Like the quest for Moby Dick, surfers all over the world are seeking the perfect leviathan wave. Professional surfer Garrett McNamara thinks he may have found it. It’s not in Hawaii or Tasmania or Tahiti, but in a tiny fishing village in Portugal.
“I love surfing,” says McNamara, 53. “It's where I belong when it's really big and giant ... And the pursuit has just been to find the 100-foot wave. And it was just by fluke that the locals in Nazare (Portugal) emailed me to come see if they had a big wave. And we found out that it was the biggest wave I've ever seen,” he says.
McNamara’s lifetime mission to find the 100-foot wave is the subject of the six-part sports documentary, “100 Foot Wave” airing on HBO.
Initially the villagers of Nazare were wary of the strangers who came to town toting their surfboards. “When we first showed up in 2010, that was in the summer. There's a population of 100,000 from local Portuguese traveling to spend their summer at the beach,” says Nicole McNamara, Garrett’s wife.
“And in the winter, it’s a ghost town. Not anymore. But when we first arrived, it was a complete ghost town. There was no one there. And ... they weren’t mean, but they also weren’t welcoming. And we eventually learned that that was because they didn't want to become friends with us because they literally thought that Garrett was going to die,” she says.
“They thought he was completely crazy and that he was going to die his first time going out there — and that was that.”
While he keeps searching for other massive waves, McNamara says, “Nazare has proven to be the biggest wave in the world that's closest to the land that you can view it and feel it on the cliff. And the water will actually splash on you. There's nowhere in the world like Nazare that has big swells so frequent and that are potentially 100 feet that I've found yet.”
McNamara was just a kid when his mom moved him and his brother to Hawaii. “We lived in, what they call, ‘The Armpit of the North Shore.’ It’s called Cement City. And it’s real small apartments, low-income housing,” he recalls.
“My mom didn't have a job and we didn't have much money and we didn't have much of anything. And we got super lucky. My mom scrounged up $15 and bought us a surfboard at a yard sale. She brought it home and she gave us the board and we went out into the ocean and nothing mattered,” he says.
“It didn't matter if we didn't have new bikes and skateboards and a nice car, and a lot of food in the fridge. We were in the ocean just enjoying life to the fullest. And it was just this place of where I could just be one with the ocean and leave everything behind.”
McNamara became a professional surfer by chance at 17. “I was getting ready to graduate and I was really afraid of what I was going to be for the rest of my life and what kind of a career I was going to have,” he says.
“When we went to school, there was a right to school and a left to the beach, and I went left a lot, so my grades weren’t that good. And I contemplated flunking that year so I could stay in school one more year to figure out what I could do with my life. And, luckily, my sponsor at the time put me in this surf contest, a professional event that I'd never been in.”
To his surprise McNamara won, earning a whopping $250. “I gladly accepted it and went, ‘Wow. I’m going to be a pro surfer. OK! OK, let’s study hard. Let’s graduate, and let’s continue this pro surfing career.’”
He describes the perfect wave as one that has a “really good barrel on it.”
He says he found that Holy Grail once in Maui. “You come down the wave and instead of running in front of the wave (or) away from it, you wait for it to cave over you,” he says.
“I came down the wave and waited and waited and waited, and then turned at the last second and the lip hit me on my head right as I was coming into the wave. And so I’m blind in this massive tube, like it was a 50-foot wave, and I’m now in the barrel, and I’m blind, and I’m getting sucked up the face, and I feel like I’m going to fall back. But I’m thinking in my mind, ‘I’m going to make it. I’m going to make it.’ And then I feel this suction compression come pulling back, and then it goes silent for a second. I feel like I’m about to fall over,” he says.
“And then the wave creates a compression chamber that spits this massive amount of air out with all this water, very similar to a firehose, and I’m falling. And then the compression spit comes from behind, literally picks me up off the wall of the wave as I was falling. Luckily, I had the foot straps on my feet, and I’m still blind, and then — and I’m gone, and everybody on the land thinks I’m pounded.
“And then it picks me up and flies me and throws me out in front of the wave and I land, still blind, open my eyes and I’m like, ‘Oh my God! Oh my God! Thank you, God!’ That’s the perfect wave!”
Anderson tries on Roosevelt's cardigan
Gillian Anderson, who’s best known as the scientific Scully from “The X-Files,” has played everything Brit from the Duchess of Windsor to Margaret Thatcher. Now she has a chance to depict American royalty as she’s starring as Eleanor Roosevelt in Showtime’s “The First Lady.”
Anderson confesses she has a love-hate relationship with acting.
“Sometimes I absolutely love acting, absolutely, completely fulfilled in every way. And sometimes — and this most of the time I think this happens when I'm doing theater — it feels like torture, like such a mixed blessing. Because on the one hand, you love it, but the mixture of the fear and commitment and also just the length of runs. And yet, you kind of get up there, and if it’s a good night and you're in a good way and you hold that space, there’s nothing like it in the world,” she says.
“It doesn’t happen every night, but even on the nights when it doesn’t go right, there are things to be learned and those can be enjoyable too.”
The difficulty for her occurs, she says, when she feels trapped in a role. “And sometimes that can happen on stage and sometimes that can happen on a film when there is a scene that has to do with special effects or has to do with something where you're trapped in a situation you can't get out of — like having to do take after take after take after take, like going up and down a hill or doing something like that. It makes me want to scream.”
The scripted anthology series, “The First Lady,” will tell the secret stories of the women behind the men in the White House. Season One will focus on Roosevelt, Betty Ford and Michelle Obama.
Famous sleuths light up Sunday nights
The obsessive-compulsive detective, Adrian Monk, has joined the annoyingly persistent Columbo for a Sunday evening block of crime solving high jinks on MeTV. The pair were two of the most engaging characters ever created to hunt down those devious miscreants. And now they’re available for a whole new generation to enjoy.
The late Peter Falk portrayed the rumpled, rain-coated detective on “Columbo,” a show that aired from 1971 to 2003, and Tony Shalhoub starred as the finicky crime stopper in “Monk,” a series which earned eight Primetime Emmys and ran for eight seasons.
Shalhoub says he didn’t study any particular case of obsessive-compulsive disorder for the role. “But I did a lot of reading and had some sessions with a psychotherapist who deals exclusively with OCD patients, and he was very helpful,” he says.
“He gave me a lot of reading material and was helpful in breaking things down for me. And then I watched videotapes of people who suffered the disorder, and then I have to tap into things within my own psyche or my own experience of things that bother me and preoccupy me. I think we all have those times.”
The actor, who’s costarring in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” says, “Fifty percent of acting, I think, is being willing to let yourself look foolish. Let’s face it, great performances of any time are those performances that go all the way to the edge to what some people would regard as ‘over-the-top.’ If you stay right at the edge of that cliff, all of a sudden there’s an amazing performance.”
Lawless turns to 'Murder'
Xena the Warrior Princess is dropping her sword and fleeing to New Zealand for the second season of the thriller, “My Life is Murder.” Lucy Lawless, who portrayed Xena for six years and is actually a kiwi, plays a detective whose wit and dedication helps her to solve the most puzzling crimes in “My Life is Murder.”
This 10-part series features a “mystery-of-the-week,” so if you miss one, you're not set adrift. The show premieres on Acorn TV Friday.
Lawless says she always wanted to be a performer ever since she was a kid. But it was after she had her first child that things really kicked into shape. “The very first week after having her I was struck with a huge surge of creative energy,” she says.
“And I wrote out a script and produced an audition tape and I was misshapen — had just had a baby — and I was young and wearing a leotard, like pantyhose, and kept dancing in my Chuck Taylor basketball boots. I just had no shame. It was hilarious to me, so I did it. Somebody saw it and thought, ‘That girl’s mad. Let’s put her in a television commercial.’ . . It began.”
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