This article on Mark Foo and Ken Bradshaw and their half-real half-performative rivalry was published in the May 1988 issue of Outside magazine. I took plenty of notes while visiting Hawaii to talk with Mark and Ken before writing "Divided Rulers." Some went into the article, most didn't, and I've attached a few to the bottom of this article.

Mar Foo drives through the cane fields, across Hawaii's Interstate 2 on his way back to Haleiwa and the North Shore. It's an opaque afternoon, the second straight day of bad winds and crummy surf. Rain clouds cruise in steadily from the north and snag on the jagged crowns of the Waianae Mountains.

Foo keeps both hands on the steering wheel, and approaching a slow-moving flatbed truck, he lets his turn signal blink a full five seconds before passing. His dark eyes stay glued to the road as he speaks. "It's actually pretty strange that I ride big waves at all," says Foo, who by consensus is one of the two best big-wave surfers in the world. He gestures to the speedometer, holding steady at 55. "I'm scared of speed, for instance. I never drive over 60. I don't gamble. I'm scared of heights. I'm not really into athletics. And surfing big waves is combining all these things that are against my nature.

"I used to wonder about that. Like, how could I be so into this when it's completely opposite of what I'm all about?" he continues. "Then a couple of years ago I realized there has to be a bigger purpose to it. It's a plan God has. It's destiny."

Foo's voice is staccato and rushed, in contrast to his neo-Zen appearance. He's dressed neatly in pleated white pants, a pearl-gray, button-down shirt, and fresh white Reeboks.

Foo downshifts as the interstate shrinks to a two-lane highway in Haleiwa. Five minutes later, he turns into the short gravel driveway leading to his house—an elegant, two-story A-frame just a 90-second sprint from the surf at Waimea Bay. He gets out of the car, takes his shirt off, and walks back to the mailbox. His back and shoulders are smooth and taut, and his comically overdeveloped lat muscles taper down to a 29-inch waist. A bottlecap-size scar, pale and ragged-edged, rests above the belt line on his right side, the result of a one-bounce slam off some North Shore reef in 1982.

Foo peers inside the rusted mailbox—just as he had when Ken Bradshaw found him the day before. Bradshaw, the other top surfer, and Foo's long-standing rival, had been driving to Haleiwa for groceries, and pulled over to chat.

The jumbo-size Texan had walked over in a good mood. "Foo-Foo!" he said, lighting up with mock amazement as he got closer. "Hey, what's this?" Extending a thumb and forefinger, he yanked out one of the half-dozen hairs on Foo's chest. "Check it out! You 

 becoming a man!" Foo had laughed along, the way smaller guys often do when they're bullied.

Foo now shuts the mailbox and walks over to his house. He disappears inside for a few seconds, then emerges on his front porch, holding a pair of trunks and a towel. Nine surfboards, ranging in size from 6 feet, 2 inches to 9 feet, 2 inches, are queued up in front of him, in a wooden rack. He picks up the 6-2—the smallest board for the smallest waves. Destiny today means windblown, chest-high waves on the east side of the island. Junk surf. Better than nothing, he figures—but just barely.

It's November 12. Waimea Bay hasn't broken for 210 days.

Located on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, Waimea sits like a fat and invincible lord, dead-center on the North Shore: a seven-mile strip of coast, now entering its fourth decade as the blood-and-glory champion of the surf world. Thirty-five separate reefs produce ridable surf along the shore. A frontier-town atmosphere has stood up to the inevitable concrete progress.

During the summer months, the ocean spreads out from the North Shore like an emerald carpet, motionless, pulled tight from beach to horizon. Summer is the off-season, and swimmers and snorkelers dot the water.

In early autumn, low-pressure systems begin to spin along the North Pacific storm track, which runs south of Japan up to the Aleutians, and the North Shore begins to stir. By December, storms big and small will be falling down the track like all-day jawbreakers out of a vending machine, and the surf season is on. The power is unsettling. A big swell with a westerly bend comes up overnight and scours out the entire beach at Rocky Point, revealing skeletal underpinnings of black lava. Five days later, a north swell swings in and pushes the entire beach back into place.

The surfer's dare is to hook into this power. Throughout the winter months, nervous challengers arrive at Honolulu International Airport from around the world, armed with an arsenal of surfboards and varying degrees of determination. Mostly they're wondering how they'll stand up to Sunset Beach, Banzai Pipeline, and Waimea Bay—surfing's sacred big-wave trinity.

Sunset Beach is the great equalizer, the most consistent spot on the North Shore. It ropes in dwarf power-swells, neurotic wind-swells, shifty two-direction swells—anything under 20 feet—and domesticates them just enough to be ridden.

The Banzai Pipeline is a hair-trigger wave that jumps and spins like a tornado. The singular object of surfing Pipeline is to see how deep within the mouth of the tornado you can position yourself and still come out: seven seconds inside a primal scream.

Waimea Bay is a genetic freak. Relative to the rest of the North Shore, the normal wave at Waimea is unremarkable. But from 20 feet on—at which point Foo and Bradshaw call it "real"—all attention moves to Waimea. Sunset and Pipeline are washed out. Waimea's the last break still in play. Radio deejays put the word out, AM and FM, on the hour, every hour. Cars pull off the highway onto dirt shoulders—tourists in shiny Avis compacts, locals in rusted-out bombs—and the lounging gallery gets up to a thousand strong on a sunny weekend afternoon. The perimeter vibes are festive, everyone digging the free dramatics.

At 30 feet, the bay's infrastructure starts to bend, and the 20-or-so Waimea regulars begin to look for a last ride in. At 35 feet, the bay overloads. The next bump in size brings on the psychotic wail of the North Shore evacuation sirens, and soon the beaches are deserted.

A few hours later, nature begins to unwind. When the surf eases down to 35 feet, the big-wave regulars come back around.

The original regular, the first man to ride Waimea Bay, in the winter of 1957, was Greg Noll. "Back then, there was a mystique about the place," says Noll, now a commercial fisherman living in Northern California. "Waimea was a real taboo deal. We used to come over from the west side and surf Sunset. If Sunset washed out, we'd drive by Waimea, stop, and check it out. We'd be standing there on the point, and I'd be hyping everybody to go out and try it. I was 18, just talking shit, mostly.

"But one day we drove by and it was just fantastic. Big and smooth, just perfect Waimea. So we paddled out and sat in the channel and really chicken-shitted it out for a while. Then we started moving over toward the point a little, inching in, and I finally caught the first wave. We just started surfing the place.

"Then I looked up and saw all these people on the far side of the bay there, right where the road bends. All the folks from Haleiwa were driving out to see what was happening, you know, 'Look at the crazy haoles!' And to this day, there's an old guy who runs a gas station in Haleiwa—I see him whenever I go back—and its, 'Ah, you crazy guy Greg Noll! I remember the day you surf Waimea, first time!'"

Today it's an eclectic group that hangs out at Waimea. There's Peter Cole, a 57-year-old systems analyst with the avuncular charm of a James Stewart. And Brock Little, the 20-year-old supernova with the MTV exterior wrapped neatly around a caveman heart. And Owl Chapman, a rail-thin holdover from the psychedelic recesses of the early seventies, who likes to lean toward people he doesn't know and whisper: "Man, I've ridden waves they've never even dreamed of."

The power draws them in. Waimea Bay's brute strength is a backwoods salve on late- eighties technosurfing: a counterweight to the kinetic, zap-attack style favored by the small-wave mainstream. Waimea strips the entire act down to a single, primitive challenge: Make it or get smothered. In truth, there are 10,000 subtleties in technique, board design, and physical and mental preparation. But all the fine points are lost while watching a fly-speck of humanity launch himself over the ledge, push up into a crude safety squat, and angle a ten-foot spear straight across the guts of the beast. It's dinosaur hunting on the eve of the 21st century.

Foo and Bradshaw never had the raw talent or competitive obsession needed to stay on the professional surfing circuit and make any kind of run at the world title.

Instead, the two opted for the freelance life. Each earned a little more than $30,000 in 1987, half of which comes from surf-company sponsorships, the rest from various surf-related ventures: Bradshaw makes his own line of surfboards, and Foo runs a string of surf-vacation rental units along the North Shore. Both pick a sincere tone when talking about how underpaid they are, but it doesn't wash. A steady nine-to-five gig, even at ten times what they're making now, would make them bitter. Everything in life falls around this: freedom to surf.

The professional surfing world tour is a far different animal than the playground scene at Waimea Bay. It is timed heats, ratings printouts, and plastic bunting.

Tom Curren, the world champion—and his sporting kind—are pop heroes to legions of nut-brown, sun-bleached-hair kids. But for a subculture that worships at the altar of machismo, deity status goes to the big-wave men like Bradshaw and Foo. A number of less-experienced surfers have died at Waimea, and others have had their minds bent to some degree from prolonged hold-downs.

A surf-world fact: Ken Bradshaw and Mark Foo aren't scared. Beyond plain survival in the world's biggest ridable waves, each man has hammered out space for interpretive performance.

Bradshaw is the traditionalist. His surfing technique is strength on strength, powerful and methodical. His arrival at Waimea came years before his younger antagonist's, and his ranking position in the surfing hierarchy was built wave after wave, year after year, and carefully cemented with steadfast regard for tradition and legacy. Dues have been paid.

Foo is the aggressive newcomer. His approach to Waimea is based on finesse and touch, not strength. He has little use for the legend and lore of Waimea. For five years now, he's ran roughshod over the Bay's time-honored protocol, and as soon as he had everyone's attention, he proclaimed that he was, in fact, the best surfer at Waimea. Better than Bradshaw.

Since 1975, Bradshaw, 35, and Foo, 30, have lived and surfed within two miles of each other. Proximity may be the chief reason why their rivalry has not become a full-blown feud. Day-by-day existence is smoother when you're not duking it out with your neighbor.

Chest-hair tweaking aside, age has brought a certain civility to their face-to-face meetings. Still, when the two are separated, it's no trick at all to get one sniping at the other.

Bradshaw: "Just the way he warms up, before he surfs. Down there at the edge of the water, this big public display, like 'Here I go, everyone. I'm getting warmed up now.'"

Foo: "There's some resentment, I think. Right when Kenny starts to get some real attention for what he's doing at Waimea, all of a sudden I'm out in the lineup with him. And making more money at it, too. I know what his sponsors pay."

The two would be a curious pair if they did get along. Dressed up properly and posed side by side, they might look like some ill-conceived World Unity poster: the rough-hewn lumberjack with the anvil jaw and barrel chest, the Asian-born gymnast with the nonexistent hips and impassive eyes. At 5-foot-8 and 135 pounds, Foo is four inches smaller and 50 pounds lighter than Bradshaw.

Both characters have an honest macho appeal, and their act would play in most mainstream sports. Against the theatrical backdrop of Waimea Bay, however, their rift takes on real weight.

"December 3rd, last year." Ken Bradshaw's knees pop as he squats down in the middle of his tiny living room and deals a stack of oversize photographs into proper sequence, one-two-three-four, top to bottom.

"It was midday, maybe one o'clock, when this came through. A big, black one." Bradshaw's looking at the first blowup. "And it started to stand up out there, the wave of the day, just tremendous, and everybody paddled like hell. Just headed out to sea. I held back, waited, and went for my spot. That's why, when this thing finally hit the reef . . . .” He stops and points. "See, these guys are over here, and I'm down here."

Bradshaw is centered in the frame, one of four men stuck to the front of the wave like lizards on a warm boulder. Bradshaw's one-third of the way down the face, paddling a huge bright-orange surfboard. One arm is buried deep in the water, almost to the shoulder, the other is arcing around, ready to dig in.

Three surfers are around Bradshaw. Two are trying to get into the wave, behind him. One is paddling up the face, just below him.

Still looking at the first photo, Bradshaw points to the two surfers behind him. "Here's Charlie and Clyde, trying. Clyde wants it, but he doesn't have the speed. Or maybe he just said, 'No dice.' He's about ready to back out. Charlie's still looking pretty good."

Bradshaw's finger drops two inches. "Here's Foo-Foo."

Mark Foo is paddling up the face in the opposite direction, closest to Bradshaw.

Everyone's position shifts in the second shot. Clyde has backed out, as predicted. Bradshaw and Charlie are still giving chase.

"Charlie has the right idea, he's just a little too far back. See, they all ran too far out. That's the thing about Waimea; the lineup's just this one, tiny spot. You have to sit on that spot no matter how big the wave is."

He looks at the third photo—the key photo. Charlie's gone and Foo's still scrambling over the face. Bradshaw is the last challenger. "This is where I should have stood up. Right here." He pauses. He shifts a little on the balls of his feet, staring. After two decades in and out of the ocean, the skin below Bradshaw's eyes is beginning to grid.

"Foo should've been yelling me on. Charlie was yelling, but I couldn't hear him.

"If Charlie would've been here," he points at Foo, "I would've gone. No doubt about it. You're paddling hard as you can, looking down this incredible thing—and this wave filled up the whole fuckin' bay—and you need that push. It makes a difference when someone's checking out what you're getting into, yelling, 'Go! Go!'"

He looks at the final shot. The wave is just beginning to break, and has rolled past all players except one. Bradshaw's directly on top of the crest, straddling his board, legs anchored to halt his forward momentum. His face howls up through the grainy texture of the print. "I'm just screaming at the top of my lungs. Screaming at myself for not going." The wave will go unridden.

He points back to photo three, the missed opportunity, and unconsciously takes the blame off Foo. "You only arrive at this place a few times in your life. I had the chance and I didn't take it."

Bradshaw scoops up the photographs and lightly bounces them off the carpet to square them up. He stands and tosses the floppy stack on a nearby coffee table. "So I got these shots blown up, real big, and they're going on the wall. A message to myself."

One person in the world calls him "Foo-Foo" to his face. Everyone else calls him Mark. Mark Sheldon Foo is seven-eighths Chinese, one-eighth French, and a self-described loner. He's 30 but looks younger.

Foo was raised "middle-class American" in Hawaii, began surfing in 1970, and met with mild success a few years later as an amateur competitor.

He moved to the North Shore in '75 and had a stunted fling with the pro circuit in '77 and '78. Foo rightfully cites high outlay and an exhausting, 11-month-a-year tour schedule as reasons for quitting the circuit. A third reason, not voiced, is that in small-wave conditions Foo's skills are adequate, not brilliant.

In 1979 Foo became what would later be called a "photo pro," working closely with the surf media to get coverage in the surf magazines and movies. He turned out to be extremely photogenic. Over the next decade, Foo was featured six times on the cover of the two major surfing magazines.

Less ambitious surfers bitched among themselves about the attention Foo received. "No cameras, no Foo," they said. Foo responded by working harder. Various surfboard, clothing, and wet suit manufacturers had begun to pay him monthly salaries to get their products displayed, and Foo was doing his job.

In '83, after eight seasons of apprenticeship at Sunset Beach, Waimea called. That same year, following a decade-long fixation on professionalism and high-performance small-wave surfing, the surf media began to turn its attention back to the primal appeal of big-wave riding.

Foo immediately set out to bridge the gap between the image-conscious new professionals and the lost generation of older surfers that had stayed on at Waimea. The "bearded crew," Foo called them.

Bradshaw had, in fact, already brought bright colors and promotional logos to Waimea. But he also had the macho cut of the old guard, and a revered, tough-but-humble approach. In 1984, just as Foo was beginning to roll, Bradshaw was marking his tenth season at Waimea, a proud classicist, a believer in tradition.

Mark Foo didn't owe Waimea a thing. Alone, he set off on an all-fronts attack, and over the next two years flew over the stratified Waimea skill levels like a gymnast on a tumbling pass. His rise was unprecedented. In 1983, he was a sideline player. By 1986, he was a main attraction.

The turning point in Foo's career came on the afternoon of January 18, 1985—thanks in large part to his own written chronology of the day's events, printed in surf magazines from the United States to Australia and Japan. January 18 was also a catalyst for the Foo-Bradshaw rivalry.

The swell that day was big, thick, and on the rise. At daybreak, the waves were 15 to 18 feet high. By three o'clock, just before Foo paddled out, the size had nearly doubled. Breakers were moving into the bay from a sharp westerly angle and seemed to be holding up an extra beat before breaking. The pause was significant, as the crest of each wave would steady itself, then suddenly loop forward to create an awful, swirling black cavity of a tube. The hole would spin and yawn for two or three seconds, then disappear into an amorphous churn of foam.

Ken Bradshaw had been surfing Waimea since 11:00 AM, first with a handful of regulars, then alone. As the bay began to overload, Bradshaw played cat and mouse. He'd scout out the unrideable close-out waves as they bounced in the distance, and paddle toward the middle of the bay to avoid them. All clear, he'd angle back to his normal lineup and wait for the 25- to 30-foot leftovers. Finding a rhythm, he picked off a dozen huge drops, then was finally catapulted at the base of a 30-footer. His board was swept in.

Bradshaw began to swim for the eastern elbow between the beach and the point—Waimea's only exit point—but got caught in a riptide 30 yards off the sand. He was quickly swept to the western point where he watched two-story, shore-break waves beat dead-on against volcanic rock. He changed course and swam diagonally against the rip—a quarter-mile out to sea, back to his original point of departure. Again, he angled for the eastern corner. And again, the rip swept him to the west.

Bradshaw headed out a second time. By now he'd been swimming for nearly an hour, constantly diving under huge waves, and the North Shore fire station rescue helicopter was nowhere in sight. He figured he had strength enough for one more circuit around the bay, maybe two. On his next pass, Bradshaw hugged the eastern point as closely as possible, felt the rip, resisted, then put his head down and spent everything, charging the final 30 yards to the beach.

Chest heaving, Bradshaw walked up the sand to the scattered applause of some 200 spectators. At that moment, Mark Foo was just beginning to run down from his house.

The ocean momentarily calmed down as Foo paddled out. Three other surfers joined him. For ten minutes the small group sat tight and uneasily wondered what had happened to the surf. Up on the point, the gallery answered with a warning chorus of whistles, screams, and blaring car horns.

Rounding the top of a small swell, Foo got his first look at destiny's offering, still two miles distant. An uneven brush stroke across the entire horizon, the approaching wave looked bruised and dark as it slowly dragged itself up to full height.

It was the freak of freaks. Nothing like it had ever been seen at Waimea. The wave measured approximately 80 feet from base to crest, and as it capped over with grotesque deliberation, the entire shoreline trembled.

The four trapped surfers abandoned their boards and burrowed deep into the lower reaches of the bay. Some 25 feet below the surface, Foo turned over, opened his eyes, and looked up at the psychedelic ceiling formed by the passing wave. Riotous white clouds fell apart a few feet above him. He held his position for about 15 seconds and waited for a green tunnel to appear, marking a clear-water passage back to the surface.

All four surfers had gone through a similar evasive routine—dive, turn, and wait— and they popped up one by one through a snowy blanket of residual foam. No waves immediately followed. Incredibly, Foo's board was floating a few feet away, and as the other three surfers began swimming for shore, he pondered the next move.

The rescue helicopter arrived and began to pluck the surfers from the bay, depositing them onto the sand.

A half-mile offshore, Foo waved the helicopter off. His plan was to do as Bradshaw had done earlier: stick and run, stay wide of the impossible waves, then cheat toward the point and catch one to the beach. He figured the monster wave had been a solo. Three consecutive attempts to reach shore were thwarted by oncoming set waves, which sent Foo sprinting back toward the middle of the bay. On his fourth attempt, with the helicopter hovering overhead, Foo ignored the distant bounce of yet another set and tacked an extra dozen yards closer to the point. He paddled for a leftover wave and came up short. The following wave was the opening salvo of the approaching set: a threatening giant, maybe 35 feet, as big as any wave ever ridden. It backed off momentarily. With some clever paddling, Foo was able to slide into a makeshift takeoff position. After five strokes he pushed to his feet just as the entire wall sucked to concave, and immediately went into free-fall. Twenty-five feet later his surfboard glanced off the face, and Foo was pitched to the base like a flat stone. The curl, some 15 feet thick, crushed Foo into a field of white noise: no control, no reference, spinning like a toy gyroscope kicked down a flight of stairs. He heard his surfboard snap in two, and felt his wristwatch twist off his hand. Bright points of light popped on his eyelids, then faded into thick gray.

When he finally popped to the surface, the helicopter was directly overhead, weaving in and out of focus, edged in shimmering rainbow colors. Foo reached for the rescue basket, pulled himself in, deep-breathing as his senses realigned.

He stepped from the basket to the beach. The crowd applauded, and Bradshaw jogged over. The two surfers slapped fives and looked back out at Waimea Bay.

It was their closest moment. Later that week, Foo would record his experience and mail the story to magazines worldwide. Reading the published accounts, Bradshaw would quickly judge Foo's version to be exaggerated. Not to mention horribly presumptuous. After all, Foo rode just one wave, and didn't even make it to the bottom. Nonetheless, his reputation had grown exponentially. A rivalry was born.

Foo didn't shy away from the confrontation. In a December 1986 interview with Surfer magazine, he said: "In terms of performance, I don't think anyone surfs Waimea better than I do." He followed with a direct shot at Ken Bradshaw: "To me, good surfing is making it look easy. Kenny's approach has always been a make-it-look-hard approach."

Mark Foo is in the dining area of his house, browsing the front page of the 

. In the bathroom, Shari Saiki, Foo's companion for the past three years, flicks on the blow-dryer.

Outside, the wind whispers and howls, and brings a sputtering procession of rain squalls. Upstaged, the Pacific hunkers down and stays quiet. It's November 14 and Waimea should break any day now.

 and the corners of his mouth rise slightly. "I just remembered how I first met Bradshaw," he says. "It was at Sunset, maybe 1977, and the waves were just wailing—huge tubes, super powerful, and that morning I broke two boards. That was it, that was all I had back then. So I swam in and was sitting in Bernie Baker's front yard—this was when everyone hung out at Bernie's, surfboards all over the place—and Bradshaw gets out of the water and starts walking over. That was right when I was sort of coming on, and he'd seen me getting good waves that year and he didn't like it. He'd been giving me some stink-eye, that kind of thing. And he was a mad dog back then, full-on, biting people's surfboards, chasing them out of the water and stuff.

"THE DIVIDED RULERS OF WAIMEA BAY," BY MATT WARSHAW (1988)

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