Just then another man races out of the pack – younger, smaller, lighter, Asian, more a Bruce Lee in shorts – goes streaking past Bradshaw on his inside and steals the wave right from under his nose Bradshaw pulls back in amazement. Who is this guy dropping in on me? When the younger man paddles back out and sits up on his board, scanning the horizon for his next ride, Bradshaw goes over to him, grabs his board and flips it over. Beyond rage, coolly, methodically, he rips off each of the three fins. “Somebody needed to teach you a lesson,” he mutters.
Mark Foo looks at Bradshaw open-mouthed It is the winter of 1980. Thus begins the duel between Bradshaw and Foo, the Old Guard and the Young Gun, that will be dangerously played out over more than a decade on the legendary North Shore of Hawaii.Bradshaw was born in Texas in 1953.
His father – ex-Special Forces, disciplinarian, local mayor – had Ken’s brilliant football career all mapped out. But in 1968, at the height of the summer of love and the revolt against the Vietnam war, Bradshaw and his board vamoosed. On the bus going south along the West Coast he stared out at all the perfect waves like a youthful kleptomaniac looking through the window at Harrods. But he soon outgrew California.It wasn’t until the late Fifties that Greg Noll and others broke the taboo at the great U-shaped bay of Waimea, on the North Shore of Oahu. The North Shore is to big waves what New York is to tall buildings. But for the next three decades Waimea Bay remained, beyond dispute, the Empire State and Coliseum of big-wave surfing, the ultimate arena.When Bradshaw arrived there in the early Seventies, Eddie Aikau, native Hawaiian, Waimea lifeguard and guardian, smiled on Bradshaw and called him “Brother Brad”. When Aikau disappeared at sea on a doomed rescue mission in 1978, Bradshaw was poised to take his place He took Waimea by force He bullied 20ft-plus monsters into submission He was undisputed numero uno and a monster of machismo.
He would bite chunks out of the boards of surfers who got in his way. A photograph showed him eating nails.Foo was born in Singapore in 1958, the son of a Chinese mother and American father. Mark was aged 10 when his family spent a year in Hawaii and he fell in love with the waves. He threw terrible tantrums when they had to move back to the mainland.
Based in Maryland, the kid talked his parents into driving him the three hours to the nearest East Coast beach every weekend.He won a place at the University of Hawaii, where he dedicated himself full-time to the study of surfing. He tried his hand at the smaller waves of the new-born pro circuit, but he only really felt comfortable in big waves. The bigger they were, the cooler and more laser-like he became. “Every day I wake up I pray it’s 20 feet,” he said to me.Foo was a karate kid among heavyweight pugilists.