was head-to-toe in his blood, and I had cuts all over my feet ... so we're blood brothers."
In surfing, coming to terms with death-or at least the possibility-is an ongoing crisis in big waves. The set is building outside, and it's so beautiful aesthetically. People are watching in awe from the beach: the blue water, the stiff offshore winds, the 40-foot walls charging in from the open ocean. If you're out there with nothing but your body, your wits, and a surfboard, that set can be your coffin.
-Bruce Jenkins, North Shore Chronicles
Taerea later died of the injuries. The question of whether that harsh confrontation with the consequences of both decisions and luck at this level became unavoidable. I asked Garrett if he thinks about Taerea s death even as he attempts to push the limits at Teahupoo himself. "I'm actually more comfortable," he said. "I worked as hard as I could for Briece. He's always there watching over me. I'm safe there. I'm set."
Clearly, there is an element to Garrett's motivation that pushes beyond career security. Billabong XXL winner Brad Gerlach said, "He's g
ot something to prove to the point where you get the sense that he'll die for it."
One of the best heavy barrel riders in the world, Bruce Irons, said, "Yeah, he's definitely going for the scary wave realm."
Last year in Alaska, even as the film crew unloaded and the jet skis were prepared for long hours in 37-degree water, the idea that this was "the wave" that would put Garrett and his tow partner, Kealii Mamala, over the top seemed ever-present. This was bigtime. Talk of the "rush" waned and ebbed. I began to suspect that this rush Garrett talked about-almost as if it were a rare bird that may or may not alight on his shoulder-represented some portion of his motivation. It wasn't the part desperate to make a good living for his family on the North Shore or to continue fulfilling dreams within the sport he loved or even the measure of approval that twelve-year-old haole kid deeply desired from his new community. I wasn't so sure it was "stoke" in the traditional sense. The "rush," I suspected, was just that sliver of something other that made the risks worth it.
So a few days into their Alaska trip, when Garrett and Kealii witnessed a thirty-story tower of ice fall into the impact zone of the wave they proposed to surf, the "rush" definitely suffered an effect. The surfers became a bit more shy at the throttle of their jet ski, more leery of leaning chunks of ice. Beautiful river-brown barrels went unridden, even as Garrett and Kealii looked for some entry that resembled "safe." On film, when The Glacier Project is released, viewers will see Garrett breaking down on the phone with his family. At the time, I thought I was witnessing a couple of daredevils who stepped a touch beyond their courage. Now that I've met that family, I suppose I see something else. After that session, Garret approached Kealii-a lot was riding on this project for both of them. "I'm over it," Garrett said. "This is not worth the rush. My family losing their father is not worth the rush."