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Laird Hamilton

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Laird Hamilton
Personal information
ResidenceMaui, Hawaii, Malibu, California
Height6 ft 3 in (190cm)
Weight215 lb (98 kg)
Surfing career
Years active1970 -present
SponsorsOxbow, Amway
Major achievementsCo-invented Tow-in surfing. August 17, 2000 at Teahupo'o heaviest wave ever ridden successfully.
Surfing specifications
StanceRegular Foot
QuiverLong boards
Favourite wavesTeahupo'o, Pipeline
WebsiteOfficial site

Laird Hamilton (born Laird John Zerfas on March 2, 1964 in San Francisco) is an American big-wave surfer, co-inventor of tow-in surfing, and an occasional fashion and action-sports model. He is married to Gabrielle Reece, a professional volleyball player, television personality and model. Hamilton and his family split their time between residences in Maui, Hawaii and Malibu, California.

Childhood and his Early Years

Laird was born in San Francisco on March 2, 1964, in an experimental bathysphere designed to ease the mother's labor.[1] His Greek birth father, L.G. Zerfas, left the family before his first birthday. Afterwards but while he was still an infant, Laird and his mother, Joann Zyirek Zerfas, moved to Hawaii. Even as a child Laird was adventurous, as is shown in footage of him jumping off a sixty foot cliff into deep water at 7 years old.

While still a young boy living on Oahu Island, Hawaii, Laird met with later-legendary 1960s surfer Bill Hamilton, a bachelor at the time, on Pupukea beach of the North Shore of Oahu. Laird recounts in the big wave-riding documentary picture Riding Giants that the two became immediate companions. After bodysurfing with his new acquaintance, the young Laird "coerced" Bill Hamilton to follow him home to "meet [his] mom." As Laird recounted of his match-making efforts, Bill Hamilton was smitten by the beauty of Laird's then single mother and married her, becoming Laird's adoptive father.[2]

Bill Hamilton was a professional surfboard shaper and glasser on Oahu in the 1960s–1970s, and owned a small business that made handmade, custom, high-performance surfboards for the famous Oahu "North Shore big wave riders" of the era. The family later moved to a remote valley home on the island of Kauai. Joann and Bill had a second son, Laird's younger half-brother, Lyon Hamilton, who also became a surfer. Laird's mother, Joann, died of a brain aneurysm in 1997.[2]

Also according to "Riding Giants," in Laird's childhood, teen years, and early adult years, he had the reputation for an aggressive demeanor around others of his age. This hostile attitude was in part due to Laird and his brother Lyon being smaller than their classmates, fair-skinned, and blonde: unusual in their predominantly Hawaiian-populated neighborhood. The role of the outsider profoundly affected Laird through to his teen years and early adult life. He became used to this role and was uncomfortable being in the center of anything. He was also known for his physical and mental toughness; nothing and no one seemed to intimidate him.[3]

As he grew up through the 1970s and 1980s, Laird Hamilton lived in one of the greatest surfing regions in the world, the north coast of Oahu, which he enjoyed with a well-known surfer as his father and coach. His father's friends and customers were other surfing greats of the modern surfing era. This environment contributed to Laird Hamilton's growth into a surfer who would ride the largest and most complex ocean waves ever ridden, as documented in film and photographs.

Men's Fashion Modeling

At the age of sixteen, Hamilton left the eleventh grade at Kapaa High School to pursue a modeling career and work in construction. At seventeen, Hamilton was discovered on a beach in Kauai by a photographer from the Italian Men's Vogue magazine L'Uomo Vogue which landed him a modeling contract and later a 1983 photo shoot with the actress Brooke Shields.[4][5] Hamilton continues to do occasional men's action sportswear print modeling.

Hamilton had his own line of clothing ("Wonderwall") at Steve & Barry's until that retailer shut down at the end of January 2009.[6]

Surfing career

1980s

By the age of 17, Hamilton had already become an accomplished surfer and could have easily left modeling to pursue a different career on surfing's World Championship Tour. However, competitive surfing and contests never appealed to Hamilton, who had watched his father Bill endure the competitive surfing contest politics and the random luck of the waves in organized championship surfing events. Bill Hamilton regarded surfing more as a work of art, rather than based chiefly on wave-by-wave ride performance scored by judges. As a young Hamilton once said,

"Contests are less about the one big wave 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?"

In the 1987 B-Movie on pseudo-surf culture entitled North Shore, Hamilton played the violent, antagonistic role of "Lance Burkhart".

Pipeline on the north shore of Oahu where Hamilton grew up

Despite further success in modeling during the 1980s, Hamilton, with his professional surfing upbringing, had always intended to venture into a life of surfing. But Hamilton's rejection and disposition toward the contest circuit meant that he had to devise an alternate route to fame, earned income and growth in personal net worth, and international recognition.

1990s

An early attempt at media recognition was his quest to be the first surfer to complete a 360 loop while strapped to his board. The attempt was chronicled in the ski film Groove - Requiem in the key of Ski by Greg Stump (1990). In the early 1990s Maui's legendary Strapped Crew, a group of eight or so friends that included fellow all-star Rush Randle, aimed to push the restrictions and boundaries of contemporary surfing at Pe'ahi (pronounced pay-ah-hee) (also commonly called "Jaws") off the north central coast of Maui. The Strapped Crew amazed spectators by tackling bigger wave surf and featuring stunts. Stunts included: launching 30-foot (9.1 m) jumps on sailboards, then mating the boards to paragliders to experiment with some of the earliest kiteboards. The video "Strapped" chronicles their feats.

In late 1992, Hamilton with two of his close friends, big wave riders Darrick Doerner and Buzzy Kerbox (also an occasional men's fashion model; Hamilton and Kerbox later lost their friendship over a property disagreement.[2]), started using inflatable boats to tow one another into waves which were too big to catch under paddle power alone. "The un-catchable (the biggest and fastest waves) was now catchable. Bingo!" said Doerner. This event is chronicled in the motion picture documentary film Riding Giants.[3] The technique, which would later be modified to use jet skis, was a revolutionary innovation. Tow-in surfing, as it soon became known, 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, Hamilton explained that tow-in surfing was the only way to catch the monstrous sized waves such as those that can be seen at Jaws, and the coastline of Tahiti. Using tow-in surfing methods, Hamilton quickly learned how to survive 70-foot (21 m) waves and carving arcs across walls of water, the size of which could literally roll a ship over.

In 1994 he appeared on both ESPN 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.

File:TeahuppooHamilton.jpg
Laird Hamilton riding Teahupoo on a stand-up paddle board, Tahiti August 1, 2006

However, in 1995, Hamilton's life took an unexpected and, more or less, permanent detour. Hamilton met famous women's professional volleyball player and New York fashion model Gabrielle Reece in Los Angeles, California after a television interview. They later married in November 1997.

In 1996, People magazine named Hamilton one of the 50 Most Beautiful People in the World, and in the same year Hamilton pushed for and took from his future wife the correspondent position for the syndicated cable series 'The Extremists'.[2][5] Ironically, regarding recognition of the pair's world class physical beauty in print, previously in 1989, his wife Gabby Reece, already a successful fashion model and women's sports figure, had been named by ELLE magazine as one of the Five Most Beautiful Women in the World.

By the late 1990s, Hamilton was continuing his love affair with the water by windsurfing, waterskiing and developing his kitesurfing abilities as a pioneer of the sport. In 1996 Hamilton and Manu Bertin were instrumental in demonstrating and popularizing kitesurfing off the Hawaiian coast of Maui.

In 1999 Hamilton sailed his windsurfer between the Hawaiian islands of Oahu and Kauai, some fifty miles away, in just under six hours. He later sailed his windsurfer back again. Hamilton has also been credited with inventing the foilboard. The foilboard is an innovative surfboard which incorporates hydrofoil technology allowing a higher degree of precision and effectiveness of aerial techniques within the water. Most recently, he has become the most public practitioner and proponent of stand-up paddle surfing, an ancient Hawaiian technique that requires an enormous longboard and a long-handled paddle, as well as considerable skill, strength and agility. Some "purist" surfers have blasted him for this, but Hamilton has called it a return to an old, traditional Hawaiian way of surfing, some say practiced by King Kamehameha and his queen Ka'ahumanu almost three hundred years ago.

2000-present; the Ride at Teahupo'o Reef on "The Wave"

Hamilton has a family home in Maui (and another in Malibu, California)

It was Hamilton's death-defying drop into Tahiti's Teahupo'o break (commonly known as, CHOPU) on the morning of August 17, 2000 which has become the measure of his surfing career to date, and has firmly established his reputation as the greatest and bravest big wave surfer in the recorded history of surfing. A wipeout at Teahupo'o reef on a 'big day', a particularly hazardous shallow-water reef break southeast of the Pacific Island of Tahiti, could result in a surfrider's death.[7]

That particular day at Teahupo'o reef, Hamilton dropped into what is widely considered to be the most dangerous wave ever ridden, due to the sea 'sucking down' into a huge well and forming a never-before-witnessed enormous mass of moving water -under, behind and over Hamilton - throughout his ride.

And on that day, a larger than normal ocean swell, "The Wave", approached. Darrick Doerner piloted the watercraft, with Hamilton in tow on his surfboard, into position. In an instant, the big wave jumped and the ocean floor dropped into a monster wave, an über wave. Pulling in and gracefully releasing the tow rope, Hamilton physically 'drove' his surfboard and body down into the well of the wave's enormous tunnel vortex, possibly betting his own life on the wave-punishing Kamikaze ride, in full view of the boat-based photographers' and videographers' cameras recording the unexpected. With his signature artistic flair and grace on big waves, Hamilton continued deeply carving water through this high speed epic ride of a lifetime, emerging back over the wave's shoulder without a moment of faltering. Cheers and screams came from all present on the surrounding watercraft who witnessed the feat. As if Hamilton had ridden the giant as a disciplined "wave-riding man-machine", his ride there on that day, chronicled in photographs and video, is known by surfers worldwide ever since simply as "When Laird Hamilton rode 'The Wave'", and a still photograph of him riding The Wave (appearing as if it were a giant mouth of water about to gulp him up) made the cover of Surfer magazine, accompanied by the caption: "oh my god..."[8]

Laird on a jet ski at Teahupo'o

In the filmed coverage of this event in the motion picture Riding Giants, Darrick Doerner, pilot of the tow-in watercraft pulling the wave-bound Hamilton, said he had strong misgivings about towing him into the huge wave because it looked un-ridable and possibly could be a 'killing' wave. Doerner, fearing for Hamilton's life at the time, poignantly said "I thought, 'Don't let go of the rope..' . . . then, I looked back at the tow rope, . . . . . and, it was too late . . . . . Laird had already let go of the tow rope and was in the wave . . . . . there was nothing I could do for him at that point." The fearless Hamilton admitted afterward that he was excited about the forming wave around him, disregarded the danger, and was pushing himself to drive to the "max, max, max, max".

Hamilton is now widely regarded by surfing historians as the "all time best of the best" at big wave surfing, regularly surfing swells of 35 feet (11 m) tall, and moving at speeds in excess of 30 miles (48 km) an hour and successfully riding other waves of up to 70 feet (21 m) high, at up to 50 mph (80 km/h).[citation needed]

Today, Hamilton prefers tow-in surfing of the giant waves of Pe'ahi reef (pronounced pay-ah-hee) (also known as Jaws) on the north central shore of the Island of Maui. He has often been credited for being able to conquer such enormous 'big wave' surf because of his exceptional physical conditioning, goal-specific mental courage, and physical stature. Hamilton is able to take on the largest waves, which many lesser-sized expert surfers might not attempt, possibly because he is more experienced and can ride the waves better, but certainly because his physique is substantial, and it has been trained and conditioned to endure the routine crushing, life-threatening "wipe-outs" in a mountain of falling water when a wave ride "doesn't have a happy ending". There are only a handful of risk-taking, big wave riders that will ride the enormous Pe'ahi break—all are colleagues of Hamilton; and, along with pal Dave Kalama, they are the strapped crew's de facto leaders. When not performing tow-in surfing big waves for photographers and film makers, Hamilton and Kalama pursue virtually every other watersport; lately, it is ancient Hawaiian 'stand-up' paddle-boarding back and forth between islands of the Hawaiian Island chain.

In February 2008 Laird joined the board of directors of H2O Audio, a watersports music company in San Diego California. Laird will help H2O Audio guide its brand and develop its next generation of waterproof MP3 cases and waterproof headphones. He had used H2O Audio products on many of his long distance paddling endeavors before joining the company.

Despite his enormous accomplishments as the best known big wave rider of the modern era (since the time of the great Duke Kahanamoku), the matured Hamilton is a modest celebrity who avoids self-promotion, has become a family man, a trusted colleague, and occasional lifeguard to other tow-in surfers, an understated ambassador of surfing and watersports, and, along with his long time surfing pal, Dave Kalama, continues to be an organizer and promoter of public charity fundraising events, notably for Autism research.

Environmental activism

Laird Hamilton is also an environmental activist. He joined a protest in Malibu against a proposed plant that was to be built in the area, which would affect the quality of the water. Various other celebrities attended the event including Pierce Brosnan, Halle Berry and Ted Danson.

Personal life

In his teens and early adult life, Hamilton had been known for a violent temper, destructive with friendships, and frequent public outbursts, including public nudity and mailing pubic hair to enemies and friends alike. Entering fatherhood (now a third time) and approaching mid-life seems to have mellowed Hamilton's personality.[2]

He was previously married to Maria Souza. They have a daughter, Izabella, born in 1995 (who now lives in the Hamilton-Reece family).

On November 30 1997, Hamilton married model and pro volleyball athlete Gabrielle Reece (also known as "Gabby"). They have two children together, daughters Reece Viola Hamilton (born in October 2003), and Brody Jo Hamilton (born January 1, 2008 in Hawaii), weighing 8lbs 2ozs. According to Reece, the Hamilton family splits time living in residences in Hawaii and California.[9]

Hamilton and wife Gabrielle are said to be part of the Malibu Mob, a celebrity group in the same vein as the Brat Pack. Other notable Malibu Mob members include Chris Chelios, John Cusack, Kelsey Grammer, John C. McGinley, Tony Danza, Justin Long, Ed O'Neill, Max Wright and tennis star John McEnroe.

In recent years Hamilton has used his celebrity status to support public charity fundraising, notably for Autism research.

Selected TV/film appearances

In the 1987 B-Movie on pseudo-surf culture entitled North Shore, Hamilton played the violent, antagonistic thug-surfer role of "Lance Burkhart".

Hamilton has been featured in American Express credit card television commercials; an early 2000s commercial in the series "Hi, you probably wouldn't recognize my name . . . " and more recently in the American Express "My life, my card" commercial series.[10][11]

Hamilton was a central real-life figure in the 2004 documentary Riding Giants about giant wave surfing; and the opening sequence of the 2002 James Bond movie Die Another Day, as Pierce Brosnan's big-wave surfing double (shared with Dave Kalama). He also appears in Waterworld, as Kevin Costner's stunt double in numerous water scenes. During the making of "Waterworld", Hamilton, who had been commuting to the set via jet-ski, was lost at sea when his jet-ski ran out of fuel between Maui and the Big Island. He drifted for many hours before being spotted by a Coast Guard plane and rescued; when the abandoned jet-ski washed up on shore on the island of Lanai, he went over to fetch it and drove it back home again.

In October 2006, Hamilton and another legendary waterman, Dave Kalama, biked and paddled the entire Hawaiian Island chain—more than 450 miles—in a week. The feat was featured on Don King's film A Beautiful Son in support of those afflicted with autism. [12]

In 2007, Hamilton, along with his wife Gabrielle Reece, appeared in the ABC reality television series Fast Cars and Superstars: The Gillette Young Guns Celebrity Race, featuring a dozen celebrities in a stock car racing competition. In the first round of competition, Hamilton matched up against tennis star Serena Williams and former NFL quarterback John Elway. Hamilton was eliminated in episode 5.

He has appeared in the television show Iconoclasts with Eddie Vedder from the popular American rock band Pearl Jam.

He also appeared in the HBO show Entourage as the victim of a road rage incident with Johnny Drama.

Footage of Hamilton is used on the video for "Dayvan Cowboy" from Boards of Canada.

In 2003, he was featured in the Dana Brown surf documentary film "Step Into Liquid".

Notes

  1. ^ Turner, Miki (2004-07-09), "10 Burning Questions: Laird Hamilton", Page 3, ESPN.com, retrieved 2008-01-11{{citation}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
  2. ^ a b c d e MJ FEATURE: Last Man Standing - Surfer Laird Hamilton
  3. ^ a b "Riding Giants" motion picture, directed and produced by Stacey Peralta, distributed by Sony Pictures Classics, 2004.
  4. ^ Surf's Up! Lesley Stahl Talks To Big-Wave Surfer Laird Hamilton - CBS 60 Minutes
  5. ^ a b Laird Hamilton Profiles and Biographies Mahalo.com
  6. ^ Wonderwall line debuted May 15, 2008
  7. ^ Surfline Teahupoo
  8. ^ YouTube: RIDING GIANTS Laird Hamilton
  9. ^ "The Chelsea Lately Show" E Channel interview of Reece.
  10. ^ Laird Hamilton @ American Express
  11. ^ Laird Hamilton @ American Express 2/ My Sherpa
  12. ^ http://www.mauimagazine.net/Maui-Magazine/January-February-2007/Laird-Hamilton-Dave-Kalama-Lend-A-Hand/ "Hamilton and Kalama Lend a Hand" Maui No Ka 'Oi Magazine Vol.11 No.1 (Jan. 2007).]

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Laird Hamilton.
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