Michael Greenwald
By: Michael James Greenwald
I’m very rarely startled by corporate greed.
Yet, I read a story this morning in April’s issue of the Rolling Stone (exceptionally written by Paul Solotaroff) about a surfing savant named Clay Marzo that caused tears to come to my eyes and my hand to slam the magazine to the bathroom floor (no offense, Rolling Stone).
Clay Marzo (on the left) describing a break.
For those of you who don’t know (I assume that’s most of you), as I didn’t know up until about 20 minutes ago, Clay Marzo reportedly is to surfing what Tiger Woods had been to golf (pre-skanky hoe fiasco), what Tony Hawk is to skate-boarding and X-gaming in general, what, to a certain extent, Michael Jordan was to basketball. That is to say, Clay Marzo is a once in a generational type of talent who has the ability to lift the entire sport of surfing onto his bronzed, taunt shoulders and carry it nearer to the upper echelon of sports mainstream: football, baseball, basketball, hockey, golf.
Therein lies the problem and the irony.
Clay Marzo has Asperger’s syndrome.
And so, to a certain extent, does the sport he excels at.
Surfing derives its roots from ancient Polynesian culture in Hawaii, which predated European contact with these indigenous people. Surfing has always contained a deep-rooted spirituality, of men and women temporarily using one of nature’s greatest powers–waves–to achieve a thrill. Analogous to how a man or woman might feel riding on the back of a horse or flying through the air, surfing, at its purest level, is a symbiotic relationship between man and nature.
Thus, surfing has always had a deep spirituality. For most people it’s an escape; from pressures of jobs, money, family, school to the purity of being one with the ocean.
From an early age (early as one years old surfing on the front of his dad Gino’s board) Clay Marzo found an innate symbiosis with the water. He entered his first contest at five and was quickly dominating a new generation of Maui surfers intent on taking the techniques and tricks they’d seen on X-games competition and emulating them in the ocean. But when I say Clay Marzo “quickly dominated a new generation of Maui surfers” I am reiterating corporate-driven, greed-centered societal speak, because Clay Marzo didn’t surf, doesn’t surf with such ambition in mind.
Those labels, that ambition is thrust upon him.
The Master was fond of painting life in its natural state.
Clay Marzo is an artist. His moves on-top of his board is like a painter brushing across canvas. (I’ve surfed a handful of times in my life and nearly once got up on my board on a three-foot wave and I am absolutely awed watching Clay Marzo surf). But what if said artist painted some of the most amazing paintings in history, and preferred to hang them around his own house? What if, even buoyed by art dealers, agents, and potential sellers, promising profits of incredible wealth, said artist refused to sell his masterpiece paintings? What if Claude Monet painted his Water Lilies series and stored the paintings in his attic?
Because that’s where this discussion is going. The Rolling Stone article and a riveting doc-movie by Jamie Tierney Just Add Water raise the question that lies just below the choppy surface here: why can’t a savant be a savant? Why must he pollute his art-form and his life to corporate greed?
Marketing-contrived symbiosis of Corporate America and Natural Purity. All on one poster.
In the article Quiksilver–the giant surfing and snowboarding gear company–plays the role of Corporate gremmie. Having signed Clay Marzo to a six-figure contract at the age of 15, Quiksilver (as is common with corporate sponsors in surfing) required their new surfer to travel the world at the company’s whim like some sort of carnival act to perform for crowds and camera crews shooting videos that will be featured on websites and sold in stores. In addition, he’s required to do exhaustive rounds of media junkets, talking up the products that Quiksilver sells, like board shorts, surf boards, sunscreen, whatever.
These surfers turn into products, sacrificing the purity of surfing for multimillion dollar advances of dough.
Nine time World Champion Kelly Slater
Surfing’s-Jack-Nicklaus-or-Magic-Johnson Kelly Slater has a slew of corporate sponsors. So does Andy Irons. Mark Occhilupo, Dane Reynolds…
But Clay Marzo turned out to be a different kind of cat.
Interviewed once during a promo for his sponsor’s line of clothes, Marzo was asked how the board shorts felt (a question, no doubt, fed to the reporter by the company).
“They should be a little longer, maybe with better material, too. And I don’t like the color. Why? Do you want me to like them?”
He blurts things out in conversation, rubs his hands together maniacally, chants rap songs to himself, and pulls out clumps of his long blond hair when anxious or nervous or both.
Asperger’s syndrome is an autistic spectrum disorder, where people who have it show difficulty in social interaction. Dr. Tony Attwood, an Asperger’s Syndrome expert, might have said it best.
“You don’t suffer from Asperger’s, you suffer from other people.”
I would argue the same for the art of surfing. Outside people, business people; leeches, mooches, hanger-ons, gremmies, kooks.
In a time when Corporate America appears to have reached long tentacles into so many of the pure magic of life and changed it, warped it, in a way, where it is no longer recognizable for the pure entity it once was (I cite Corporate America’s corruption of grunge music in the 1990’s as a prime example) I fear the same will be (if it already hasn’t been) true of surfing.
The quote that actually drove me to drive the Rolling Stone mag (once again, nothing against Rolling Stone) into the tile floor and nearly caused me to fall off the porcelain God was, after Clay Marzo’s manager Strider Wasilewski pushed Marzo’s mother and he, at eighteen years old, to go to California for a week of testing for autism and received a positive result for the syndrome, his sponsors (Quiksilver had been in the process of dropping Marzo from their payroll not weeks before) informed their surfing prodigy to, “Forget doing promos and the junior tour–just go surf and have fun.”
Epitome of Corporate America's altruistic spirit. Yes, it's a skeleton of a Dodo bird.
Okay. This, on the surface, sounds like a big corporation flexing a rare altruistic spirit, right? (See picture to the right)
Duck-dive with me, will you? Lets examine what lies beneath.
Here’s my reenactment set in Quiksilver’s board room of the strategy-session involving three Quiksilver Big-Wigs, after Strider Wasilewski came back to the company with the pronouncement of Clay Marzo’s Asperger diagnosis.
Big-Wig Number One: Asperger’s huh?
Big-Wig Number Two: Yep.
Big-Wig Number One: That the one where they bang their head against the wall and chew off their fingers?
Big-Wig Number Three: No, that’s autism. Asperger’s is similar, but much less severe, where the sufferer has trouble with social interaction.
Big-Wig Number One: That explains the kid slamming our board shorts.
Big-Wig Number Two: Sure does. Should we cut him loose?
Big-Wig Number One [incredulous (I picture him with a handle-bar mustache chomping a cigar)]: Cut him loose? Are you serious? Do you realize the kind of opportunity this could be for us? Quiksilver with a surfing-kid with Asperger’s? I mean, the marketing potential is incredible! Mainstream media will clamor for this story.
Big-Wig Number Two: I see what you’re saying. Like ESPN, Fox Sports, Sports Illustrated.
Big-Wig Number Three: Hey, maybe we could even get Rolling Stone to do a story?
Big-Wig Number Two: You think? They’ve never cared about surfing before.
Big-Wig Number One [rubbing hands together]: Oh, they will now [evil laugh].
Big-Wig Number Two [evil laugh].
Big-Wig Number Three [evil laugh].
[END]
Clay Marzo has a choice. He can either choose to live out his days surfing the waves he loves in relative obscurity and peace. Or he can bend to the pressure to give into the ambition of those who surround him that he become the beacon which leads surfing as a sport into the corporate polluted mainstream.
Surfing has a choice, too. Either it can remain in the niche it has shredded for itself, in tune with the spiritual basis tapped into by the Polyesians hundreds of years ago. Or it too can give-in to the drivers that wish to see it become even a greater money-generating machine that it already has.
Surfing,
Clay Marzo,
It’s red-or-blue-pill choice time.
–MJG
When not severing and feasting upon the hands he hopes will feed him, Michael James Greenwald fights off his daily dose of depression by taking out his depression on Corporate America. He’s a student at Story Studio Chicago, applying for a Ragdale Residency in the fall, and considering allowing UT, Austin a second chance at deliverance (Corporate-sponsored education institutions here I come!!!), by accepting him into their MFA program for 2011 (HOOK ‘EM HORNS!!).
For now, he works in his family business of owning and operating bowling alleys in the South Suburbs of Chicago. He is also a fiction writer, with a short story collection Stories from a Bowling Alley and a novel The Rainbow Child due to be published in the next several years. You can read his blogs at sleepsunshine and his confessions every Sunday on his group blog at parkinglotconfessional.com. Venture to his Facebook page or feel free to email him with any comments or suggestions for further topics, or if you had any interest in being a guest blogger on either one of his sites.
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