Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Hobnobbing with the Pipe Masters at Oahu's G-Shock Triple Crown of Surfing.
Jan 20, 2000 | There's a lot to be said for the North Shore of Oahu, destination-wise. The food is surprisingly tasty. The landscape is wet, tangled, ropy and green, writhing suggestively in a mist of sex aromas -- cut plants, sea water, clay dirt shiny with wet minerals. The ocean is a cool pool-temperature, around 68 degrees, and supposedly, on the breaks of Sunset Beach, Waimea Bay and the Banzai Pipeline, it boasts some of the best, biggest, gnarliest and most deadly waves in the world, which is why the G-Shock Triple Crown of Surfing competition is held there at the end of every year. It's the biggest surf event of the season.
Unfortunately, I wouldn't know about the goddamned big waves on the North Shore. I went to cover the final Association of Surfing Professionals surf contest of the year at Pipeline, and six out of seven days I was there the sea was flat, flat, flat -- apart from a few puppy-ripples you might find on a 50-foot potato chip. The Pacific Ocean doesn't love you. The ocean doesn't care that today is the Superbowl of surfing and it is the field; it says "ha ha ha ha" and rolls away to attack Venezuela where they don't want anything to do with it.
The small North Shore community has the feel of a condominium poolside singles scene. The people listen to a lot of "Jawaiian" music, which is a kind of audio drip torture created by extracting all the soul from reggae standards and adding ukuleles. There is such a "laid-back" island attitude that many of the inhabitants treat the sandy island like a big hotel ashtray and, in a carefree fashion, leave big viscous globs of filthy surf wax under the restaurant tables, that you might rub up against them unawares and ruin your pants.
The North Shore also has whores. We saw one right off, a hip-weaving brunette cat-walking the side of the main road along the beach with a hard expression of crystallized pornography, wearing nothing but a turquoise string bikini, black eyeliner and a pair of red 6-inch fuck-me platforms. A truck stopped for her and she got in.
The surfing world is not really covered by any major press, save surf magazines. Even in the Honolulu paper, the front page headline one contest day was "Christmas Trees Selling"; the surf results were buried around Page B6. Famous surfers are famous almost exclusively to other surfers, surf-mag readers, sponsors and interested locals, so they hang around in the restaurants of the small North Shore town of Haliewa fairly unguarded, close enough to breathe on; no entourage armies or swarms of pie-eyed little girls.
Even the wildly photogenic six-time world champ, water-djinn and Pam Anderson Lee-ex, Kelly Slater, rates fairly low in the mainstream public consciousness compared with other sorcerers of sport. Slater is surfing's Michael Jordan, its most transcendental practitioner ever, but the ASP and/or surfing's annual world championship tour has virtually no corporate infrastructure comparable to the NBA's. So to the average tourist, the Holy Slater is just a freakishly good-looking young guy with a cell phone.
The first legend I spotted in Haliewa was big-wave stud Brock Little, who looked like a piece of animated driftwood. He'd been absolutely chiseled by the teeth of the ocean, physically and spiritually -- he had the look of somebody who's died six or seven times already and is now a project of voodoo scientists, running on some whole other ghost chemical. All the blood in his body has been removed and replaced with concentrated adrenaline and a clear, high-octane bionic fluid made from denatured testosterone and the distilled essences of his dead friends, which makes him beautiful and creepy to look upon.
When it isn't completely flat and eventless, Pipeline is the mother of all dangerous surf zones. The area boasts a huge tubing wave, which when it's doing what it's supposed to do, stands up a couple of stories high, throws its white lip over itself and makes a perfect "Hawaii Five-O" circle that accelerates into a howling Niagara then crushes down into hard, chunky spray -- like an imploding concrete building -- as it nears the shore. The reef underneath it is hard and nasty and lethal, covered with weirdly shaped rocks and deadly little caves an unfortunate surfer can get sucked into.
The day before we arrived there was a flurry of casualties: Cory Lopez, the sullen son of Florida and one of my personal favorites, broke his nose when his board snapped up and bashed him in the face and out of the contest. Taj Burrow, another top contender, slammed his ass very badly on the reef. Derek Ho, a native local hero who has won the Pipe Masters competition enough times in the past to feel real comfortable, almost drowned when he bounced off the reef and his foot leash got caught on a rock. He went to the hospital with a head injury and lungs full of ocean.
On the last day of our stay, the ocean graciously kicked in again and we were able to see 32 of the ASP top 44 whittled down in eight hours of heats to 16.
The state of surfing that day seemed to be a general contentedness under the reign of Occy -- aka Mark Occhilupo -- the lovable Australian "Sesame Street" monster, who had just been crowned 1999's World Champion. Basically, every surfer in the ASP, even the most gargantuanly bitter, entitlement-barking horror egos like Sunny Garcia, are pretty happy about this.
Occy made a positively stellar surf comeback after being a fat, depressed guy on a couch for several years, and is now a sunshiny example of plucky human triumph; everything is fair and right within a world in which Occy earned his champhood at 33. Kelly Slater didn't do the ASP tour in 1999 or try for the title, and this prompts the terrible question: Is anyone really world champ in any way other than ceremonially if Slater didn't surf? Slater reserved himself for choice surf events in '99, in which he competed as a "wild card." Naturally, he was there at Pipeline, lending star aura, being the big dog in the park.
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