Riding Giants

Never surfed in my life. We used to go to the beach, the same beach, several times a year and there would always be at least a few surfers. None of them ever impressed me as fabulous surfers and it always looked a little futile, trying to get up on a wave, falling at least half the time, riding it for about 5 seconds, then falling down. There were always guys changing in and out of wetsuits out on the street. It looked kind of uncivilized. Plus I never got to know any surfers. I think this related to me being an indoor kid and, maybe, to needing to wear corrective lenses from the age of 11. I preferred watching the Dodgers on cable TV (we didn't get cable or Dodgers games at home) and reading magazines with the sliding door open to the ocean air. My sister The Force of Nature was an outdoor kid and, while I don't think she ever surfed, she got to know guys at the surf shop anyway. I appreciated the athletic aspect of surfing from watching surfing competitions on Wide World of Sports (4:30-6 Saturdays when I was a kid, from April to November, it was the capper of Saturdays that began with watching cartoons, the last of which was what I remember now as 2 hours of Looney Tunes, followed by either NBC's baseball Game of the Week or whatever college football game ABC was showing, there then would be like an hour break before Wide World of Sports, sometimes I watched bowling to pass the time. Man, that Earl Anthony was a hell of a bowler! Yes, I was pretty geeky as a kid.)

As I have gotten older, I've come to appreciate outdoor stuff and stuff that used to seem pointless like surfing more. Surfing in particular really intrigues me. You get to be out on the beach, apparently there's a serious rush from riding a wave. That sounds good. Plus the whole disconnected from the "real world" thing is appealing. It was probably nothing that I was ever going to do. Somehow my brain got wired to care a lot about stuff like grades early on and that has worked out pretty well, so I'll probably be giving The Muse material for giving me a bad time about external validation for a long time.

Now, though, I can see the appeal of hanging out at the beach and surfing much more than I could when I was a kid. So I've started reading some surfing stuff (the book Caught Inside is pretty good). Most relevant to this post, I decided that I needed to see Riding Giants when it was in theaters. I just watched it again on DVD. I may buy it. Film minus.

I knew a little bit about big wave riding from reading the SF Chronicle over the years and reading about when the big waves (like 25-40 feet high) start breaking at Mavericks, a surf break off the coast near Half Moon Bay. In particular, when I was in law school, one of my friends was a surfer (and he loved tax law, which struck me as a strange combination, partly because, to me, anyone who likes tax law has to be a little strange). In early 1994, a storm out in the Pacific caused Mavericks to start breaking and there was a big surf competition. One of the big stars, Mark Few, drowned during the competition. It was very big news, I think it was on the Chronicle's front page. My friend explained just how this could happen with those big waves. Mavericks has stayed fresh in my mind because there are pictures of it in the burrito place where I go way too often for lunch, along with a story about a 16-year-old kid who was surfing in the 1994 competition, tried to catch a 40-foot wave, wiped out spectacularly and lived to tell the tale.

Anyway, Riding Giants is about big wave riding's evolution, beginning essentially in the mid-50's when a bunch of Californians going over to Hawaii to live on Oahu and surf. They eventually moved over to Oahu's North Shore, which is the much less developed side of the island and the nirvana of big wave surfing.

If nothing else, the movie has just spectacular imagery. The waves that these guys ride are just unbelievable. In particular, the story of how these guys decided to try to ride waves at Waimea, which had the biggest waves on the North Shore and was considered unrideable for a long time, is really good. One of the movie's real strengths is that the guys who did these things -- particularly, Roger Noll -- tell the stories in their own words. They were seriously crazy, with Noll paddling out into huge 50-foot-type surf in the middle of basically a hurricane in 1969 (I think) to ride the biggest waves anyone had ever seen.

The movie also has a very good passage about Mavericks, which was discovered by a surfer Jeff Clark in the mid-70s. He rode out there alone for 15 years. Once he convinced some friends to go ride it too, its reputation took off. The movie describes how you have to paddle out about a 1/2-mile offshore to get to break and, once you catch the wave, you might end up in a bunch of rocks just offshore. This is with Northern California's mid-50-degree ocean water, too. (As The Muse's mom says, "They should really do something about that.") The guys who go out there are seriously committed, or should be. The movie describes how the 1994 Mavericks competition was a real watershed event, when the Hawaiian big-wave riders first came to California and validated their big waves and how horrible it was when Mark Few died.

Finally, the movie talks about how they are now able to ride even bigger waves even further offshore by having the surfer pulled into the wave on a towrope behind a jetski. The waves that they ride this way are even more unbelievable. The filmmakers developed this new technique for displaying stills in 3D that really gives you a flavor for how big the waves are. (It's a little like what Ken Burns did with stills in The Civil War series, except those were presented as flat. The ones in Riding Giants look like someone had a small camera inside a kid's pop-up book and pulled it out slowly.)

The movie isn't perfect. It suffers from Telling Disease in places. Telling Disease is where a story, a movie, whatever, tells you how special, wonderful, horrible, extreme, etc., something is without giving you the objective evidence or details to make you believe it. The Muse has always told me that this is a major flaw of a lot of writing. ESPN's SportsCentury series, while being something I like a lot, frequently suffers from this disease. For example, in a show about Kirk Gibson's home run, one of ESPN's baseball geeks talks about how "Eck just threw Gibson a slider because he just wanted to do something different [after Gibson fouled off eight fastballs]. Really? Dennis Eckersley said you, baseball geek, can call him Eck and that he got bored throwing fastballs. How about if Eck tells us that himself? The most egregious offender in Riding Giants is the editor of, I think, Surfer Magazine, who pops up every 10 minutes or so to tell us things like "It was just so historic what those guys did going over to the North Shore, it was a really special time in history" and "That wave that Laird [Hamilton, apparently the king of tow-in surfing] caught may have been the most important ride in the history of surfing." OOOO-KKKK.

Overall, though, the movie rocks. It's just hard to wrap your mind around those guys riding the waves that they are showing on the screen. I think I'm going to have to buy on DVD so I can watch it every couple of months. Once I get that LASIK, maybe, I'll try surfing, although on really small waves and hopefully in nice, warm water.