Laird Hamilton

In 1996, People Magazine proclaimed Laird Hamilton one of the “50 Most Beautiful People,” inspiring Laird’s wife Gabrielle to say: “He’s beautiful when he’s in motion.” Not only was that one of the nicest things a wife has ever said about a husband, it was also true. To see Laird Hamilton in motion, aggressively and beautifully toying with 40-foot surf at Jaws, is to see a 70s psychedelic cartoon made real.

The honors and honorifics continue. The Encyclopedia of Surfing described Laird as “the near-unanimous choice as the best big-wave rider of the 1990s and ‘00s, and one of the four or five surfers throughout the sport’s history to significantly change the way waves are ridden.” Laird is the 21st Century link in a chain of forward-thinking innovators going back to Duke Kahanamoku and forward through Tom Blake, Woody Brown, Bob Simmons, George Greenough, Dick Brewer and Simon Anderson. Every 20 years or so, someone will come along who calls Emperor’s New Clothes on what is currently happening, does things differently, struggles until he proves it, and changes everything forever.

Laird came into the world in 1964, an experimental water birth – surprise surprise – to a father who left the family when Laird was five months old and a mother who loved surfing and Hawaii. When Laird was two, a chance meeting on the North Shore of Oahu with surfer/shaper/stylist Billy Hamilton lead to Laird being adopted by Billy and nurtured by the world’s greatest surfers of the 60s, 70s and 80s.

Growing up on Kauai, Laird’s character was forged by anti-haole beatings in high school – “Every day, fighting,” Laird said in Surfer Magazine – and by the wide variety of waves around that island, from the gentle beachbreak at Pinecones to those mountainous outer reefs, only visible from the hills. Hamilton had enough of the high school torture at 16, moved to California and labored as a mason and plumber before he picked up modeling work. Never that interested in competition, and probably too big anyway, Laird was a paid non-professional, a 6’ 3”, 200 pound flowmaster who was brilliant in the heavy surf of the North Shore at Sunset Beach, Waimea Bay and more obscure reef breaks like Backyards.

In 1992, Hamilton and his friends were distressed by the influx of nouveau big wave surfers overloading Sunset and Waimea, so they began using a small boat to catch the illusive bluebirds way out the back at Backyards, just up the coast from Sunset Beach. Their boats and traditional big-wave guns evolved into PWC and smaller boards that were closer to water-skis or wakeboards, and went completely against 50 years of big-wave surfboard making: shorter, and weighed down with pieces of lead, with footstraps to handle the bumps and speed.

Tow surfing began to shake up the world around 1994. Laird and his friends were way ahead of the game, and Laird set an incredibly high bar in August of 2000 when he towed into a monster barrel at Teahupoo and survived. Since then, the world has been on Laird’s tail, and now the ongoing pursuit of that illusive 100-foot Billabong XXL wave has been taken up by many others – Garret MacNamara, Mike Parsons, Brad Gerlach – while Laird and his friends choose not to participate, and even asked that Jaws be excluded to stop the madness.

Laird has a daughter with Gabby and homes in Malibu and Hawaii. The accolades from the civilian world continue. He was on the cover of National Geographic, Outside Magazine named his as one of 2000’s Outside Super Heroes and Sports Illustrated proclaimed him one of the “Sexiest Men in Sports.” He is sexy when he is in motion and Laird is always in motion. When he isn’t towing Jaws, he can be seen doing his stand-up paddle-surfing around Malibu, or riding his hydrofoils in Hawaii, or running the sand dunes north of Malibu with his daughter strapped to his back.