“Because you have no ambition.” She had a way of snapping at him and then turning her back, and in those days of her early widowhood, with her back turned, she left the house with men. Imagine—pursed lips, a little-girl voice—I’m dating again. Her late husband, the Colonel, was screaming from his grave.

But Sharkey did have ambition, it burned in him, because it was his secret, seeing himself in his dreams atop the boil of a massive, still-swelling wave, climbing to stand on his board and in a crouch riding through the barrel, his trailing fingers reading the wall in the pipe of rolling water, and at last twisting his board into the lip of foam, and after a swooping cutback speeding through the shallows of a breaking wave—then loud cheers, hoots, yells, and “Joe Sharkey!” shouted over the loudspeaker.

No ambition? He was bursting with it, it trembled and enlarged him and made him incoherent. How could he tell his mother, or anyone, that in his heart he was already a hero? He had always wished for it, his small boy’s dream of bigness and power. His father’s urging him to become a soldier meant that he had to prove himself as brave, or braver, in another dangerous profession, and the risks that surfing demanded made it heroic. His ambition to ride the biggest waves, to be celebrated for it, meant he could not say those words to his mother or anyone—they’d see a skinny boy and laugh, they’d ask “How?” and they’d pity him for being deluded. Some might mock him, as they did all dreamers. Yet he lusted for glory.

Pedaling his bike after the accident, he was returned to that dream; and he knew that he had succeeded—the years had proven it. He was now sixty-­two, a well-known big-wave surfer, a champion. He had become the person he’d always wanted to be—too superstitious to speak the word “hero,” but he knew that no one had matched him on the tour. He did not need to call attention to his surfing excellence or any of his feats—there were plenty of people to do it for him, even if not as many as before. There were the record books too; and he was a brand name—flip-flops, boards, leashes, shirts, trunks—though many of these products were no longer in the stores. Newer names, younger surfers, had taken his place. He didn’t want to think of them as the punks he saw at parties these days, it seemed envious and unworthy, but they did seem younger, flashier, more callow, without any idea of how surfing had emerged; and now and then when Sharkey said, “When I was a kid I met Duke Kahanamoku,” they merely nodded or murmured, “Sweet.”