“. . . and he said, ‘I’m Eddie Aikau,’ and we drove away together.”

So much had happened since, and he’d told the story so many times, that Sharkey could not say for sure whether Eddie had dropped him in Hale‘iwa or driven into town; whether they’d stopped for a beer or shared a joint; whether they’d met the next day or weeks later. Had Eddie said, “Sharkey—that’s a good name” that night, or had it been later, another day, less dramatic, just a casual remark?

Sharkey could not say. The fact was that he’d met Eddie and they’d become friends. Eddie had encouraged him, dared him, to take bigger and bigger waves, recklessly, because big waves were all that mattered, not the dances and cutbacks and hotdogging on average surf; you made your reputation on the rides through barrels and long steep drops on monster waves.

But when Sharkey looked back on his life he did not see failure or disorder or the tearful face in the rearview mirror. Nor doubt, hesitation, or retreat; he saw only conviction, a strengthening of resolve, a kind of nobility as he faced one wave after another, each one bigger than the last, the story of his struggle simplified in the telling, so much so that it sometimes seemed he could not say for sure who he was, or where he’d been, or how he’d gotten to win the Triple Crown.

And years later, after Eddie was lost at sea, paddling away from the overturned canoe Hōkūle‘a, to seek help, a memorial service was held and Sharkey was not asked to speak. At the time of his disappearance in the darkness and the wicked waves off the Big Island, Eddie was a devout and energetic Hawaiian, risking his life for his fellow crew members on the canoe, and Sharkey was pursuing his ambition to triumph in big-wave surfing.

“I was somewhere else, on a wave far away,” Sharkey said at the time of the Eddie Aikau memorial—the paddle-out, the casting of flowers in the enormous circle of surfers on their boards, slapping the water in honor of their friend.

Was it true that he was elsewhere? He could not remember. What mattered was that as a boy he’d met Eddie, a boy like him.