Laird Hamilton
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Image:Laird-hamilton-teahupoo.jpg Laird Hamilton (born Laird John Zerfas) is one of the most influential big wave surfers as of August 2000. Born on February 3, 1964 in San Francisco to a Greek father L. G. Zerfas and a Swedish mother JoAnn Zyriek, Laird was raised on the north shore of Oahu, Hawaii from a very young age, two years after the departure of his birth father before his first birthday. Bill Hamilton, the legendary 1960's Big-Wave surfer was chosen as his adopted father. Hamilton thus grew up in the 1960s and 1970s with one of the greatest surfing locations in the world on the north coast of Oahu as a playground with a legendary big wave surfer as a father and coach to mould him into the art of conquering big wave surf.
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Career
At the age of sixteen Hamilton left school to pursue a modelling career capitalizing on his blond good looks which he was often teased about during his childhood in a school of dark native Hawaiians. At the age of seventeen Laird was discovered on a beach in Kauai by a photographer from Italian Men's Vogue magazine [L'Uomo Vogue] which subsequently saw him land a modelling contract and later a 1983 photo shoot with the actress Brooke Shields. By the age of twenty, Laird had already become an accomplished surfer and could have easily left modelling to pursue the well-worn path from clothing endorsements to dominance on the prized World Championship Tour. However, competitive surfing and contests never appealed to Laird who had watched his father Bill suffer thoroughly in organized championships. Bill Hamilton regarded surfing more as a work of art rather than based chiefly on performance. As a young Laird once quoted "Contests are less about the one big wave," he says, "than about your performances. Surfing is about your body of work. It's about art. I would snap if I was letting someone other than the audience determine my fate. How does a musician judge his thing? By how many people love his music?.".
Despite further success in modelling during the 1980s, Hamilton, with his professional surfing upbringing, had always intended to venture into a life of surfing. But, Lairs's rejection and disposition to the contest circuit meant that he had to devise an alternate route to fame and international recognition. This he embarked on famously, in the early 1990s with Maui's legendary 'Strapt' crew, a group of eight or so friends that included fellow all-star Rush Randle which aimed to push the restrictions and boundaries of contemporary surfing beyond people's wildest imaginations. The Strapt crew amazed spectators by tackling bigger wave surf and featuring stunts such as launching 30-foot jumps on sailboards, then mating the boards to paragliders to experiment with some of the earliest kiteboards. In late 1992, Hamilton with some of his companions, such as Darrick Doerner and Buzzy Kerbox started using jet skis to tow one another into waves which were too big to catch under paddle power alone a revolutionizing innovation known as tow-in surfing which pushed the confinements and possibilities of big wave surfing to a whole new level. Although met with mixed reactions from the surfing community, some of whom felt that it was cheating and polluting, Laird explained that tow-in surfing was the only way to catch the monstrous sized waves such as those that can be seen at Jaws (Peahi) off the coast of Maui and the coastline of Tahiti. Using tow-in surfing methods, Hamilton quickly learned not just how to survive 70 foot waves but to carve gorgeous arcs across walls of water that could literally sink ships putting high level of drama back into a sport long preoccupied with small-wave hopping tricks that had become a cliche in competitive surfing.
Soon, Hamilton was receiving the recognition he had long craved for. In 1994 he appeared on both ESPN (with his first wife, Brazilian bodyboarder Maria Hamilton) and the cover of the magazine which gained him attention from a number of sporting agencies who recognized his potential, landing an exclusive sponsorship from the French beachwear company 'Oxbow' surf later that year which he still endorses to this very day, modelling their clothes and featuring in their adverts.
However in 1995 Laird's life took an unexpected detour. He left his Brazilian wife and baby daughter and moved in with professional volleyball player and model Gabrielle Reece in Los Angeles whom he met following an interview by her on American television. He went on to marry Reece in November 1997. Hamilton's claim to fame was greatly helped by Gabrielle Reece's expertise in the media machine who "knew all about being in a sport where you had to create something out of nothing," as she says. She soon set Hamilton up with her own talent manager, Jane Kachmer, who recommended that he needed some professional organization and publicity to achieve his potential. In short order, Hamilton's career began looking a lot more like Reece's. In 1996, People magazine named him one of the 50 Most Beautiful People in the World, and he actually replaced Reece as correspondent for the syndicated cable series 'The Extremists'.
By the late 1990s Laird whilst gaining more attention, had become a truly all-round waterman, gifted in a number of other watersports such as windsurfing, waterskiing and developing his kite-surfing abilities. Demonstrating his superb ability in the water, in 1999 Laird sailed his windsurfer between the Hawaiian islands of Oahu and Kauai, some fifty miles away, an endeavour he completed in just five or six hours. He later sailed his windsurfer back again. Hamilton has also been credited with inventing the foilboard, which he has also developed in, an innovative surfboard which incorporates hydrofoil technology allowing a higher degree of precision and effectiveness of aerial techniques within the water.
However, it was Hamilton's death-defying drop into Tahiti's Teahupoo break on the morning of August 17, 2000 which undoubtedly became the benchmark in his career and his life, and cemented his status as a legendary big wave surfer, one of the greatest surfers that has ever lived. A wipeout in Teahupoo, a particularly hazardous shallow-water reefbreak southeast of Tahiti, means almost certain death yet on that August morning Laird defied all expectations and conquered what is widely considered to be the most dangerous wave ever ridden given the enormous height and volume of water which Laird succeeded in defeating. His ride there is known by surfers worldwide simply as 'The Wave' with the shot of him riding The Wave making the cover of Surfer magazine, accompanied by the caption: "Oh My God...". Afterwards even Laird admitted that even he was pushing himself to the "max, max, max" as he was quoted on saying, knowing that his life had been on fine knife edge in undertaking such a truly magnificent endeavour. Hamilton is now widely regarded as the best of the best at surfing particularly big waves regularly surfing swells of 35 feet (11 m) tall, moving at speeds of 30 miles an hour (50 km/h) and successfully riding other waves of up to 70 feet high (22 m), during which he reaches speeds up to 50 mph (80 km/h).
Laird Hamilton has often been accredited for being able to conquer such enormous 'big wave' surf because of his exceptional physical shape and stature, enabling him to take on larger waves which many smaller surfers could not physically handle. Laird stands at a mighty 6ft 3 inch (1.93m) weighing in at 225 pounds (102kg). As Laird was once quoted in saying "God builds a damn good car", revealing a humorous and charismatic side to this mountain of a man.
In 2001 Hamilton's professional career took another leap when he was asked to host the Fox Sports Network's Planet Extreme Championships and was famed with the ESPN's Action Sports & Music Awards' Feat of 2001. Hamilton continued his steady rise to fame by turning his attention to film, appearing as an actor and stunt performer in several movies, including a starring role as an unethical surfer in North Shore, as a stuntman in Waterworld, and more recently starring as one of the big wave surfers clad in a body suit in the opening sequence to the 2002 James Bond film Die Another Day. Although in the film the big wave surf was intended to be portrayed as the Puk'ch'ong coast of North Korea, the footage was actually shot at 'Jaws' on the north coast of Maui over several days in December 2001.
Things took another meteoric turn in 2003, when thanks to the box office success of Blue Crush surfing was suddenly Hollywood-hot for the first time since the 1966 cult classic Endless Summer. Hamilton scored major screen time in Artisan Entertainment's Step Into Liquid, the 2003 surf documentary that grossed upwards of $3.5 million. Riding Giants, which debuted at Sundance in January and was released nationally in June, was an even bigger coup for Hamilton, who landed both a leading role and production credits—and was heralded onscreen by director Stacy Peralta as the greatest monster-wave rider of all time.
These days continuing to show he has a great deal to prove Hamilton is training like a man who knows that his body is his future. A standard day, when he's not surfing, involves hill climbing with 50 pounds strapped to his mountain bike, two hours of circuit training, three miles of surfboard paddling, and a personal favorite: harnessing himself to a log and dragging it for miles down the beach. His workout partners include John McEnroe and NHL All-Star Chris Chelios, of the Detroit Red Wings, who says he's "never worked out with anybody in quite that shape. He's a natural phenomenon."
Despite his A1 degree of physical fitness, Hamilton still refuses to compete, even as the big-wave gold rush unfolds on his home break of Jaws. On April 16, 2004, the 'Billabong' XXL Global Big Wave Awards, surfing's most prominent contest, handed 43-year-old former Strapt crew member Pete Cabrinha a check for $70,000 for riding a Jaws 70-footer that made it into the Guinness Book of World Records. Hamilton, meanwhile, has never entered photos of his giant rides in the Billabong competition—a decision that is as much about principle as it is marketing savvy.
Hamilton's main sponsor, Oxbow, is reluctant for Billabong to profit from Hamilton's image. Arenaplex's November 2003 release Billabong Odyssey, for example, documented a team of expert big-wave riders on a quest for the world's biggest surf, and when they came to Maui to get the Jaws story, Hamilton declined to participate. As a result, Billabong Odyssey had to tell the entire story of tow-in surfing without any mention or footage of its foremost pioneer, Laird Hamilton.
By staying above the fray, surfing only for himself, he has become a lone, untouchable Neptune, reigning over a swelling pantheon of competing demigods. "You'll never hear from me, ‘I rode the biggest wave," says Hamilton. "Because you hurt yourself by saying, ‘This is it.' Like a benchmark. Then people want to step over that."
Laird Hamilton and Gabrielle Reece now have one child together, a daughter, Reece Viola Hamilton, who was born in October 2003 and have made their family home on Maui.
In 2004 Laird and NHL player Chris Chelios trained with the US bobsled team, and hope to form the first Greek bobsled team at the 2006 Winter Olympics.
Trivia
- Laird hunted pigs and worked in taro patches as a boy
- His adopted father is the legendary surfer and shaper, Bill Hamilton
- Laird is said to have been born in a bathysphere in San Francisco
- He's half Greek, on birth father side.
- Even as a child Laird showed an unquenchable thirst for adrenaline; footage has been released of him jumping off a sixty foot cliff into deep water at just 8 years old!!
- Laird left school at 16 to pursue a career in modelling. At the age of 17, he was discovered by a photographer for L'Uomo Vogue (Italian Men's Vogue) on a beach in Kauai; the images of Laird landed him a modelling contract and a 1983 photo shoot with Brooke Shields
- Chosen by People (USA) magazine as one of the 50 most beautiful people in the world [1996]
- In the year 2000, Hamilton hosted the Fox Sports Network's Planet Extreme Championships
- Laird appeared in the 2003 documentary Riding Giants about surfing
References
- Matt Warshaw: Maverick's: the story of big-wave surfing, Chronicle Books, ISBN 081182652X