"Thunder from the Sea," by longtime motorsports writer Sam Moses, was Sports Illustrated's cover story for the week of March 8, 1982. It's a long article, probably close to 7,000 words, on the history and mythos of what SI editors anachronistically call The Banzai Pipeline. Moses gives us the full dose of hyperbole. A surfer wiping out at Pipeline will be "churned and whipped, like a rag doll with a firehose trained on it." Most of them pop up, but Moses tells us that "North Shore surfers whisper about strange disappearances at the Pipeline, and imply that the bodies are still down there." Those same North Shore surfers then whisper to each other about how they just trolled the New York reporter.

On the plus side, Moses does an excellent job at profiling the Pipeline headliners, including Phil Edwards and Gerry Lopez. The Lopez section anchors the second half of the article, and is presented here in full.

Gerry Lopez, 33, of mixed Japanese, German and Spanish descent, is considered the best surfer ever to come down the Pipeline. Like no surfer since Phil Edwards, Lopez, who is 5' 8" and 140 pounds, has become a cult figure. He’s the only surfer to have parlayed the Pipeline into a living, and a handsome one at that. He endorses Pipeline-label clothing, makes promotional surfing expeditions to exotic, tropical spots and recently finished making a movie in Spain—he costarred with Arnold Schwarzenegger in 

. Lopez suspects he was cast because the director, John Milius, is a surfer and wanted a kindred soul around during the six months’ shooting.

Rory Russell, who has been surfing the Pipeline half his 28 years and has ridden it as well as anyone over the last half-dozen, doesn’t shave under his lower lip because Lopez doesn’t shave under his. “Gerry Lopez is my idol, my hero and the greatest surfer that ever surfed the Pipeline,” says Russell.

Lopez, too, has his idols: the North Shore pioneers. “I look at those guys and think how great they were,” he says. “They remind me of the mountain men of the Old West. Those North Shore guys were real watermen.”

But Lopez isn’t a follower. He’s one of the few remaining surfers to whom the pastime is still more of an art than a sport. A native of Honolulu, he moved from the North Shore to Maui in 1974 to escape the crowd—surfers, in particular. His appearances at the Pipeline have been spotty since 1975, but he hasn’t really left it. He’s part owner of a three-story cedar house smack-dab on the Pipeline; the two rooms on the second floor are his. “I can always come back here on special days and get a few waves,” Lopez says. “That’s really all I need now. That seems like enough.” Lopez, a goofyfoot, is the only surfer ever to make the Pipeline look easy. Never the most radical, he’s still the best when the tubes are 10 to 12 feet and perfect. He has a remarkable ability to stay cool in the pocket. He has been filmed inside long tubes casually wiping the spray from his eyes. “The faster I go out there, the slower things seem to happen,” he says.

But Lopez has taken his lumps. His board once gave him two black eyes, and another time he was unable to walk for two weeks because his tailbone was cracked after a free fall that ended in two feet of water in the trough. He laughs at the notion that he’s the all-time king of the Pipeline. “The king of the Pipeline is the wave,” he says. “The best anyone can do is survive it.”

But that’s exactly it: What makes Lopez different from the other Mr. Pipelines is that he got away with it. Says Edwards, “I know Gerry. I see him all the time, and we don’t even talk about that place. But he must have some secret. He doesn’t seem to me like any foolhardy daredevil. I think he must have figured out something nobody else ever knew.” Lopez chuckles at that notion. “The whole trick is catching the wave at the right place at the right moment,” he says. “It sets up the whole ride. If I’ve figured out anything different, that’s it. It seemed obvious to me. It’s just a matter of being in touch with it. There’s virtually an ‘X’ out there in the water to tell you where to catch the wave. I paddle around, and when I see a swell coming, I go right for the X. The wave and I meet right there, and I take off and catch it, while the other guys turn and see that I’m gone and just say, That asshole!”

“But what really makes the difference,” he adds, “is learning to stay away from the waves that can hurt you.”

One Sunday last December, the swells at the Pipeline were rising higher than the horizon. Whitecaps rolled over the outside reef, and by the time the waves reached the lineup they were inconsistent and threatening. Lopez sat in the living room of his apartment in the three-story house—called the Pipeline Hilton by surfers—with one eye on the Bengals-49ers game on television and the other on the sea. Occasionally he would walk to the balcony and peer between the coconut palms at the surf. No one was in the lineup, but surfers were crouched on the beach, watching and waiting.

All morning no one dared to go out. Lopez continued to watch football, lying on the couch, so relaxed that every breeze from the balcony threatened to roll him onto the floor. He smoked a joint, only passingly interested in the game, and never took his eyes off the waves for more than a minute or so. Finally, one surfer went into the water; three others followed. “Cannon fodder,” Lopez muttered. “I might have thought about going out 10 years ago, but no way now. I wouldn’t even consider it. I can wait. There will be a better day. I don’t need to take those chances. I don’t go for the 50-50s anymore. The 75-25s, okay, but not the 50-50s.”

If it had mattered to Lopez to prove that he was still Mr. Pipeline, he would have been first out there, of course. How they would have talked about that; how that would have perpetuated his reputation. But perfect surfers don’t have the same competitive drive that most other athletes do. What makes Lopez surf-idol material is that he has just the right amount of indifference and just the right amount of aesthetic awareness. It wouldn’t have looked neat to surf those imperfect waves.

There had been a lot of commotion that week because of the Masters, a professional contest held at the Pipeline each December for the past 10 years and one of the events on the International Pro Surfing circuit. Though he has won the event twice, Lopez hadn’t entered this time. The idea of surfing whatever waves broke on the day chosen by some promoter displeased him; besides, he wasn’t really interested in having his surfing judged. Late on the afternoon before the Masters, he watched some of the pros and semi-pros, as well as a few hot young local surfers, riding the Pipe. The waves were mellow six-footers. Mind-surfers squatted in the sand, their erect boards casting long shadows in the low sun. There were a few empty green beer bottles and rusty cans strewn about the beach. An old yellow Lab stalked a piece of driftwood. A girl wearing a bikini that could have fit inside a walnut shell high-stepped in the soft sand. Coconut palms leaned toward the ocean, their roots exposed by the storm tides. There was a pile of decaying palm fronds and two broken surfboards like snapped jousting poles.

Lopez came down from the patio of the Pipeline Hilton wearing a red wetsuit vest, his signature board under his arm. “Got to get one good ride before the sun goes down,” he said, trotting toward the surf. He paddled out to the lineup and caught a small wave as a warmup. He got tubed on his second ride, the only surfer to catch a tube in nearly an hour, but his board popped out of the whitewater without him when the tube closed out. “Lopez!” someone shouted from the beach, pointing toward him as he swam after it.

For the rest of the afternoon he caught ride after ride, many of them tubes. He caught many more waves than the others. One of his tuberides was so long and thrilling he must have heard harpsichord music inside it. It threatened to close out on him two or three times, but he tucked like a downhill skier and sped on, his form blurry through the clear wall of water, and was spit back into daylight the instant the wave crumbled. The sun, veiled by one last tube, set behind Kaena Point, but the surfers stayed out until the moon rose and lit up the sandbar under them. Later that week, when the moon was full, they would be surfing at 1 a.m.

LOPEZ IN SPORTS ILLUSTRATED: "THE FASTER I GO, THE SLOWER THINGS SEEM TO HAPPEN" (1982)

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