Paradise Found
Beach-bound, buff, and beautiful, surfer Laird Hamilton and his athletic wife Gabrielle Reece share a competitive spirit, a devotion to their daughter ... and a bottle of Pinot at the end of the day.
By Mark Seal
Photography by Andrew Eccles
Stylist: Sara Ell
Groomer: Felice Miller
The body of Laird Hamilton, 42, the king of big-wave surfing, is in Manhattan, but his mind is on Maui. Landlocked in a downtown loft, where metrosexual men and pale women prepare blue cocktails for his media launch as the face of Cool Water cologne, Laird, whose name is Gaelic for lord, is monitoring the titanic swells off a perilous beach in Hawaii, where he is free to immediately fly should the waves reach 30 feet.
It's known as the "30 foot clause," and if you want Hamilton — and everyone from editors to advertisers to filmmakers wants him these days — you understand that his appearances are dictated by the tides.
"We're in a window of it happening," he says. "There's a big swell right now." If the wind and the moon conspire, then who would he be if he didn't drop everything and rush toward the surf?
"Meet a man who is to his sport what Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, and Lance Armstrong are to theirs," said Leslie Stahl in a 60 Minutes profile of Hamilton. "His competition stands 35 feet tall and comes at him at 30 miles per hour." The camera cuts to footage of Hamilton riding the face of an unimaginably huge wave, a 6'3", 210-pound block of Carrara marble who has spent his life conquering the most treacherous architecture of the sea.
A lifelong daredevil who once paddled across the English Channel for fun, he now rides the biggest waves on earth, in both Hawaii and Tahiti, where the monsters break on dangerous and shallow coral beds.
"Laird is flat out surfing's biggest, boldest brave," says Sam George, former editor of Surfer magazine. "He's the best big-wave surfer in the world today."
I'm thinking Hamilton is pretty amazing.
Then, his wife walks in.
At 6'3", Gabrielle Reece is as equally buff as her husband. In the mid '90s, she was perhaps the world's most famous female athlete. The most famous face of professional women's beach volleyball, "she likes to hit the ball hard and put it back in somebody's face," her coach once said.
In 2000, she transferred that ferocity to professional golf, so devoted to her game that it almost ended her marriage. Growing up in oceanside communities around the world, she spent her gypsy childhood living on boats and pursuing perfection in sports. Like her husband, she's been anointed one of People magazine's Most Beautiful, and, like Hamilton, she's ever ready for action. She once turned down $35,000 for two days of modeling because she had a volleyball match. Gracing the pages of magazines ranging from Outside to Playboy to Bazaar and hosting network sports shows like The Extremists with Gabrielle Reece in the past and, now, specials for the likes of The Discovery Channel, she's the death-defying "Big Girl," as she titled her 1997 autobiography, Big Girl in the Middle (Crown Publishers), drag-racing, white-water kayaking, sky diving, rock climbing, hang gliding and, perhaps her proudest accomplishment, giving birth to the couple's daughter, Reece, now 2.
The story of how they came together is a triumph in itself, victory over a commercial world that attempted to celebrate them for their beauty alone, a world that tried to seduce them into neglecting their goliath need to devote everything to perfection in sport.
"You can't make it up better than it really is," Hamilton says of his epic life. Born in San Francisco, he moved with his single mother to Hawaii when he was less than six months old. "I lived on the beach at Pipeline," he says, referring to the North Shore of Oahu legendary for its waves. "I got swept out to sea and rescued numerous times growing up, and saw the most aggressive surfers in the world surfing more or less in my front yard." The best was Bill Hamilton, who was 18 when the 4-year-old without a father decided that the greatest surfer of them all should be his dad.
"He was known for his beauty, his grace, and his style, and I gravitated toward him," Laird says of Bill Hamilton. "He'd see me playing in the tide pool in front of the beach where we lived and say, ‘Hey, do you want to go swim?' He'd body surf and I'd hold on to his back. I convinced him to come to my house; I had a plan to fix him up with my mom."
"I walked in and I was totally head over heels," Bill Hamilton told 60 Minutes of the moment he met Laird's mother, Joann. Within a year, they were married. When Laird turned 6, Bill took him to the 60-foot cliff at Waimea Falls, and Laird didn't have to ask his adopted father what to do. He leapt into the waterfall, and he's been leaping ever since. He describes himself as "genetically courageous," a "thrill seeker," hungry for "danger and the feeling of it," that precipitous moment of "calculated risk" between sport and doom, when you're riding the wave just before it crashes.
In high school, he spent every spare moment in the ocean and began receiving the first of a thousand stitches. "I've had five broken ankles, I've broken my arch, separated my shoulder," he says. "I've had a lot of damage over the years."
“ Like her husband, she's been anointed one of magazine's Most Beautiful, and, like Hamilton, she's ever ready for action. She once turned down $35,000 for two days of modeling because she had a volleyball match. ”
But danger can lurk in different forms. When he was 16, temptation entered his idyllic life. "I met a sports photographer who shot me surfing on Kauai, and he told a photographer who was shooting for men's fashion magazines, ‘You've got to see this kid!' " he remembers.
Transplanted from the ocean to the city and into magazines, Hamilton quit school and began posing. Brooke Shields did one of her first photo shoots with him, and his modeling future was bright; magazine editors, ad agencies, and corporations vied to put his face on their brands. The clamor was so loud, he could barely hear the sound of the surf.
"If people want to pay money to take pictures of you, that's great," Hamilton says, "but did I ever think I was going to be a model, that this was going to be my profession? Absolutely not. And I know Gabby wasn't that way, either. I don't think either Gabby or I felt we accomplished something because we got chosen because of how we looked. I mean, you're born that way. We've always been drawn toward doing things that brought us fulfillment, and, for me, nothing has ever been more fulfilling, other than family and love and children, than riding giant waves."
“ "We have ideas about how we want our child to be raised," says Hamilton. "We don't want to waste a lot of time on situations or things that don't bring us happiness and pleasure. ... We don't want to spend too much time in the traffic, or too much time away from each other, and we don't want to spend too much time not getting along." ”
Surfing's top superstar, he has appeared on myriad magazine covers, been endlessly honored by sports franchises like ESPN; appears in his own American Express commercial; and has starred in several films, including Riding Giants and, most recently, All Aboard the Crazy Train.
"Bigger, higher, faster," is how Hamilton describes his goals in surfing, which, he says, "is one of the few times when I feel totally whole."
When Gabrielle was 3, her 6'2" adventurous mother joined the circus, moving to Mexico City from Long Island to train dolphins. "She was a free spirit, and for whatever reason, was never able to realize her potential," Gabrielle writes in her autobiography. "In a way, [she] passed the baton to me, even if she dropped it at my feet."
Gabrielle was left to live with friends in Long Island until she was 7, when her mother sent for her. By the time she was in junior high school, living with her mom and stepfather in St. Petersburg, Florida, she was closing in on her ultimate height of 6'3" and the two paths of her future arose before her: First, her mother took her to a John Roberts Powers modeling school in a shopping mall; then, a boyfriend showed her the joys of basketball.
The modeling world beckoned first. But after her mother took one look at the wolf of an "agent" eager to whisk her off to Paris, the skyscraper girl stayed home and stuck with basketball, which eventually led her to volleyball. She was so adept at the net that she won an athletic scholarship to Florida State University, playing two seasons while vaulting between modeling assignments in New York. When she was a sophomore, Elle magazine christened her one of the five most beautiful women in the world. But she didn't let it go to her head.
"I would never go on a job during the season," she says. Still, she wasn't giving her game her all. While her teammates were in spring training, she was modeling in Milan. In 1991, when she was 21, she had left college and both pursuits were suffering. "I had no money," she writes in her book. "No one wanted me anymore."
She was living in Miami when a friend suggested she try beach volleyball. She soon went pro, and her two worlds merged when People magazine featured her in its Most Beautiful People issue, clutching a hot pink basketball on a white sand beach. She knew she had to make a choice: modeling or sports?
"I really connected with the sports lifestyle," she tells me in New York. "With my teammates, with practice, with being sweaty, with being one of the girls." And modeling? "One day they like blondes. The next day they hate blondes. One day they want you giant, the next day they want you petite. The lifestyle of training and my body being big and strong — I related to that more than I related to trying to be as thin and pretty as I could be. I just identified more with athletics. In sports, if I bust my butt, the result can match the input. It doesn't matter if somebody likes you or doesn't like you. When you're on the court, when you're playing, that's what's speaking."
By 1992, Reece abandoned the ephemeral world of modeling and focused everything on volleyball. Her single-minded devotion led her to Team Nike, the women's volleyball team sponsored by the sportswear giant. Dominating the net, she transformed four-woman beach volleyball into a legitimate sport. She was Nike's first female cross-training spokesperson, appeared in cutting-edge Nike ads, and the Nike shoe she helped design became the first woman's model to outsell the Air Jordan.
Her commitment to sports, especially to sports television, led her to Laird in 1995.
"I said it was love at first conversation," says Hamilton, who says that he's wary of beauty but a sucker for brains.
"There were no bells and lightning bolts," Reece says of their first meeting. "But then we went tandem surfing."
She had come to Hawaii to film an episode of The Extremists with Gabrielle Reece, her participatory show with daredevils of every stripe, including, she says, "wind surfing, hang gliding, sky diving, and tow surfing." Of course, there was only one man to see for tow surfing, the revolutionary but controversial act of being towed into the maelstrom of a wave too mammoth to swim into: Laird Hamilton, who invented it. While filming the segment, Hamilton took her tandem surfing, which, she says, "has an element of intimacy because you're on the same board."
Two days later, they were sky diving together. "She said I was the only guy she ever saw who leaped out of the plane," he says. "She told me, ‘Normally, I have to push the guys out.' "
After Reece met Hamilton, she skipped a lunch meeting with John F. Kennedy in New York, and Hamilton did the impossible: He momentarily forgot about the waves. A week after they met, he took the red-eye from Maui to Malibu to move in with Reece.
"It was all or nothing," she says.
Married two years later in 1997, they were more than mentally and physically compatible. Best of all, their sports seasons meshed: surfing in winter; beach volleyball in summer. "In January, we were in Hawaii so he could surf, and then we'd migrate in April or May so I could prepare for my season in California, traveling around the country and then head back to Hawaii in October for his season," says Reece.
“ "Bigger, higher, faster," is how Hamilton describes his goals in surfing, which, he says, "is one of the few times when whole." ”
They set up a bicoastal existence: a winter home in Maui and a summer home in Malibu, each near the beach, each designed as the couple has designed their lives: function over style, sport over modeling, with the most popular room being the gym.
"It's my job to train and to be in shape," says Reece. "It's more intense living and being with Laird. He has a lot of energy and in a way it motivates me even more. Because everything he does is full bore."
"I like to be outside with my football cleats, running big dirt hills or dragging a log," Hamilton says. "Last summer, I rode a 90-pound mountain bike all summer on these hill climbs, doing 2.5- to three-hour circuits. I don't think she wants to hurt herself like I do. I'm a little more abusive in my training."
Hamilton's workout partner is the appropriately named Don Wildman, 72, one of the founders of Bally's Total Fitness, whom Laird calls "my inspiration, my guru."
"He lives near me in Malibu and we do all kinds of crazy things together," Hamilton says.
Hamilton typically is in bed by 8 p.m., Reece by 9:30. Before that, the food and, frequently, wine flow freely. "I love steak," he says. "I pretty much eat anything except wheat: no pasta, bread, cake, pie, hardly any dairy. Mostly just fruits and vegetables and lots of protein and then espresso and then a little bit of Pinot — or a lot of Pinot, depending on how my day is. Like the French say: You have to earn it. If you work a half-day, you get a half bottle. If you work a full day, you get a full bottle. So those are my vices."
"It's funny, because you come to a place like New York and every "good life" thing is here," Reece says reflectively. "There's every fancy shop and store. But I think there are a few things that represent the good life. First, good health. There's a saying about the impudence of wealth when rich people are sick," she says, quoting Alexander Pope's poem about how wealth can't buy good health. I like the idea that for the most part, I schedule my time how I want to. We have a lot of time: time for ourselves, time for each other, time for her."
"Her" of course, is Reece, their 2-year-old daughter, surely the future star of some sport.
She represents a new triumph for the couple, who reunited in 2001 after a brief separation in part, Gabrielle says, due to her "tunnel vision" in professional golf. "We realized there is a ton of love there," she has said of her marriage. "So we dusted ourselves off, asked for forgiveness, talked it through, and vowed we're going to do it better."
She decided "to back off golf a little" to devote herself to her infant daughter. But she says she's now preparing to "reinsert myself full-time into practicing and playing for fun, but with a different attitude than I started with before."
"We have ideas about how we want our child to be raised," says Hamilton. "We don't want to waste a lot of time on situations or things that don't bring us happiness and pleasure and doing things. We don't want to spend too much time in the traffic, or too much time away from each other, and we don't want to spend too much time not getting along."
With that, they're gone, swept into the cocktail party for the release of his new cologne. Later that night, the buoys dropped off the coast of Maui, signaling that the expected big waves would not materialize, leaving Hamilton in Manhattan as the city was blanketed under six inches of snow. Nonetheless, the next day, he was on a plane and back in the ocean, his wife and daughter watching from the shore.