Editor’s Note: The following is a three-part memoir from former professional surfer and recording artist Jim White. We think you’ll enjoy it, as three years later, the themes Jim tackles ring perennially true. Also, be on the lookout for Jim White‘s recently released CD, Where It Hits You. Read Part 1 here.
Jim White surfing Velzyland during the trip. Photo: Courtesy Jim White
I was furious with myself. I’d surfed waves just as large in California, but the energy was different here. There was a pulsating electricity in the water—like going from a dimly lit room with a single 25 watt bulb to one with a bank of 500 watt strobe lights. I bided my time, studying the line-up and learning which waves were makeable and which weren’t. Eventually I caught an inside wave, this time restraining my knee jerk survival impulse to bail out. I cautiously picked my way down the line, working the wall all the way through the inside. By the end of the day I had fifteen or twenty waves under my belt and was loosening up and starting to get a feel for this huge paradigm shift. I settled in and tried to adjust, tried to press harder, tried to become the pro surfer I told myself I needed to be.
After a week of intimidating swells, the surf moderated and I started feeling more at home in the 6-8 foot waves. I surfed Laniakea mostly, as the localism there was all but non existent. Rocky Rights was a favorite break, as was Velzyland, although the locals there were less than hospitable. After six weeks of surfing, trying out paddle boards, glassing boards for Aipa and settling into the rhythms of the island I’d just begun to let my guard down, surfing with the confidence and abandon that I showed on the mainland. Then came the accident.
I’d met Thom Hamilton, a Jacksonville based surf photographer, who told me he’d been assigned to shoot up-and-coming surfers for the East Coast mag that he worked for. Although technically I wasn’t an East Coaster—I’m from Pensacola on the Gulf—he offered to shoot a few rolls of me free surfing at the break of my choice. I took it as a good sign—my skills were starting to catch the attention of photographers. We loaded up my junkalunka Datsun station wagon and headed for Rocky Point.
Everything was going so well: not only would I have photographic proof to show all my friends back on the mainland that I’d actually surfed Hawaii, but should I make the mag, the exposure might prompt G & S–who I was now riding for— to take me a little more seriously in terms of sponsorship. As I paddled out past Death Rock on the left hand side of Rocky Point Thom trained his 500mm lens on the line-up and everything felt as it should be. ALl my work was finally paying off and the universe was spinning in a greased groove. All I had to do was cooperate and do what I was good at—ride waves. It was low tide on that pristine 4-6 foot day—again, small by North Shore standards. As I paddled for the first wave I had no idea that a moment later my pro surfing career would be, for all intents and purposes, over. The wave hit the shallow reef and pitched unexpectedly. The fin, my foot and the lip of the wave converged in the impact zone and a moment later I was back on the beach in agony, a bloody trail marking my miserable exit from water’s edge. Thom rushed me to a clinic in Haleiwa, and there it took the ER doctor 3 hours to, grain by grain, clear the sand out of the huge gash, knowing that the slightest speck left behind would most certainly lead to a staph infection that would likely spread to the various bones that were affected. Staph is serious business, and if left unchecked can lead to amputation or worse. Jesus.
Once the wound was finally cleared of debris and the stitching began the doctor explained that this kind of injury was problematic, as the arch of your foot bears tremendous stress and as such causes healing in that region to be slow and easily compromised. One wrong move, he warned me, and I’d pop those stitches and be back to square one. No surfing for four weeks minimum. It was like a death sentence.
The afternoon before I’d surfed epic Laniakea. On the way home after six hours of laminating boards in town (Aipa’s factory was next to the Ala Moana Shopping Center on the South Shore) I noticed a much larger than usual tangle of cars parked along the Kam Highway. I stopped and checked the swell, which had been much smaller when I passed on the way to work that morning. It wasn’t small anymore. I watched a few inconceivably long, picture perfect Hawaiian rights wind down from near Jockos through three distinct bowls. Around a hundred surfers were scattered through the line up, including a tangle of hardcore pros—Aussies and Hawaiians alike—who were clustered at the north bowl. I briefly wondered why the likes of Shaun Thompson, Buzzy Kerbox, Hans Heddeman and Mark Richards were surfing lowly Laniakea, but just assumed it was a good day there. I raced to my apartment up near Wiamea and grabbed my board.
I’d slowly become accustomed to island power and since I knew the break at Lanikea well, I decided it was time to start asserting my place among the pros, so although it was clear the waves were larger than normal (Waimea was even breaking a bit) and despite the fact that I had a perfectly good 7’4″ gun shaped by Mike Eaton, I grabbed my 6’4″ roundtail twin fin. I figured if Mark Richards could hot dog his swallowtail twin fin at 10-12 foot Backdoor, I could do the same at Laniakea.
The paddle out was terrifying, as the normally safe channel to the left of the line up was getting pounded. When I finally made it past the shorebreak it was clear I’d made a terrible strategic error. Lanikea breaks much further out than most North Shore spots, and so it’s hard to accurately judge the size of the wave from the shore. Once past the inside I could see that these were by far the biggest waves I’d ever surfed. I’d ridden my twin fin in 6-8 foot Laniakea with no problem, but this was a different proposition. These were huge ocean waves with tremendous push to them—thick and formidable mountains surging toward the shore. The trades were gusting wildly. For a while I sat a ways out of the impact zone in the channel, trying to get a feel for the disposition of the line up. I started asking guys in my vicinity what size boards they were riding and the shortest anyone reported was a 7’10”. When everyone in the water is riding a gun you know the surf is big. One guy told me Sunset and Pipe were huge and closing out and that Lanikea was the only rideable break on the North Shore. There I sat on my puny 6’4″.
In surf that size, particularly with the trade winds howling straight offshore, it’s tough to get a small board to build up the necessary hull speed to take off before the wave hits the reef, jacks up and gets too vertical to plane on. Knowing this I tried edging my way inside, hoping to pick off one of the “smaller” 8-10 foot waves, but soon found out this was not a viable strategy, as the clean up sets were in the 15 foot range (confirmed by Aipa, who I saw in the line-up) and came charging through with alarming frequency. And if you think an 8 foot Hawaiian wave is intimidating, then double it and get ready to clean the brown stains out of your Quicksilvers.
I paddled for a few waves to no avail, then turned just in the nick of time to see the horizon jump menacingly, signaling a monster clean up set. I scrambled back toward the channel, narrowly avoiding going over the falls as the first wave of the huge set came marauding through. I was paddling literally for my life, scratching over the shoulders of three consecutive monsters, surrounded by five or six other harried souls who were in the third bowl area. The pack out at the first and second bowls were getting hammered. Big guns were bouncing around like toothpicks. On the fourth wave of the set, as I scrambled to clear the feathering lip I spied Mark Foo driving to the bottom of an even larger wave up in the north bowl, dodging the scattering of boards ditched by the mob caught inside. He eased into the pocket of the huge grinding right, unweighted and accelerated, then flew down the line through the second bowl, but as he hit the cluster of paddlers I was closest to, there was no clear path for him. With nothing to do but bail out or run someone over, Foo chose the latter. He drove his gun directly over the guy paddling twenty yards to my right, hitting the poor slob’s board with a sickening crunch, slicing it nearly in half. Mark went tumbling and the monster wave had it’s way with him. That was the last wave of the set. He popped up a few seconds later, surfacing next to the guy whose board he had just destroyed and what did Mark Foo do? He began screaming obscenities at the bewildered surfer. Apparently the legendary big wave rider objected to this guy getting in his way.
To backtrack a little, Mark Foo was once a close friend of mine. I met him one summer when he was a fifteen year old runaway living in half-built condos in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. We bussed tables at the same restaurant, wolfing down remnants of steaks off the plates from the tables we cleaned because we were so poor, so malnourished. Although he’d only surfed for a short time at that point, Mark somehow had decided that he was going to be a pro surfer. The closest beach to his Washington DC home was a lively jetty break known as Southside near the Maryland/Delaware border and so he ran away from home—or so he claimed—and surfed all day every day. We struck up a friendship. Foo was chasing the surf, as was I. Summer for surfers on the Gulf of Mexico is usually an endless agonizing flat spell. Frequently months can pass without so much as a ripple to ride, and so in June and July committed surfers from my town would take to the highway. Following the lead of surfing great Yancy Spencer, who at that time was a well established pro, we found our way to various surf friendly towns along the east coast: Cocoa beach, Jacksonville, Cape Hatteras, then north to Delaware, where better chances for the trifecta of surf, cheap housing and marginal employment in beach towns were available. Foo attached himself to our group and when the summer ended he followed us back to Pensacola.
He stayed wherever there was room, at times living with me and my sisters in the small apartment we rented in town. We shared a fold-out couch in the living room of our tiny place and many a night Foo would hold forth on how he intended to become the most famous surfer in the world. He was the most focused, committed person I’d ever met and was fully confident that one day he’d achieve his goal. To me it was an odd aspiration. I could understand wanting to become a great surfer, but not a greatly known surfer. While it was clear our goals were different, I admired Foo’s determination and courage. He once exhorted me to show more courage in big waves, saying, “You have to go for it! You’ll never have anything to brag about anything unless you do something worth bragging about!” Again, this was a puzzling mindset to me. I wasn’t much interested in the perks of bragging, but the idea of pushing myself beyond perceived limitations certainly resonated, as I felt trapped in my skin and desperately needed to somehow transcend the person I was. But how?
Mark was a ruthless competitor in all aspects of life. His singular aim in any interaction was to assert himself as the alpha dog. Many a day I picked Mark up from wherever he was staying, drove him to the beach, paddled out beside him, then watched as he cut me off on wave after wave. He was on a mission and anyone who got in his way was excess baggage. During his second winter in Pensacola, after I beat him in a local high school surf contest, I made the mistake of teasing Mark about losing to me—giving him a small dose of his own medicine, as he was merciless with his taunting, or “torture” as he called it. Foo became furious, huffing away after denouncing my victory, refusing to speak to me for days after that. Mark wanted to be the best so badly that it colored his view of everything, even friendship, and when that sad realization became clear to me I decided we weren’t really well suited to be close friends. Our paths diverged and soon thereafter Mark fled wave-poor Pensacola for the exponentially greener pastures of Oahu. I later learned from a prominent surf photographer friend that once in the islands he would cold-call magazine photographers and beg them to come to Off The Wall when it was huge and closing out, promising that if they’d take his picture he’d guarantee them a shot worthy of their mag. When the photographers finally started showing up Foo was true to his word. Soon enough dramatic photos of Mark began appearing regularly in those publications. Imagine everyone in Pensacola’s surprise when Mark Foo made the cover of Surfer magazine—four times!
Once in the Islands he befriended Bobby Owens, a rising Hawaiian star at the time. They made quite a pair, this red-headed Hawaiian upstart and Foo, a self-made refugee from Chinese royalty (if his claims regarding his ancestry were to be believed), and both became media darlings. When the photogs would show up, lenses would be trained on Foo, who would do whatever it took to guarantee a money shot for them. He was fearless; a talented surfer with thermonuclear ambition and a savvy marketer who wanted more than anything else to prove himself to the world as a member of the surfing elite. And he did just that. By the time I arrived in Hawaii four short years later, although he’d never won or even placed highly in a major pro contest, Foo was mentioned in the same reverent tones as big wave legends like Ken Bradshaw and Reno Abellaro.
So there he was, my old Gulf Coast surfing buddy, head bobbing out of the water, unloading on this innocent bystander whose only crime was trying to avoid being crushed by a huge wave, a fellow surfer whose board Foo had just ostensibly cut in half simply because he didn’t want to lose his position in the pocket. Mark’s leash had held, so when he’d finished ripping this guy a new asshole he gathered his board in and then began paddling back out. As he passed me we made eye contact. Without so much as a pause gave me a cursory nod and paddled on by. That was it. No words were exchanged.
The following morning my North Shore surfing days were finished. The next time I saw Foo was fifteen years later. I sat in a ratty booth in a Russian diner in the East Village section of New York City, staring at his face for the longest time. He was on the cover of a different publication—the New York Times—and his image was accompanied by a brief article describing his death at Mavericks. There was Foo on the cover of the world’s most famous newspaper. I just shook my head, thinking that in death Mark got his wish, for a moment at least he was the most famous surfer in the world. He certainly proved something, but what?
Stay tuned for the conclusion to Jim White’s surf travel memoir, A Different Kind of Surfing, next week.
