In Deep: The Collected Surf Writings - Softcover

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ICE BLUE EYES

Layne Beachley Knows Her Name

Surfer Magazine, USA, 2000

Layne Beachley’s courage has never been questioned, but to me, in this fragilemoment, I saw a courage in her that went far, far deeper than any of her athleticfeats.

Layne Beachley and I once held hands on the far side of the world. It was in the shade of a coconut palm a lifetime ago. She and I sat on the sand of a Mentawai Island beach, one hundred nautical miles off West Sumatra, waiting for the offshore wind to pick up at a surf spot called Hollow Trees. We were surrounded by a covey ofMentawai village children. The kids would mimic our every move, hour-glassinghandfuls of sand, hugging their knees and burying their feet and toying with the smallhermit crabs that peppered the beach.

The kids were fascinated with Layne’s ice-blue eyes. Through sign language they were saying that her eyes were the color of the sea and that the sea must be inside her. I remember thinking that was just about the truest statement I’d ever known.

The soft land-breeze was made for conversation and Layne was trying to share something with me. I had never seen her so uneasy. It was about her mother. Her biological mother. The woman whom she had seen for the first time in her life just two months earlier. After years of searching, she had finally met up with her mother at San Francisco International between flights. There they’d spent the only two hours they would ever spend together. In that two hours, Layne’s mother tried to explain a few things. Layne learned that her mother was a teen gang-rape victim who had become pregnant with Layne as a result of the attack.

“And being a single mother in Australia in 1972 wasn’t fashionable,” Layne said. “Fortunately for me, neither was abortion.” Left behind in a Sydney hospital, born six weeks premature, Layne survived, alone. Her mother had fled to New Zealand, and then on to the United States, where she disappeared from the face of the earth. Twenty-seven years and four marriages later, this woman met Layne at an airport bar in San Francisco just to tell Layne how proud she was of her daughter’s achievements. This woman had secretly followed Layne’s life from afar. Following through surfing magazines and Australian newspapers and whispered favors from trusted friends back in Oz.

Layne told me that this woman’s name was Maggie.

I knew a time when Layne had to hold two jobs to support her surfing career. Surf shop by day, barmaid by night. A lousy apartment. Out on the pro tour, she had to stay in rundown youth hostels, sleeping with all her surfboards leashed to her ankles, ready to clash with anyone who tried to steal her boards A time when she was vilified by the men on tour, made to feel freakish and repugnant. They gave her a nickname. “The Beast.” She couldn’t get a date to save her life. She went for four years without being hugged or kissed by a single soul. Four years. In the prime of her life. It was her loneliest time in a lifetime of loneliness. Stressed emotionally, financially, and physically, Layne was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome and ordered to take months of bed rest. She didn’t. She couldn’t. She had to fight on. And she went on to become the best female surfer the world had ever seen.

“All I’d ever had was my backbone to lean on,” she said. I remember sitting there in the quiet with her on that exotic beach after hearing her story, thinking about the miracles that the surfing life can perform. About the places it can take you, about the adventures it affords. About the hope it can give and the lives it can save. Lives like Layne Beachley’s. That was Layne to me at that moment. Only her backbone to lean on. Imposing her will on the world against long odds. As we sat there, she was twenty-eight years old and on her way to her fourth world title. The woman sitting next to me on that beach seemed to bring with her, wherever she went, all the history and hopes of every powerful woman who has ever existed. Plenty achieve trophies, but only a few achieve royalty. A Queen to Kelly Slater’s King and all Aussie pride; despite the challenges of life, Layne was the irrepressible spearhead of surfing’s suffragette movement long before it was cool. The very movement that would eventually alter the entire surfing industry and alter the way every one of us would look at women in the line-up. And considering the fact that Layne is a woman who stands only 5’4”, and considering the fact that she would eventually go on to tow into sixty-foot waves, and considering the fact that she would go on to be the only woman on earth searching for the hundred-foot wave with the rest of the Billabong Odyssey boys—considering all that—I believe, at that time, I was sitting on the beach with the most courageous surfer on the planet. At that time, Layne held the Holy Grail— multiple World Titles and that which all women pray for: respect. Still a sufferer of chronic fatigue syndrome, yet pound-for-pound, one of the physically strongest athletes in the world. Unlike other heroes who have come and gone, the woman sitting next to me on that beach was more than a woman; she was a symbol. A tattoo on surfing’s history. The living personification of the only three things that will ever make an athlete great, that will ever make the world great: strength, wisdom, and achievement.

“I learnt my real birth name from her, though,” Layne said. Snapping out of it, I could only raise my eyebrows. Layne waited a minute, arranging the seashells at her feet. Then, softly, she said, “My real name is Tania Maris.” And this was when the tears began to well in the corner of those magnificent ice-blue eyes. And that is when this powerful woman next to me, this sporting icon, was alone in this world all over again. And that is when I gently reached out and took Layne’s hand in mine on the far side of the world. I could feel her racing heartbeat through her palm, urgent as a captured bird. And we sat quietly among the children and the seashells and the hermit crabs, staring out at the surf, waiting for the offshore wind.