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Outside’s All Stars Laird Hamilton (Cont.)
He could easily have trodden the well-worn path from clothing endorsements to dominance on surfing's World Championship Tour, the sport's most prized competitive venue. But organized contests were never going to cut it for Hamilton. "How do you judge art?" he scoffs. He'd seen the pain suffered by his stepfather at the whims of judges. "It was devastating," Hamilton says. "Financially, trying to feed a family, but also not getting due respect because you won't dance
Rejecting the contest circuit meant that Hamilton had to devise an alternate route to fame. This he did brilliantly, starting in the early 1990s with Maui's legendary Strapt crew. A gang of eight friends that included fellow all-star Rush Randle (page 96), the Strapt boys blew minds by launching 30-foot jumps on sailboards, then mating the boards to paragliders to experiment with some of the earliest kiteboards. In late 1992, Darrick Doerner, Buzzy Kerbox, and Hamilton started using Kerbox's Zodiac—and, later, jet skis—to tow one another into waves too big to catch under paddle power alone. Hamilton quickly learned not just to survive 80-foot waves but to carve gorgeous arcs across walls of water that could literally sink ships—putting high drama back into a sport long preoccupied with small-wave tricks. Soon, Hamilton was receiving the recognition he craved. In 1994 he appeared on both ESPN (with his first wife, Brazilian bodyboarder Maria Hamilton) and the cover of this magazine. That same year, he landed a lucrative sponsorship from the French beachwear company Oxbow. Then, in 1995, he took an unexpected detour. He left his wife and baby daughter and moved in with professional volleyball player Gabrielle Reece in Los Angeles. (They married in 1997.) Reece, who'd parlayed her bump-set-spike into international celebrity, "knew all about being in a sport where you had to create something out of nothing," as she says. She soon hooked Hamilton up with her own talent manager, Jane Kachmer. "When I met Laird," Reece says, "he needed some professional organization. Janie really had to get creative. Being female is an easier card to play. But we understood image." 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 replaced Reece as correspondent for the syndicated cable series The Extremists. In 2000, he hosted the Fox Sports Network's Planet Extreme Championships. His death-defying drop into Tahiti's Teahupoo break—at the time, considered the most dangerous wave ever ridden—was named ESPN's Action Sports & Music Awards' Feat of 2001. That year, Hamilton and Reece had what she calls a "hiccup," and she filed divorce papers, but they reconciled a few months later and Hamilton continued his steady rise to fame, surfing as Pierce Brosnan's James Bond stunt double in 2002's Die Another Day. Things took a 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, as if to prove it all again, 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 über-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. For me, it's less about the one big wave than about your performances. It's about your body of work. It's art."
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