Hawaii’s Pipeline Masters is the last stop on the world surfing tour and that scheduling, combined with Pipe’s standing among the most dangerous waves on the planet, have conspired to produce extraordinary drama over the years. But rarely has that drama escalated to a finish like this.
Days before the contest, Floridian Evan Geiselman nearly drowned out there. During the heats Queenslander Bede Durbidge broke his pelvis on impact with the reef. The customary insanity of the north shore was delivering again.
Coming into the event Australian triple world champion Mick Fanning led the ratings and was hungrily eyeing a fourth crown. But close behind him were a cluster of rivals: two Australians – Julian Wilson and Owen Wright, and three Brazilians – Adriano de Silva, current world champ Gabriel Medina and talented youngster Filipe Toledo.
One by one they began to fall: Wright to a head injury, Toledo and Wilson to the numbers. Coming into day nine of the contest window, Fanning faced a tough elimination heat against a genuine Pipe expert. Jamie O’Brien lives directly in front of the feared wave. To get to the world title, Fanning would have to win a heat against someone who knows the wave better than anyone.
And then, the terrible news that changed everything. Back in Australia, Fanning’s brother Peter had died overnight. It’s well known that at sixteen Fanning had lost another brother, Sean, to a car crash.
The delivery of the news just hours before Fanning paddled out to contest his third round heat at Pipe echoes the sadly similar experience of Australian Tom Carroll in 1987. Carroll won the Pipe Masters in a haze of emotion after learning of his sister Josephine’s death back in Australia the night before, explaining in his biography “I’ve never experienced anything like it….the trivial things completely dropped away. I was completely raw and in the moment. It was amazing having fate say…here’s an opportunity to win in memory of your sister.”
It illustrates the drive inside people like Carroll and Fanning: the ability, the need even, to apply their competitive instincts to the resolution of grief. Paddling out again isn’t about indifference to the pain: it’s perhaps a way of cauterising it, a form of alchemy that gives it beauty and meaning.
Meanwhile, the contest ground its way on, a wounded man at its centre.
He took out the third round heat, followed by a round four classic against Slater and John John Florence in truly epic conditions. He waited out the day, and early the next morning faced the legendary Kelly Slater again in a quarter final. The numbers were such that if Fanning survived the heat, another contender, Gabriel Medina, would fall. In a tough battle, a six-point thriller with two minutes on the clock got Fanning home. Now only De Souza remained among the challengers. “We can deal with anything,” Fanning said post-heat, as the interviewer, Rosy Hodge, wept.
Mick Fanning had already faced challenges on a scale that would destroy anyone else: a horrendous hamstring injury and gruelling rehab in 2004, the death of his close friend Andy Irons in 2010 and the much-publicised brush with a great white shark at Jeffreys Bay earlier this year.
Still de Souza kept advancing, and Fanning’s nightmare draw continued. He had to get past reigning world champ Gabriel Medina, and Medina stole the heat from under him with an extraordinary air move. In an instant, Fanning was out of the contest and depending on Hawaiian youngster Mason Ho to end de Souza’s run. The swell cruelly disappeared, leaving the whole thing to chance.
In the end, it wasn’t to be for Mick Fanning because de Souza surfed a masterful semi and took out a well-deserved world title. The Australian was typically gracious in defeat.
Regardless of today’s result, Fanning has long been on a path towards recognition among our greatest sporting icons. Surfing lives in an odd form of obscurity: whilst almost every Australian seems to surf, competitive surfing isn’t widely followed here compared to the stadium sports like football and cricket. The media don’t lionise our greatest surfers the way they do our champion leg spinners or full forwards.
But competitive success is only part of the reason why Fanning is a great Australian. The rest of it – the bulk of it in fact – is his conduct. Discipline, grace under pressure, incredible tenacity and acts of unacknowledged generosity.
There was a moment in the remarkable round four heat, just hours after he got the news, when Fanning pulled into a dangerous left barrel and somehow negotiated the foamball for a safe exit. It scored him an eight, gave him the lead in the heat, and (after a classical last-ditch Slater counterattack) ultimately got him through to the quarters. As he catapulted out of the barrel he raised both arms to the sky and the morning light shone on him. His mother wept in the stands and people stood on the beach with their mouths hanging open at the sheer audacity of his effort.
And we were reminded once again: just occasionally, sport can express the rarest heights of human potential.
