Beautiful But Deadly

[hellwoman]

Beautiful but deadly

Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 04/03/2007Page 1 of 3




In search of the ultimate challenge, two rival big-wave surfers agreed to tackle 'The K2' of breaks together. But, writes Andy Martin, it was the sea that triumphed that day

I first met Ken Bradshaw in the late 1980s. I was supposed to be writing for an English paper about 'Pottz', Martin Potter, the Brit who was threatening to become Britain's first surfing world champion, in Hawaii.


Killer wave: Mark Foo on the wave that killed him
I should have been faithfully reporting on the Association of Surfing Professionals Triple Crown contests in which Pottz was performing. But, inevitably, I got distracted, mainly by the big-wave matadors, the high priests of Waimea Bay. In Hawaii, I learned that a big wave is not big in the way a building is big or the way a mountain is big: it is always bigger. It eclipses everything else in your life. Especially when it is coming straight at you. The 20ft-plus guys were somehow deeper, more obsessive, warped, twisted, sublime, courageous, insane and radically dysfunctional than the pros on the ASP tour, who finessed anything up to 15ft.

'Bradshaw has muscles the way a fish has scales,' I jotted down in my notebook, as I watched him sculpting a new board in that big wooden house of his off the Kam Highway that looks out over Sunset Beach, North Shore, Hawaii. Bradshaw, the Texan surfing champion who had conquered Hawaii, was to waves what Tarzan was to trees. I felt obliged to ask him about his eccentric habit of biting chunks out of people's boards.

'It's not as hard as it looks,' he said, grinning and revealing powerful, gleaming incisors. 'It's just a question of getting your mouth at the right angle.' He treated it as a purely technical issue, as if I, too, might like to try it, like a circus Hercules showing me how to tear up telephone directories or pull a truck with his teeth - as if my question had been how, rather than why. The idea that I could be expressing any moral qualms about the whole exercise was alien to Bradshaw. He seemed to feel that putting boards together - which is what he did, as a shaper - gave him the right to take them apart again.

We talked of this and that, and then I said to him: 'Ken, I've heard rumours, is it right that you're at war with Mark Foo?' He gave the question serious consideration. 'Andy,' he finally replied, in his most meditative, professorial style, 'I can't be at war with Mark Foo. If I wanted to go to war with somebody, they would cease to exist. I would win.' In May 1974, Surfer magazine published a couple of action pictures of Foo, a good-looking Chinese-American who had moved to Hawaii aged nine. Then, he would have been barely 16. They were idyllic, almost innocent, pictures. The photographs, taken by David Skelton, show him crouching low and leaning into some semi-transparent 4ft-6ft green walls. The waves were well formed, but definitely not huge (Hawaiian-style); there were a few guys out there, but not a dense and potentially aggressive crowd (California-style).

These were the ideal faces for some explosive moves (the kind of radical attack that became known as 'hot-dogging', after the high-performance cars). 'With enough size to tuck into and enough speed to get you off. Good waves to be remembered by those who had them.' There was no drama. Nobody won anything. Nobody died. They weren't great waves. In a way, the waves matched Foo's standing in the profession. He was good but not great, he was stylish, he was clean. He was not huge either, but he had potential. He was still young and 'lighthearted', unscarred by either Hawaiian heavies or Californian combat. He still looked like a skinny kid with skill.

February 1978, Surfing magazine: it was just a one-page interview, but it registered a significant shift of emphasis. Foo had become first and foremost a pro surfer. He looked on the recently formed ASP circuit, the 'tour', as his workplace, a big enough platform not just to showcase his skills, but also to provide a career path and a decent income. 'I'm totally committed to pro surfing,' he says. 'First, because I love to surf and I like competition, and also because I like to live comfortably. So, of course, it would be the ultimate to live off surfing! I also know that that "ultimate" might become a reality, and if it does I want to be there. But, at the same time, I'm not being completely narrow-minded, and I'm also leaving other options open in case it doesn't.' Foo forever cultivated the other options (money, women, media, property, pleasures). Like Bradshaw, he revered surfing; unlike Bradshaw he didn't think it had to be divorced from everything else in the world, kept sacrosanct: rather, it had to be traded, exchanged, transformed, translated, have all its latent value and meaning activated and disseminated. Where Bradshaw excluded, Foo included. Foo was into everything; for Bradshaw, surfing was everything. Bradshaw lived by a single great organising principle, a prophetic vision that became a dogma; Foo pursued many goals, disparate and contradictory.




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[hellwoman]

While the bristling, prickly Bradshaw wanted to keep surfing for surfers, the foxier Foo sought to put surfing up in lights and make it available and saleable to the whole world. He lived on a tiny island stuck out in the middle of the Pacific, but he was alert to the potential for globalisation.

'I want to be a professional athlete. I mean, to be a pro in anything you have to act like one, dress like one - everything.' Blasphemous though it was to say it, surfing's image could be improved. 'It has been for you, more than anyone, that I had to prove that surfers were not bums,' he wrote in a birthday card to his mother. If he could sell it to his own mother, he could sell it to anyone. Foo wanted surfing to be as big as rock music. And he would be its Elvis, its Dylan, its Lennon.

'You're going with who?!' Sharlyn Foo's reaction to the news was understandable. Her little brother and Ken Bradshaw had been at war, on and off, for about a decade. For years, Foo had been telling her again and again about what a monster, what a pathological maniac, wave-hog and tyrant the guy was. And now he was going surfing with him. Of his own volition. Without, so far as she could see, getting paid for it. 'He's mellowed,' said Foo. 'I think maybe I misunderstood him. You have to be a headcase to go out in 30ft waves.' 'So what does that make you?' 'A headcase.' Foo grinned. His sister had always supported him, without question, since he was a kid, defending him against his parents. Then she defended him against Bradshaw (she had once thought of going over to Bradshaw's house with some heavy blunt instrument). And now she was having to adapt to the new mood of glasnost. A kind of peace had broken out between them. You could call it 'mutual respect' so long as you prefixed it with the word 'grudging'. Foo was finding it hard to adapt himself. But it made good commercial sense in the new environment they were having to work in.

Brock Little, 10 years younger than Foo, had captured the public imagination: he had moved in and now fully occupied the role of New Kid on the Block. And Darrick Doerner, as far as most commentators were concerned, was probably more accomplished, technically, than either of them. There was a moment, absurd though it was, which seemed to define the shift in the balance of power. Kathryn Bigelow, a Hollywood director, had been shooting Point Break, with Patrick Swayze, on the North Shore of Hawaii. As a rule, Swayze liked to do his own stunts, but he was scripted to wipeout and die on the biggest wave for 50 years, and he wisely backed out. The part of the pseudo-Swayze, the surf double, went to Doerner. He did a few suicidal take-offs and got paid $1,000 per wipeout.

It was no big deal, but it rankled with Foo and Bradshaw. Foo's inventive mind naturally turned to thoughts of celluloid. Which is how he came up with the XXL project (alternative titles: The Endless Winter or Destination Extreme).The idea was that he and assorted partners would make up their own grand tour and come up with the biggest waves on the planet. Every now and then, Foo and Bradshaw would coincide. On 23 December, 1994, they coincided at Maverick's.

Bradshaw had been the first North Shore inmate to do a reconnaissance. There had been rumours about a big-wave spot in northern California circulating for a few years, but nobody took it too seriously. How could it be bigger than Hawaii? And then, in 1992, the story broke: a solitary soul (Jeff Clark) had been surfing a 20ft-plus wave, maybe 30, in a spot only a short drive south of San Francisco on the road to Santa Cruz. Half Moon Bay, and the break known as 'Maverick's', had been one of the best-kept secrets of surfing history. Daniel Duane, the author of Caught Inside: A Surfer's Year on the Californian Coast, wrote: 'To understand the discovery, in the early 1990s, that the world's greatest big-wave break lay just outside San Francisco, imagine, next week, a climber stumbling upon a mountain both bigger than Everest and harder to climb, right outside Denver.' There was an element of writerly overstatement here: it was only the West Coast crew (of whom Duane, hailing from Santa Cruz, was one) who were pushing Maverick's as the biggest-ever anywhere. But if Waimea was Everest, then Maverick's probably had a claim to being K2. Whatever, Bradshaw naturally had to go and see it for himself. It was all Bradshaw's idea. He was the one who invited Foo along in the first place.

He was cold, he was tired because they had got their timings wrong on the flight and lost a night's sleep, and yet Foo was still surfing with all the old panache; he streaked ahead of the others and off on the first wave of the set. He was muscular, too, really hustling for every wave. After all, he had a reputation to preserve. Foo turning up at Maverick's. In the realm of hard-core surfing, it was like hearing that Elvis Presley had blown into town. 'Surfing's pre-eminent big-wave rider', and 'consummate living legend' - here at Mav's! The news caused a ripple, a minor sensation among the regulars. They were too cool to make a big deal of it, but they knew he was there all right, and he knew that they knew. Foo was a little like Harry Houdini.The show always had to go on, no matter what. He was always performing for the grandstand, for posterity. He didn't like to disappoint his audience: more than 100 spectators - Maverick's' biggest-ever crowd - had gathered in the sun up on the cliffs. And then, of course, he had made sure he had a cameraman in place to shoot for a film project. He wanted to make it look good for the viewers, too.

[hellwoman]

Eric Nelson, a surfing videographer, kept the camera on Foo whenever he could. There was something about the guy that was irresistibly photogenic. The lens loved Foo. When Nelson saw the ocean ruck up promisingly, about 11.20am, and watched Foo paddling into the lead wave of a set, he checked the light reading and pressed record. He was set. He sure didn't want to miss this one. Foo was on it. Everyone else backed off. Only he and Bradshaw could have made it, and Bradshaw was probably too deep, too close to the peak. Let him have it! thought Bradshaw. What the hell, there's always another train coming along behind. Maybe this was the new team mentality? Solidarity among surfers. Togetherness. Tolerance. These were concepts new to Bradshaw. Or was it just a night without sleep that made him think like this?

Foo made his move and went over the edge. He got to his feet and swivelled his 9ft 6in, purple-and-yellow Rusty board down the face. Below him, the Pacific, above him, sky; to his left, America, and somewhere far away to his right, Hawaii and Waimea Bay. Nelson followed Foo's trajectory down the face. He was glued to it as closely as Foo to his board and the board to the wave. In fact, more closely. His mesmerising footage shows Foo falling in slow motion. He is slightly askew on the board, he doesn't have the right angle to hold it, he tries to correct and adjust and flatten out, but it's too late, he can feel himself going, and he decides to let it go and surrender to the forces.

He bails, pitching forward. He goes down. Such is the effect of gravity. The incredible and paradoxical fact is that, in the next instant, he is being dragged back up the wave all over again, almost as if someone has pressed the rewind button. It is the ascension of Mark Foo. Perhaps to minimise the impact he has his arms pressed together, his hands folded neatly, one on top of the other, almost as if he is praying. He is in a loop, rolled around in the barrel, but behind the curtain. It is still visibly Foo, but more remote, as if seen through a greenish glass darkly, a face caught frozen in the ice, or preserved inside a museum display case. And then the glass shatters: he is flung down all over again and stomped on by the cascading water, and he vanishes beneath the surface. The camera turns away and looks elsewhere.

Ken Bradshaw saw Foo go down. He saw him come up again, for the last time, and he saw him finally shoved down into the pit and given a hammering. He couldn't resist a small grin of wry satisfaction. Foo was fallible, he was never going to make that late take-off. Tut-tut.

Bradshaw took off on the last and biggest wave of the set. He was careful to line himself up nice and square and get in early and stand up and really dominate the damn wave and crush it and force it to let him ride down it. He didn't glide down the wave, he burrowed into it, used the board like a shovel, furiously excavating great chunks out of the granite water like stepping stones. It was bumpy, but Bradshaw refused to get thrown off. He was not giving in to any forces. No surrender. Bradshaw was on top of it. He looked down as he sailed by, knowing that, somewhere down there, beneath the great turmoil, Foo and the rest were eating it. He was riding right over the top of them. It was a long, leisurely wave and Bradshaw rode it to the point of extinction; he flipped off only when he was sure it was really dead. As he paddled back out again, hungry for another wave like the last one, he cruised past the photographers' boat. In fact he paused to check that everyone had captured that last wave of his for posterity. As he pulled his head over the gunwales, he spotted a couple of fragments of Foo's board lying in the bottom.

- 'Anyone seen Mark?' he said.

- 'I think he's gone in to get a board,' somebody said.

- 'He sure needs a new board after that!' chuckled Bradshaw. He looked back towards the cliffs and the beach, but he couldn't make out Foo. Must be already in the car park getting his spare board.

Foo was not, in fact, on the beach or in the car park or swimming back or paddling back out again. While Bradshaw and the photographers exchanged words on the surface, he was several feet below them. Perhaps he could even see them in the world up above. His leash, the famous leash that he introduced into big-wave surfing, the leash that traditionalists such as Bradshaw scorned (and then finally adopted, by and large), had snagged on a rock and twisted solidly around it. Foo was temporarily stunned by the force of the wave. When he came to enough to realise he shouldn't be sticking around much longer, he naturally made for the surface, the light and the air. Only he didn't make it.

The leash tightened like a noose around his ankle and he was stopped short, several crucial feet short, of the surface. He yanked at the leash but it was held tight. Then another wave barrelled through and smashed him down again and squeezed whatever breath was left in his system right out of him, like toothpaste from a tube. He couldn't have been that surprised. This was a moment he had been planning for, anticipating, living, for years. And he had written the script. 'If you want the ultimate thrill, you've got to be willing to pay the ultimate price.' 'You can't breathe water.' According to the coroner's report, he suffered 'conscious drowning'.

Bradshaw, meanwhile, just kept right on surfing. This was what he did.

Much later, some wise guy would make the crack that this was Foo's 'smartest-ever career move'. Going out on stage, on film. Now that he was dead Foo attracted even more attention than when he had been alive. He would have loved the article in The New York Times, the elegy in Rolling Stone, the pictures in Paris-Match, the heroic quotations from Jack London and Ernest Hemingway. Had he not said in an interview broadcast on the BBC that dying in big waves would be 'a glamorous way to go - a great way to go'?

A few months later, in the spring of 1995, Ken Bradshaw was out at Big Sunset. Darrick Doerner was out there too. Doerner saw him, paddled over to him. 'You could have saved him, man!' he spat in Bradshaw's face. 'You could have saved him.' And with that he paddled away again. Bradshaw didn't have to ask who he was talking about.

Extracted from 'Stealing the Wave', by Andy Martin (Bloomsbury), available for £11.99 plus £1.25 p&p. To order, call Telegraph Books on 0870 428 4115