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| The Greatest |
| Written by Larry Kuechlin on Monday, 11 May 2009 16:31
 Printer Friendly | ||
| The Greatest
Greg Noll is the most significant athlete of our, or any generation.
Wait…the guy with the stripped trunks and flabby gut?
Yep. That guy. Da’ Bull. The greatest. Now, I realize that many of you just launched a booming litany of invective at your screen loud enough to wake the neighbors, and I am sorry to upset you, truly I am, however:
I am right.
And what’s worse: you know it.
(Oh, sorry: invective… verbiage of the 4 letter variety that I both know how to use and spell…just not here in this particular blog.)
Now, please understand, I am not saying Da’ Bull is the most significant extreme athlete…I am saying athlete. Of any kind. Ever.
He may just be one of the most influential humans to ever live.
Let us reason together, shall we?
In this generation that seems to quantify athletic greatness with product endorsements entourage size, simple things like influence over humanity gets lost.
Besides practicing extreme sports, I am also a writer. In writing, we all know that we are only at this level of competency because of all the great writers who came before us: T.S. Eliot, e.e. cummings, Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allen Poe, William Shakespeare, a shepherd sitting out in the dark of ancient deserts who decided that it was fun to make little word puzzles, and the most primitive of our kind who sat around their evening fires and passed down their history from generation to generation by means of Oral History.
All forms of human endeavor are cumulative.
And that is the key to what I am saying.
But what makes a truly great athlete? Talent? Statistics? Championships?
No.
What makes an athlete great…or any human great…is their ability to change the world around them. The most amazing exhibition of pure athleticism I have ever personally witnessed was the play of Wayne Gretzky. At the height of his career, every team in the NHL was not only changing their game plan to try and keep up with Gretzky and the Oilers, but they were also changing their draft strategy in order to play Wayne’s game. Kids were molding their training to play like Wayne: blinding offense, blistering speed, more speed, and oh, yeah…that whole defensive thing.
That’s influence.
For nearly a decade, nobody could stop Wayne Gretzky. Nobody.
I saw him play in Los Angeles many times. The first game I got to see him play live against the Kings, I had exceptional seats. I was close enough to the ice to hear the player’s comments in the always quiet Los Angeles Forum. My favorite player, Dave Taylor, was given the task of shadowing Gretzky. Taylor, a tough, defensive-minded winger, with excellent playing skills shut Gretzky down for 2 periods. You could see the frustration building in Gretzky.
Early in the third period, on an innocuous face-off in the King’s zone, when he was unshackled from Taylor, the Great One decided that he had had enough. So, as the linesman dropped the face-off, Gretzky knocked the puck out of the air, over the shoulder of the expectant goalie, and into the net.
Goal.
It was not a mistake. From the angle I had, I could see him turn his shoulder and aim the shot.
That is a brilliant athlete.
Michael Jordan was so dominant in his sport that the entire league, to this day, looks just like Michael Jordan: tough defense; brilliant offense. He influenced the entire generation behind him. His play is the standard that the NBA still bears.
Tiger Woods was so dominate, that they changed entire courses so he wouldn’t win. Physically changed the playing surface to handicap him.
It didn’t work.
In baseball, there are so many dominant players: Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, Jose Canseco and…you know…let’s just skip over baseball for the moment.
None of those amazing athletes even make it onto my top 5.
Their tragic flaw? They all played games.
In the words of (most likely) Ernest Hemingway:
“There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”
Now, let’s look at our premise again.
A game is something you play. A sport is something you can die doing.
All of the great athletes on my list were not only physically gifted, but they also showcased those skills within an arena that could kill them.
One of the greatest moments I can remember in any game was Michael Jordan making that 3-pointer in the finals…and shrugging his shoulders into the camera. Priceless. He won the game and the Championship. Brilliant play by any standard.
I would like to see Michael Jordan make that shot knowing that if he missed the basket…or his landing by a quarter of an inch…he would fall 1000 feet to his death.
You see…that is a sport.
The athletes on my list are people like George Mallory…who
in 1924 attempted to summit Mt.
Everest with his partner Andrew Irvine, 50 years before that feat was
accomplished. He is an athlete almost
without compare, and resides at number 2 on my list. Mallory is attributed with the most popular phrase in extreme sports:
Why do you want to climb Mt. Everest?
Because it is there. His frozen remains were found on Mt. Everest in 1999.
Think you are tough because you woke up early on a late-fall morning for a round of golf? Think of George Mallory who tried to bag the first ascent of Everest without supplemental oxygen; using a worsted wool jacket and plain leather boots that wouldn’t protect you against a mild winter in Chicago.
Mallory had the same chance of success as Babe Ruth hitting 60 home runs with a broomstick.
Blindfolded.
Mallory though, only influenced is successors. They learned from his fatal mistakes. And outside of his brilliant retort that defined all the extreme sports we practice today, nobody has heard of George Mallory, unless, of course, you’re a history geek.
Like me.
Or consider Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, athletes of amazing ability and unquestioned bravery, who, in May of 1953 finished the first ascent of Mt. Everest.
Still don’t believe my theory about all human endeavor being cumulative?
On the morning of the final assault, bearing the bad omens of both the failure of the lead element in his party and a failure of the supplementary oxygen system they carried with them, Hillary began his climb that day by clearing his boots of ice which had frozen them solid. After weeks of exhausting effort simply to get to their encampment at 28,000 feet, and forging a route on the most difficult side of the peak, he found himself beneath a sheer rock outcropping just below the summit. In a move of audacity that defies words, Hillary, carrying a bulky pack that weighed 30 pounds, maneuvered up a 40 foot chimney between the ice and the rock face. The Hillary Step, 5.10, a move that was exponentially harder than the 5.9 that Royal Robbins had put up just the prior year at Tahquitz.
Now, 40 feet is really not a long way to fall, unless, of course, you add 28,000 feet to the bottom of that fall. The idea that Hillary even attempted this maneuver defies description.
And this man, the man that showed a brand of bravery that forever defines the word; after accomplishing the most amazing feat in human history, after forging the hardest climbing route ever finished; after suffering through conditions and physical strain that would kill most people…he declined to have his picture taken, and, instead, took a picture of his partner Tenzing Norgay on the summit, and gave him the credit for reaching the summit first, a lie that he carried with him to his death so that the glory for what he knew would be remembered for all of history would be given to his partner;
that man
looked for the remains of George Mallory on the summit of Everest.
It speaks volumes to how highly regarded Mallory was in Hillary’s heart.
All human endeavor is cumulative.
Every step. Every height. Every word.
Back to the guy in the black and white stripped board shorts.
Greg Noll is not the athlete that Hillary or Mallory was. Nor did he have the technical brilliance of athletes like Gretzky or Jordan. He wasn’t even the best surfer of his day. Those honors went to Phil Edwards and Miki Dora. What separates Noll from every other athlete; influence.
The first example of this is his stripped trunks. He was the only surfer in those older movies with a unique style. Soon, every surfer wanted a look that was all their own. And every pseudo surfer. And every never-been-within-a-mile-of-the-beach surfer.
Quicksilver, Roxy, O’Neil or Billabong ring a bell?
Individuality of fashion in all sports became a demand. Think about how many of today’s extreme sport athletes have their own style. Shaun White. Danny Kass. Rob Machado’s signature red and black trunks made by Hurley. (I own a pair) Andy Irons’ signature Japanese battle flag trunks. (I own a pair) All the individual decks created for individual skaters. Kobe’s signature shoes. LeBron’s signature shoes. Air Jordan’s.
Nike, Addidas or Reebok sound familiar?
How many billions of dollars do you imagine this has generated world-wide?
Noll’s simple idea has touched, arguably, every human on the planet. But that’s not why he’s the greatest athlete of our time.
You can trace extreme sports back from modern day heroes like Laird Hamilton or Randy Leavitt, through the heroes of our past; George Downing, Royal Robbins and Sir Edmund Hillary, all the way past George Mallory until it vanishes as true sport into the pursuit of world exploration. In every case, though, these men were isolated in their pursuits. They were universally thought of as crazy for risking their lives.
Greg Noll changed that.
In 1957, without a leap in technology like Robbins or Hillary, without a path that had been blazed in the blood of predecessors, Greg Noll walked down to the water’s edge at Waimea Bay, and changed how humanity looks at itself.
Forever.
For years surfers had watched the big surf at Waimea and wondered if the human body could survive it. They wondered about it so much, it ended up in the infamous beach blanket movies. People may think the scripts in those movies were exaggerated hype.
The surfers didn’t.
They stood for decades watching the massive surf pour over the outer reefs at the North Shore: wondering…calculating.
They say when Waimea is big, it rattles windows a mile away. It is known to push the sand with such ferocity up the shore that it buries telephone poles where they stand.
Big waves convey a power you can feel in your teeth.
In the face of such power and fury, any human is humbled. Not Da’ Bull.
We can do this thing…
With that simple statement, he began to change the way humanity looked at itself; what we could achieve…and what we could survive. He began that change the day in 1957 he first rode Waimea, and motivated a generation of surfers to swarm down upon all the known big wave spots to prove their mettle.
He continued that statement in 1964 with his famous ride at 3rd Pipeline.
He put the punctuation mark at the end of his statement in 1969, during the biggest recorded swell to hit Hawaii in as long as records had been kept.
Greg Noll, sitting a mile offshore all by himself in the line-up at Makaha, thought about his own mortality. In his own words, he said he felt he had a 50-50 chance of dying. I’ve sat by myself in big water, and it is truly humbling. It messes with your mind.
You waver. You hesitate. You fear.
And I have never been in water even close to where Greg Noll found himself.
He said that he paddled outside the break, and collected himself. Decided whether or not risking death was really worth it. In the end, he took off on a wave so big, that even the great surfers of that generation had a hard time describing it. A famous picture taken by Surfer Magazine of another wave that day was said to exceed 100 feet. The biggest recorded wave to date.
And Greg Noll was out surfing all by himself.
Da’ Bull wasn’t towed into the wave. For Noll, there was nobody to look to and say:
…well, he made it; so can I.
Noll was by himself, historically and physically, without
supplemental oxygen, floatation devices…or even a leash. And there wasn’t anybody there who could
rescue him if he got into trouble…no
Completely isolated, he paddled into the biggest recorded wave, stood up, made the drop, and was subsequently obliterated by tons of water closing out around him.
Da’ Bull made his way back to shore and stepped triumphantly onto the sands of Makaha at the threshold of the 1970’s. That decade saw the creation or refinement of many of the extreme sports we practice today. Was it coincidence? I think not.
Those formative years were followed by a landslide of extreme activity and exploration. And now, extreme sports are an every day pursuit in many people’s lives. We even have our own Olympics; the X Games. Extreme athletes are no longer isolated crazies that most people have never heard of; they are well-known, well-respected heroes.
Extreme sports have become main stream.
And it all began with two simple concepts.
George Mallory gave us the first part of the extreme sports equation:
Because it is there.
Greg Noll gave us the final part of the equation:
Because we can.
Larry Kuechlin Copyrighted, 2009
Footnotes, upon request.
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