Laird Hamilton

Laird Hamilton

by Sam Bleakley                             

Hawaiian Laird Hamilton is THE ultimate legend in the boardsports world, and widely acclaimed as one of the most talented and accomplished athletes in surf culture’s rich history. A sensational waterman, a genius inventor, a glowing and charismatic personality, Laird has pioneered countless new ways of riding nature’s energy, from tow-in to the hydro-foil to the stand-up-paddle (SUP). Along the way Laird has surfed the biggest, scariest and most beautiful waves on the planet, constantly pushing the limits of the extreme sports.

In February 1964, Joann gave birth to Laird in a ‘bathysphere’ with reduced gravity as part of an experiment at the UC Medical Centre in San Francisco. Joann was also a surfer and decided to move the family from California to Hawaii when Laird was just a few months old. Here Laird became the adopted son of the 1960’s surf legend Bill Hamilton (who stars as Matt Johnson is the surfing sequences in Big Wednesday). They lived on Oahu’s North Shore and later in a remote valley on Kauai, where Laird learned to surf between the ages of 2 and 3 on the front half of Billy’s surfboard. At the age of 8, Billy took him to the 60-foot cliff at Waimea Falls. Laird looked down, looked back at his Dad, and jumped.

“He’s been bold since day one,” says Bill, “And hell-bent on living life to the extreme.”

At 6’3” and 215 pounds with a neck as wide as a tree-trunk, Laird appears almost bionic. Laird quickly developed a passion for a variety of extreme ocean activities from making epic long distance journeys on his ocean-going paddleboard to creating speed sailing innovations. When he was 22 Laird entered a speed-sailing competition in Port Saint-Louis, France, defeating the heavily favoured French Champion, and breaking the European speed record of 36 knots, using his newly invented speed sailing loop.

Laird then took his step-father’s elegant style and added immense power and courage to tackle the world’s most outrageous waves in Hawaii on creative equipment, pulling off the impossible. He soon applied his energies to surfing the outer-reefs using a wave runner: taking a water ski rope, and towing friends into waves too big to paddle into. Laird’s brainchild was to use footstraps on his board to keep him from getting bounced off and to enable him to do aerials and complete 360’s. By the mid 1990s Laird and a group of friends had pioneered tow-in surfing at a break called Peahi, or Jaws, on Maui.

“Bigger. Higher. Faster,” said Laird. “I wanted to go after the world speed sailing record. I wanted to ride bigger waves. I wanted to try and invent some new sports, combining the most existing ones. I wanted to be creative.” He achieved all of this and more.

Laird became the master on impossible walls of water that would send others into a jittery skate across the face, or break a person in two. But he never lost the cool from his step-dad, the longboard master of understatement. Laird maintained a graceful style in wildest cauldron, outrunning monsters at speed and sweeping turns on a liquid mountainface. And his timing was perfect, taking off to stay alive as a massively thick square lip tapped him on the shoulder out of curiosity but could not break his back this time because his positioning was uncanny.

In August of 2000, only a few weeks after a local surfer named Briece Taerea was killed on the reef, Laird Hamilton chased a giant Southern Hemisphere swell to this spot, now called Teahupoo in Tahiti. With photographer Tim McKenna in the channel, Darrick Doerner whipped Laird into a huge lump of turquoise water that roared over the reef with great vengeance and furious anger. Laird made physical adjustments that came from decades of big wave riding, his weight on his back foot, his right hand dragging for stability, and he came out in a huge avalanche of compressed spit, gliding to safety in the channel.

Laird’s unbelievable ride at Teahupoo made the cover of Surfer magazine and was the grand finale in Stacy Peralta’s big-wave documentary Riding Giants. That wave brought audiences to their feet when the documentary premiered at the Sundance Film Festival as Greg Noll, Pat Curren and many pioneering big-wave surfers of the 1950s and 60s expressed their astonishment about what Laird had achieved: “In my prime, at my best, I could have never ridden a wave like that,” Pat Curren said onscreen. Surf writer Matt Warshaw added,  “I think it’s the single heaviest thing I have seen, in surfing. What could be heavier than that?” The ride was simply labeled ‘the millennium wave’.

Former Surfer magazine editor Sam George, in the magazine’s ‘Most powerful people in surfing’ wrote: “Laird is flat out surfing’s biggest, boldest and bravest. He is the best big wave surfer in the world today, bar none. He is the sport’s most complete surfer, displaying almost unnerving expertise in a multitude of disciplines: tow-surfing, bodysurfing, longboarding, paddling, sailboarding and kite-surfing.” Laird is the ultimate waterman.

“The idea of a waterman,” explains Laird “really is somebody that can do anything in the water. If you’re a versatile waterman, then you’ll be able to go out when it’s a foot, two feet, ten feet, twenty feet, fifty knot winds, no wind. And you’ll always have something to do in the water. And ultimately it will make you better at all the things you do in the water. “

But throughout his career Laird has also worked as a stuntman, famously doubling as James Bond riding huge waves in Die Another Day. If you are lucky enough to meet Laird, his motivation is palpable and he instills a unique philosophy we can all learn from. “I love to be challenged,” says Laird, “to be challenged to look for the biggest waves in the world and ways to ride them. To continue to ride the smallest waves in the world, the shortest waves, underneath the waves. I love to be excited, to retain a youthful enthusiasm. I think that has been my number one goal - to continue to be excited about surfing and all the ways there are to surf. And to share with people. There is nothing like giving somebody their first wave, or their first stand up paddle. And they come back and they smile and you see that and you get to have a piece of it. So to retain my enthusiasm is really important.”

“And then also just being physically and mentally prepared to confront the challenges that the ocean brings. And that’s a lifelong journey. I mean, this year we have had an incredible winter and we have been waiting for five years. It’s a long wait. In most sports you wait for five years and the sport would be finished. It would be the end of sport. What I want to do is endless. We don’t know what the next new thing is. But I want be ready so that when the next new thing comes out, I can at least be aware of it, and that I can be available for it. I want to be ready to do it, because that is the biggest part – being open to trying. If you don’t see it, it’s just going to go by, so I just want to keep being open about it.”

“There is no right or wrong way to ride a wave. It’s all right, it’s all fun, no matter which way you want to ride a wave. People forgot one thing in surfing, and in all boardsports – there is a big secret that a lot of people don’t know – which is that it’s fun. It’s fun. All of these things are fun – snowboard, windsurf, kite, Stand Up – it’s fun. Sometimes people forget that this is why they started, and that is why they continue. This is fun. We are doing something that brings us fulfilment, and it’s very fun, and you are not hurting anybody. I mean, what better thing - there are only a few things like that in life.”

“My personal thing is to try to keep the fantasy alive – to keep people dreaming. Because if you cannot be doing it, then the next best thing is dreaming. Then maybe your dreams come true, because they do. You don’t arrive in a place that you didn’t start out to try to get to. At the beginning you said ‘I’m going get to the top of Mount Everest’. You don’t realise until you get there (to the top) that it’s about getting to the bottom. But everything starts with a dream, or an idea – and that’s the only way to get to any place.”

Sometimes you just walk in and go ‘wow, look where I ended up’. But normally it all starts with plan – and maybe it’s not exactly how the plan goes, but you still end up arriving at a spot that you were trying to get to. And I think that’s the first thing – to figure out what spot you want to get to. And then you will figure out how to get there. But if you are worrying about how to get there without knowing where you want to go, then you end up just going in circles. And you have to listen as well. A lot of the time that’s the hardest thing to do – to listen.”