"The Nation of Ken," by Bruce Jenkins, a 22,000-word XXL profile on big-wave surfer Ken Bradshaw, ran in the Spring 2001 issue of Surfer's Journal. This version has been slightly edited from the original.

A lesser man would be dead drunk by now. A weaker man would be railing against a system that rarely calls his name. Ken Bradshaw could be a lot of things at 48: melancholy, delusional, spent. Instead, he smiles easily. It’s a look of confidence and experience. And if you don’t catch him just now, he’s gone—out to the distant reefs, where history and freedom converge.

There have been more stylish surfers in the big-wave realm, and many with an edge in cool and mystique, but there is only one champion of desire. Ken Bradshaw is the most driven individual the sport has ever known—and possibly the most contradictory. For all the disturbing tales surrounding him, he meets you head-on as a gentleman. On the flip side of his savage temper, there is warmth and kindness. For all the waves he’s grabbed like a starving lion, there is unrelenting generosity.

Ken Bradshaw could safely be described as two people, and he needs both to be whole. Without that fierce desire, he’d be lost somewhere in the corporate world of southeast Texas, rich and unfulfilled. Without the sensitivity, he wouldn’t have drawn more than a glance from his lasting love, Layne Beachley. He needed two fists and a hot-blooded rage to make his mark at Sunset Beach. He used compassion and a keen eye to help develop an Eddie Aikau champion and the two greatest big-wave riders in the history of women’s surfing.

On paper, Bradshaw has nothing: No job, no salary, no sponsors, not the slightest hint of support from the industry to which he has devoted his life. Then again, he has everything: love, contentment, a long list of accomplishments, and a legitimate claim as the man who caught the biggest wave ever surfed. He’s damn near broke and couldn’t be happier. He is the richest poor man on earth.

Bradshaw seems to have been shaped from some long-ago mold, a chiseled, power-drive surfer who would have fit perfectly in a Waimea lineup with Buzzy Trent, Jose Angel, and Fred Van Dyke. He wouldn’t have needed the warfare back then, for there were plenty of waves at Sunset and a clean-up set ready to wash 15 leashless boards to the shore. And yet the modem era resurrected him. Just when the North Shore scene was driving him to the brink of madness, he retreated to Phantoms, Backyards, Outside Log Cabins—the vast and terrifying world of tow-in surfing—and it saved his soul. Ken Bradshaw was born too late, absolutely. And he’s right on time.

Big-wave surfing may be the province of renegades, but Bradshaw is a true original. He has never reminded anyone of anybody. For all of the unlikely journeys of surfing lore—Darrick Doerner born in Fresno, Jeff Crawford moving seamlessly from Florida to Pipeline, a pack of Southern Californians breaking North Shore ground in the ’50s—Bradshaw’s is the most radical. He didn’t learn to surf until he was 13 years old, and he was living outside of Houston at the time. He needed to quit school, wage war with his parents, and flee his home just to reach California. In the haze of marijuana smoke that was surfing in the ’60s and 70s, Bradshaw abstained. There isn’t the slightest trace of a Texas accent in his voice, and even after 30 years on Oahu, he is unaffected by slang or pidgin, sounding more like someone who would greet you at the White House. He doesn’t seem to be from anywhere, really. He comes from the tiny Nation of Ken.

It’s a good thing he had that Big Wednesday session at Outside Log Cabins in January of '98, a good thing for everybody. Bradshaw put Oahu on the tow-in map that day, in a class with the massive peaks of Peahi (Maui). Countless surfers were inspired by the Hank photograph of Ken that became a poster, staring at it incredulously for hours. And when Bradshaw caught the wave to end them all, a legitimate 40-footer on the Island scale, only one person, videographer Bill Ballard, captured the moment—a message to every jaded surf photographer that the magic is still out there.

Mostly, though, it was good for Bradshaw. For a man whose name has been synonymous with big-wave surfing since the mid-1970s, Bradshaw struggles with his image. He worries about his reputation and what others say about him in big-wave circles. Longevity isn’t the problem; he hasn’t missed more than a few big swells over three decades on the North Shore. It’s quite likely that he has ridden more big waves than any surfer, ever, and he has definitely taken the most poundings. But his name went stale, from a publicity standpoint, in the 1990s. Brock Little and Keone Downing dominated the epic ’90 Aikau meet, one of the worst days of Bradshaw’s life. Laird Hamilton became the unquestioned master of tow-in style, guts, and technique.

Brian Keaulana was acknowledged as surfing’s greatest waterman, Darrick Doerner was its reclusive genius, and Peter Mel and Flea Virostko became the main warriors at Maverick’s, one of Bradshaw’s favorite spots.

Yet suddenly, following the Big Wednesday session, Bradshaw was back on top—at the age of 45, no less. About a dozen surfers shared the glory that day at Outside Logs, but Bradshaw was the standout. At a time when most athletes spin semi-believable yarns about their glory days, Bradshaw was in his element, still in his prime, leaving everyone else behind.

Waimea Bay had been a vision of death that morning, giant cleanup sets ruling out any possibility of holding the Eddie, and most of the competitors just threw up their hands in surrender. Brock Little, Brian Keaulana, and a hardy lifeguard crew were denied jet-ski access at the Haleiwa harbor (hard to imagine, but true), then reluctantly chose the West Side over what looked to be a two-hour crawl through traffic back to Backyards. Bradshaw had been there from the start. He saw the hesitation in the faces of Ross Clarke-Jones and Tony Ray, who did a bit of soul-searching before venturing out as a team. He saw that there was no clear path through the whitewater-ravaged inside between Backyards and Phantoms. But he never hesitated. He had the partner he wanted—Dan Moore, a 42-year-old contractor and longtime underground challenger of the outer reefs—and he had his mission. This is how history will remember Bradshaw: calm, clear-eyed, and stoked under some of the most harrowing conditions ever faced by a surfer.

They hadn’t been out there long when the Big One arrived. Bradshaw didn't know it at the time, but this would be the biggest set of the day by far. It was a freaky thing, not unlike the rogue that took Todd Chesser’s life at Outside Alligator Rock a few winters before, but at least 10' bigger and minus the caught-inside element, thanks to a tow rope, foot-straps, and 1100cc of jetski power. “I never really knew how big it was, because I couldn’t afford to look behind me,” says Bradshaw. "But I remember thinking it was the biggest thing I’d ever been on. It wasn’t until I got picked up by Dan, yelling and gesturing and amped out of his mind, that I knew something special I had taken place.” On Ballard’s video, shot from land at sea level (writer Ben Marcus calls it “the Zapruder film of surfing”), there is no sign whatsoever of Bradshaw on the drop, only an endless zippering-white trail down an inconceivable mountain. But suddenly there he is, driving across the top third of the wave before easing out onto the shoulder.

The rest of the day was like a dream. Over five hours in sunny, light-offshore perfection, Bradshaw and Moore spent more time and caught more waves than any other team. Bradshaw got his poster shot. He pulled one of the most amazing power moves ever seen in big-wave surfing, knifing straight up through the lip of a 30-foot wave to avoid a closeout (Bradshaw performs that kickout routinely, but in this setting it was truly extreme). “I watched that whole day from the cliffs through binoculars,” said Bill Sickler, who has shared big waves with Bradshaw for more than 20 years. “I saw Ken get a stand-up barrel that was approaching 35'. It was the most beautiful wave I’ve ever seen. The whole day was like that. The gods were smiling on him.”

So much of Bradshaw’s image centers around ego and aggression, and with good reason, but he showed nothing but humility on the day that defined his career. For one thing, it never occurred to him to alert any photographers—he just went surfing. When I spoke to him that night and on many occasions thereafter, he was more awed by the conditions than his own performance. To this day, he refuses to boast, letting the accomplishment speak for itself. He even admitted suffering from depression for a month or so, realizing it was the kind of day that may never be repeated. Low-key factions criticized Bradshaw for personally marketing the poster, without realizing that it represented one of his few sources of income.

“I just remember seeing Ken at a trade show with a bunch of posters, and he didn’t know what to do with them,” says Greg Noll. “I told him he could pull up a desk where I was setting up. Next thing you knew, people were coming over and asking him to sign, and Ken was so stoked, he looked like a little kid. This is a guy who always rode big waves because he really loved to do it, and the rest of it was bullshit, you know. It was cool to see him get a little glory. That was a real moment in the sun for him.”

What you eventually realize about Bradshaw, through all of the stories and the contradictions, is that his life is about just one thing: the pursuit of freedom. That’s a dreadful cliche and, in fact, it characterizes the ideal of most surfers. But freedom is a different thing with Bradshaw—it is the whole deal. It means more to him than money, respect, recognition, or friendship. Freedom is Bradshaw’s oxygen, and he traveled an awfully long road to find it.

The man's body is shot full of holes. Back, stomach—look around, you’ll find another one. It was almost a family joke, how many times Ken Bradshaw Sr. had been wounded. There were seven bullets in all, twice from his days as a Houston police officer and five times in combat. He was twice sent home from World War II after being shot, and both times he returned to duty.

“The U.S. Special Forces sent him behind enemy lines one time,” the younger Ken recalls. “He dressed in a German uniform and played a deaf-mute, driving an army lieutenant who spoke fluent German, and they went in to survey some towns they were about to go into. That’s the kind of man he was.”

But that was just a preface to Ken Senior's career. He had roots in Texas oil, ran a successful pipe-fitting business, became a captain in the local sheriff’s department, and just to round things out was elected mayor of the town of Spring Branch, near Houston. “This is a guy who would have four major things going on at once. I mean, to see my father, you’d have to go to some mayor’s meeting or the police station. Even if I’d wanted to be exactly like him, I couldn’t have done it. I don’t know who could.”

For a time, young Ken fit the mold pretty well. He was headstrong, handsome, and aggressive, like his dad, and he was a kick-ass football player who made All-City as a linebacker in junior high school. He had an innate charm and intelligence, amiably chatting up his parents’ social companions, yet he could transform himself into a Dick Butkus-style warrior at kickoff time. “When you’re young, your parents seem omniscient, and I was living the life they wanted,” he said. “Especially my dad. I figured he had every answer for me.” Bradshaw got his extreme sense of discipline from his father—“an overbearing, domineering, regimented attitude,” as he remembers it. “I mean, my bed had to be tucked in so tight you could bounce a penny off it. To this day, he’s never helped me financially, and I thank God for that. It made me work harder, find the answers myself, and I've carried those ideas with me throughout my life. Basically, I’m a drill sergeant at heart. Every problem I’ve ever had with another surfer was because he didn’t have enough discipline or common sense.”

One of Bradshaw’s oldest friends, surfer-journalist Bernie Baker, has met Ken’s father several times. “I could always see Ken in his dad," Baker says. "Hard-willed, solid as a rock, emotionally without bend or flex, and at the same time, the warmth and that big Texas smile. That’s how I’ve always felt with Kenny on a big day in the water. If Ken Senior had grown up surfing in Hawaii, he’d have been Buzzy Trent.”

To hear people tell it, Allyne Bradshaw, Ken's mother, was a little slice of perfection: Always together, on top of things, handling every little crisis, loving her son unconditionally. “Moms are always in your corner, aren’t they?” Kenny says. “You’re always their little boy. She’d come to Hawaii, during all kinds of hype and hysteria about big-wave surfing, and she’d say, ‘Yes, but I remember when he was just a little thing in my arms.’ She hated the decision I made at first [to surf full-time], but she got over it a lot faster than my father did.”

It was Bradshaw's sister, Janice, who introduced him to the beach. In summer, she loved making the 75-mile drive to Surfside, a brown-water beach just south of Galveston, and Kenny got hooked in 1967, his freshman year in high school. “People give Texas a hard time, but the waves actually aren’t too bad,” he says. “There was a lot of surf. Big, long, mushy peaks that gave me some paddling experience and wave knowledge. My parents used to freak out when a hurricane came through. 'Everybody get inside! Get out of the wind!’ I’d be heading for the car. I knew there would be waves on days like that.”

Before long, Bradshaw was obsessed with the sport: the act itself, but also the photos in surfing magazines, the Duke contest on ABCs 

 Suddenly, football didn’t seem so important anymore. Nothing did. He ran away from home twice, got a taste of real surfing in California, and infuriated his parents. Big Ken threatened to have him arrested if he didn’t stay close to home. He even ordered some psychological testing, figuring there must be something wrong with a Bradshaw who wanted to go surfing. “My parents were so freaked out. It really was an evaluation to see if I was sane or not,” he says. “So I took the test, told the psychologist my plans, and he gave me a questionnaire with about 500 things to answer. When I went back for the results he goes, ‘Look, your parents are on their way over.’ I was hanging my head, expecting him to tell me I’m a loser, do what your parents say, stay in school. But he looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘I’m going to support your decision. You don’t have the normal wants of an adolescent male. I’m going to tell your parents to let you go.’ I walked out of there feeling so good.”

Ken’s mother figured she could live with it. Big Ken was furious, didn’t speak a word over his son’s final two weeks at home, then continued the silent treatment for the next two years.

In any event, Bradshaw was off to California, where he had the good fortune of landing on the soon-to-be-famous Swell of 1969—which was really a long series of big-storm wave events. Setting up camp in Encinitas, he spent the next few months surfing Swami’s, Windansea, and La Jolla Shores with the likes of Tom Ortner, Jon Close, Cheer Critchlow, and Alf Laws. At a shade under six feet and 185 pounds—almost exactly his measurements today—Bradshaw couldn’t match the talent of those local legends, but he felt right at home in bigger surf, savoring the rush, not minding the wipeouts, and feeling there was nothing he couldn’t handle. “I never thought about football again," he says today, "because I’d never felt such freedom. I’d run all the way down to Swami’s, paddle out, get my butt beat, lose my board, swim in, paddle back out, and I’d just be, 

 I didn’t have a coach yelling at me. I didn’t have anybody else's expectations resting on my shoulders. Just go into the ocean and ride this energy. It was so liberating, I couldn’t get it out of my system. I still can't!”

While the Texas newcomer was in many ways naive, he was smart enough to know that Southern California as a rule doesn't produce month after month of double-overhead surf. By 1972, Ken had grown tired of the two-foot slop and the weeks of waiting; he made a spring trip to Hawaii, stayed three months, flew home and got ready to move over there for good. He was back in Hawaii by October, and he’s been there ever since.

It took a long, long while to make amends at home. Kenny once wore a wig when he went back to Texas, hoping his dad wouldn’t notice the long hair underneath. It wasn’t until he won the 1982 Duke Classic that Ken won a grudging acceptance from his father. Even still, he was never able to adequately explain the choice he made. “I never said to my dad, hey, by the way, I’ve done this or that. Never once. I’d tell him straight out: I am not successful. Mom would say, ‘Oh, no, you’re happy—that’s more important than whatever financial rewards you would have had in Texas.’ But when you think about it, it’s almost sad, the opportunities I missed because I’m so obsessively caught up in surfing. I see myself as dysfunctional; I really do. Maybe you can admire me for enjoying my life, but don’t be me. I don’t have what most human beings want.”

By late 1998, Bradshaw’s family connections were hanging by a thread. He and his sister and grown apart. His father, 83, was showing signs of dementia, and his mother was due for some outpatient surgery for arthritis in her knees. It was a simple operation, but the anesthesia didn’t sit well. She was nauseous from the moment she woke up, right through that whole day and night. By the following morning, she was weak and crying, having gone without food for 48 hours. She managed some dinner that afternoon but sounded distraught when she called Ken in Hawaii, fearing she would eventually need knee-replacement surgery. “I don’t think I can live through it, Ken,” she said. “I can’t imagine the pain. Oh, I’ll call you back when I feel better.” Two hours later, Ken's father called. “It’s your mom,” he said, his voice rattled with anxiety. “She’s unconscious. I don’t think she’s gonna make it. The paramedics have been working on her for 45 minutes now. We can’t get her back.” The words hardly registered. Even as Bradshaw heard the grim details later, they seemed almost surreal. “My mom was in a wheelchair, she’d just finished eating some watermelon, and she wheeled herself into the bathroom by herself. Getting up to ease herself onto the toilet, she had no strength and passed out. My dad heard the noise of her hitting the floor. He went in to see her lying there, not breathing. They finally revived her body, but not her brain. They pulled the plug the next day.”

Bradshaw’s energy vanished as he told this story. He was staring into space. “It took five months after the autopsy to tell us they really had no idea how she died. I talked to lawyers, everyone involved, and of course nobody did anything wrong. This was doctors protecting doctors; they never do anything 'wrong.’ She was only 69 and had a lot of good years left. I think she just died from dehydration.”

Bradshaw was devastated, and it took Layne Beachley's sturdy companionship to get him through it. “With his dad, I think Ken felt like he had something to prove,” Layne told me last winter. “And I think it has always been that way, because no one’s ever backed Ken, nobody’s ever put that belief in him that he has in himself. I think his mother was the real driving force because she had faith. It was so sad to see him lose her. He still feels the void, for sure.”

Although Bradshaw kept his emotions private, choosing not to inflict them on his friends or the media, he went through a period of deep remorse. “You know, whatever people think of me, I’m a real wuss sometimes. Just an absolute pushover. I get that from her. My mom would cry at Christmas and cry at phone calls and cry every time I’d leave Texas. There wasn’t any time that I could go to the airport without her absolutely in tears. And I can be like that. I’m almost there right now, just remembering her and missing her. She was the real strength of the Bradshaws, and our family will probably just fade away at this stage. My father’s really not too coherent any longer. Last July he sold the house, right out of the blue. No attempt to keep it in the family; he just got rid of it. I had to rush home to retrieve the things I wanted.”

He was too late. The house had been cleaned out. Ken arrived to find a bunch of empty rooms, and his half-sister (from his father’s previous marriage) had sold the family treasures for a pittance. “They opened it up for the public to come in and buy everything,” he says. “Every precious thing we ever had—ten bucks, fifteen bucks. Just giving it away. Gone.” It must have felt strange for Bradshaw to walk away from that house, one last time, but he still had his allies: strength and willpower. He got through the heartbreak and moved on. Lord knows he had done it before.

In a certain light, Bradshaw still looks like a football player. He sounds like one, too—not some toothless lunk of a defensive end, but a man who played for 15 years and went to the Hall of Fame. Picture Howie Long and you’ve got Bradshaw: the commanding physical presence, the sound of authority and intelligence, the look of longevity. A lot of people snipe at Bradshaw behind his back, but it’s amazing how the pettiness fades when he shows up.

Bradshaw needed all of those qualities when he first arrived in Hawaii. He had Town jobs as both a waiter and a bouncer (perfect; for most of us, it’s one or the other). He got a quiver of boards shaped by George Downing. Knowing the fierce brand of competition that is unique to the North Shore, he grew a beard to look more menacing. “I was 19, younger than most everybody out there, and it made me seem bigger, older, darker,” he says. “I guess it’s like guys who shave their heads today. Get sinister. Get some tats. Make yourself look meaner than you actually are. It’ll help ward off potential fights."

Except there were still a lot of fights. When Bradshaw went surfing back then, he essentially went to war; there’s no other way to describe it. “As much as I’ve grown to love Ken over the years, he was kind of a punk when he first came over here,” says Fred Van Dyke. “He got into a lot of altercations and he was a real wave hog; I mean, he caught every wave. He made that circle like there was an outboard motor behind him. And if you surf that way in Hawaii, you’re gonna get in scrapes. It builds up a great deal of resentment and jealousy, almost to the point of hate. So he had to mix it up with some of the really bad boys on the island, to the point where most guys would have left Hawaii altogether.”

Not Bradshaw. He was going to survive. He wasn’t the borderline-criminal type we’ve all seen at one time or another —the guy who hits the water angry and proceeds to make life hell for everyone—but he could not tolerate anything he perceived as an injustice. He developed some unique tactics. If somebody broke his code of ethics, Bradshaw simply paddled up to the guy and knocked a fin off his board—or took a bite out of it. Seriously. Bradshaw would literally chomp on the rail and leave a hole, like someone eating a tuna sandwich. “It’s the best way to get rid of somebody in the water if they really piss you off,” he says.

“Or if a guy dropped in on me, I’d wait for him to make his turn, then just (grinding noise) drive my board right into his. Once you do something like that, people back off. It gave me a high place in the pecking order that is still accepted today.”

Bernie Baker: “It’s funny to imagine Ken getting started with that whole act. This is a Texas boy, remember. He needed to lay the groundwork, make himself known, and I've thought about what that must have been like. I mean, at some point there had to be a first board he ever bit into, right? The first sizable foe he had to out-grrr. But a lot of surfers were very quietly behind him. Every major break has its watchdogs—Pipeline, Rocky Point, Off the Wall—and at Sunset, I think Kenny just felt he was the golden child. He just said, ‘Let’s put this act into the lineup and see what happens.’ And it worked.”

The key, says Baker, is that Ken's aggression was never deployed for its own sake, or as a way to mark turf, but rather from a sense of fairness or equality or safety in the lineup. If you were out there tripping over everybody or putting people in harm’s way, Kenny was there to remind you—once, and only once. He didn't start things. He didn't paddle out to get into a hassle. But he didn't things slide, either.

Bradshaw: “I think it stemmed from my frustration over the sheer disrespect for the people who live here. I feel it even today. Would I wear muddy shoes and shit on the floor of your house? That’s what it feels like. People come here for two weeks, take everything they can and leave their trash behind because they’re leaving and they don’t care. I grew up in a time when people were accountable for their actions, and to me, the North Shore was the Wild West. That’s what I called it. If you were a man of honor and were willing to defend it, you had a place here. The Hawaiians gave me a lot of respect. If I was wrong, I would apologize, but I would never back down. Even if you walked off hugging each other, wiping blood off your face, it was like, 'You aren’t so bad after all. You put up a good fight.'”

One of the worst encounters, Bradshaw recalled, found him squaring off against two Hawaiians. “I was out at Sunset being my typical aggressive, catch-a-lot-of-waves self, and some guy started hassling me. Kept calling me a fucking haole and wouldn’t let up. This went on for like 30 minutes. Finally I said something like, ‘Do something, so I can kill you,’ and he took his board and shoved it into mine. We start swingin’ on each other, we go underwater and I come up with the guy in a stranglehold. I’ve got him whipped. Then next thing I know, another guy’s shoving his board at me. So I swing the first guy’s face in the line of fire. I’m warding off this new guy with the other guy’s head. I said, ‘Go get your friends, whatever it takes, meet me on the beach.’ And when I went in, sure enough, the first I guy’s walking right toward me—to say he was sorry. He checked with some of the local guys, and they told him I was cool. We shook hands and went home, and see, I admire that. I admire their dignity and the honor to their cause.”

Bradshaw didn’t have many more beefs with the local boys. Mostly it was Mainlanders, or hotshots from other countries. If anyone paddled out at Sunset without showing respect, Bradshaw got right in their face—or worse. He once grabbed Michael Peterson mid-drop and cracked him two shots to the head before they both went over the falls. He tackled Owl Chapman on a wave, punched him before they went under and again when they surfaced. He knocked Tom Curren off his board, got into screaming matches with Jim Banks and Mark Occhilupo, and had a knock-down, drag-out brawl with Charlie Walker, one of the all-time great North Shore surfers and a friend to this day—all over ethics in the water. (With blood on Kam Highway and people looking on in shock, Bradshaw and Walker calmly washed up and had lunch together.)

“Everybody knows I’m here, that I’m not going away, and I that I will survive, no matter how much you throw at me,” Bradshaw says. “I just growl at guys now, and that’s usually the end of it. I’ve seen guys drop in on me, not knowing who it is, and then they realize it and they’re petrified. They just sort of melt off the wave, thinking, ‘I am so fucked (laughter),’ and then they apologize for ten minutes. So it has its rewards. Guys like Michael Ho, Dane Kealoha, and Johnny Boy are ruthless. They’ll drop in on guys and pull into the barrel like no one’s there. That's not me. My issues are when I’ve got priority on a wave. If it’s an innocent mistake, I’ll kick out. But if the guy’s got no manners, forget it.”

Randy Rarick, who has surfed alongside Bradshaw from the beginning, has never quite understood his anger in the water. “When you talk to Ken on land, he’s never uptight about anything. He seems very pleasant, he's a nice, gentlemanly guy. Then I see him in the water yelling at somebody, or just pounding the deck of his board when he misses a wave, and I go, man, this guy cannot keep his emotions in check—even after all these years. He swears at the Brazilians, who are filling up the Sunset lineup now. He scapegoats them; they’re the bad guys. Or the Japanese. By now you’d think he'd have some emotional stability out there, but it seems like there’s a still lot of insecurity coming out. I still see Ken drop in on a lot of people. And I think to myself, why?”

Bradshaw has always been acutely aware of his image. As far back as 1989, he expressed a desire to change. “I had a lot of good talks with Eddie Aikau before he died,” Bradshaw said. “Eddie’s the guy that started toning me down, controlling some of my energy. He showed me there’s another side to life than just raw aggression and going madly forward. He’s the type of surfer I’d like to be. My friends call me the Angry Young Man, and that’s not what I want to be later in life.”

“I think he’s probably mellower now,” says the great Peter Cole, still surfing big Sunset at the age of 69. “Every once in a while you hear him screamin’ at some guy, but I think Layne (Beachley) has been good for him, a stabilizing influence. It’s just such a different dynamic with Ken and me out there; always has been. I don’t mind getting one good wave an hour, if it’s a good one. Ken’s a quantity man who likes to get every wave in the ocean. I think he’s down to 20 waves an hour now instead of 40 (laughter). But I never took issue with him because he’s always been a gentleman and he’s always looked out for me. I can’t remember that he’s ever snaked me.”

“I’ve always found him a pleasure to surf with,” says writer Matt Warshaw, whose ability in the water mirrors his journalistic skill. “There’s a lot of hooting and sharing waves, and you just have a blast with him. He's still really stoked, and not at all cynical or jaded like so many older surfers.”

It’s just that Sunset Beach, Bradshaw’s lifeblood and salvation for so many years, has become unrecognizable to him. “We are witnessing the death of Sunset,” Bradshaw said recently. “Or at least the death of modem surfing out there. Between Owl Chapman and his proteges and the Willis brothers and the Brazilians, all riding boards over 10', you can’t catch a wave out there anymore. We used to ride 7' 8"s, 7' 10"s, the biggest we’d ever ride would be an 8' 4" out there. I remember one time Barry Kanaiaupuni came out on a 9-footer and we were all laughing at him, like, ‘Gettin’ old, huh?’ And that was more than 20 years ago."

He's getting worked up now. "I mean, top 44 won’t even surf there any more. Why should they? They can’t get a wave. I mean, if you’re paddling and some guy on an 11-footer goes gliding past you and you’re not even to your feet yet, you’ve got a ridiculous situation. And this is like everybody in the lineup. I saw the 135-pound (Brazilian) Carlos Burle out there on a 9' 6". Please understand, I like Carlos and I think he’s a great surfer. But I said, 'You know what, Carlos, I don’t talk to people who ride 9' 6"s out here. I don’t even say hello." Because it’s crap. You’ve got surfers who can’t compete with a contemporary style, so they’ve handicapped the rest of us by getting bigger and bigger boards. Listen, I don’t have any problem with Peter Cole or anybody who’s been riding longer boards their entire life. But I don’t get it when a 25-year-old guy comes out on a 10' 6". I don’t get it even a little bit. You’ll see six guys take off on a soft wave sometimes, doing absolutely nothing, just trying to outrun it. It looks like Waikiki, with everyone going straight for the channel. It’s dreadful out there now. No wonder nobody’s ripping Sunset like the old days. It’s impossible.”

He thinks a moment and corrects himself. "A few guys, like Pancho Sullivan, Shane Dorian, and Myles Padaca—they're riding progressive boards out there and they’re absolutely brilliant. But mostly the only time you can see contemporary surfing at Sunset now is during a contest.

Bradshaw became so exasperated with the situation last year, he actually conceded. He built three new boards—a 9' 0", a 10' 0", and an 11' 0"—and called it the “You Win” series. “That’s right,” he says. “You win. I give up. I take ’em out there just to play their game and beat ’em at it. One of these guys, one of Owl’s disciples, looks at me and goes (admiringly), ‘Wow, nice board, looks like a big one.’ And I’m like (eerily), ‘It’s a real big one.’

Bradshaw readily cops to his disdain for the Brazilians, saying, “They come from a world where macho is king and the most aggressive guy wins. It’s like their driving. Whoever pushes the hardest has the right of way. Same thing in the water. It’s hard to fault them because they come from that culture. But it’s just a fact that they show no respect out there. The Japanese guys are slowly starting to surf the place better, except now they show up with five carloads of four guys each. Do I get a bad attitude? You bet I do. I’m taking off on this wave. I don’t care if you’re behind me. I hope you don’t make it.”

A lot of Sunset surfers still look to Bradshaw for enforcement, but it's no longer the 1970s when a hint of violence took care of everything. “It’s all about litigation now,” he says. “If I break off somebody’s fin or even threaten to punch him, it’s ‘terroristic threatening.’ I’ve actually had the police come to my house. I’ve never been prosecuted, but it’s changed the whole complexion of surfing, especially in Hawaii. Before, you were held accountable for your actions. Discipline, that’s all it was. We were disciplining the younger kids, and if it took a quick shot to the head to drive home your point, so be it. Now somebody can drop in on you, spear you, then start swearing at you, and you can’t even threaten to punch the guy.”

Bradshaw at this point is the only North Shore surfer who has a real commitment to Mavericks. While others recoil from the icy waters of Northern California, Ken is always ready for a quick-strike flight from Honolulu to San Francisco. He loves the wave itself, and all that goes into figuring out a new big-wave break. But he also has a second base of operations in the area.

Bradshaw has long been a top shaper on the North Shore, making boards for Sunny Garcia, Pancho Sullivan, the Ho brothers, Buttons, Mark Liddell, Dan Flecky, John Shimooka, Noah Johnson, Munga Barry, Brock and Clark Little, Richie Collins, Serena Brooke, and Layne Beachley over the years. But in Northern California, Bradshaw’s shaping is almost legendary. Even from a distance, he is an integral part of the Mavericks/Ocean Beach scene.

It started in the early ’80s, when San Francisco surfer-physician Mark Renneker made lengthy visits to the North Shore and found Bradshaw to be a kindred spirit. “He was one of the few big-wave riders who would even talk to me,” said Renneker. “I was approaching guys who were involved in board design, asking where I could get a 9- or 10-foot gun for Ocean Beach, and they’d just sneer at me. Really unpleasant stuff. Even Mark Foo was in sheer disbelief that there could be big waves in California. But Ken was willing to talk about it. He saw outside the box of his own self-interest.”

Bradshaw began making boards for Renneker, and before long he was shaping for Grant Washburn, John Raymond, Bob Battalio, Steve Dwyer, Christy Davis—those solitary specks on the horizon when Ocean Beach is triple-overhead and the paddle out takes up to an hour. “He really got curious when we kept breaking his boards on big days,” said Washburn, “and I mean boards with extra stringers that weren’t breaking in Hawaii. At that time (the early ’90s), skinny little guns were the fad, just these wafer-like boards that didn’t get it done at Ocean Beach. Ken wasn’t afraid to make a thick one. Except for what Jeff Clark might have been making in his garage back then, Ken was the only big-time shaper who really understood what we had here.”

The Ocean Beach crew saw nothing but the best of Bradshaw. “It wasn’t at all surprising to me that he came over,” said Renneker. “A lot of North Shore guys had some notion of their image that they had to take care of elsewhere, but Ken always had that unbridled thrill for big waves, plus a real disdain for the sponsored professional world. He would sacrifice a lot to not miss a swell. He’s the only one who would come back every year, and it made guys like Foo nervous to think that Ken was locked into this other premier big-wave spot.”

Based on image alone, Bradshaw and Renneker would seem to be essential opposites, sort of like Atilla the Hun paired with Gandhi. In fact, they have a seamless friendship, connecting on levels that extend well past surfing. “I’ve always thought he is very misunderstood when it comes to his so-called arrogance and aggressiveness,” Renneker said. “I’ve never experienced any of that with him. Nor seen any of it—and I surfed Sunset with him many times. I’ve only seen him be engaging, charming, and considerate, and even though he doesn’t have a formal education, I find him to be quickly perceptive on matters I wouldn’t guess he'd even be interested in, like medicine or artwork. Among surfers of his ilk, he’s one of the few who really sort of relishes the intellectual pursuits.”

During the epic Northern California swell of December ’94, Bradshaw made two trips from Hawaii. He was there on the fateful Friday when Foo lost his life, but he was also at Ocean Beach the previous Saturday, one of the biggest, cleanest, and most frightening days in memory. Locals still recall the sight of Bradshaw and Raymond walking down the beach, about to paddle out into an absurd cauldron of caught- inside hell—and making it out to ride a couple of waves. And they love telling the story about the night Raymond’s house caught fire. Once he got his wife and kids safely onto the street, cold and shivering, Raymond had only one thing in mind. Not fresh clothes or family treasures, but his quiver of Bradshaws. He just couldn’t think straight until he’d rescued those boards.

“I was in awe of Bradshaw when I was a kid,” says Grant Washburn, “and I still am. Talking surf with Ken is always an astounding thing for me, and the more I know him, the more the pedestal is deserving. When you’re a kid, you picture what these big-wave riders might be like. Later on you find out they’re into drugs, they go to McDonald’s before they surf, something that just shatters the image. Then you meet Bradshaw, and all of your old ideals come to life. He really is that guy.”

Bradshaw pulled a little experiment one day at Sunset, something he’d never seen another surfer try. As the whitewater approached him from a freshly detonated 12' bomb, he held on to his board and duck-dove it. There are stirring tales of the North Shore pioneers (notably Jose Angel) bulling through waves with a death grip, but Bradshaw may have been the first to do conventional duck-dives at big Sunset.

“Back in the 70s, nobody would even think of duck-diving under a pitching wave,” he says. “You just threw your board and started swimming. But I’d seen guys do it at Pipeline on small days, and I was determined. I’d literally paddle right at the wave, shove the board down as deep as I could, sometimes even stand on it underwater and let the whole thing hit me. Sometimes it drove me so deep that it shoved the board out the back. People were amazed at what I was doing. Barry (Kanaiaupuni) would trip on it. He finally agreed to try it one day when it was really big, so we’re both paddling toward this thing, and at the last second he goes, ‘I got kids!’ and throws his board up (laughter)."

That story says everything you need to know about Bradshaw. He has never been among the most fluid surfers at any break, but through knowledge and raw passion, he has driven himself to great heights. “I’ve never thought I was that talented,” he says. “I’m methodical, practiced, regimented. I’m relentless. It goes all the way back to the Texas days for me. When you don’t grow up with it, you tend to try harder.”

In February of '91, he and I sat on a deck overlooking Sunset. Ken was pondering his career. He had just broken up with a woman he had hoped to marry. He had only recently recovered from his worst surfing accident, an intentional spearing from Dane Kealoha (who later apologized) that left a three-inch hole on his backside. He was 38 years old at the time. “I want the longevity that Mark Richards has walked away from,” he said. “That BK and Hakman walked away from. That Paul Strauch and Reno Abellira walked away from. I don’t want to be any of those guys. I have personal milestones that I want to cross.”

Bradshaw once said he’d “rather ride big waves than wake up in the morning,” and he devotes his life to that pursuit. His diet has been health-conscious, almost to an extreme, since the early days on the North Shore. You’re lucky if you ever get him to taste a Mai Tai or a glass of wine. He doesn’t need any specific training because he surfs almost daily, often for hours at a stretch, but he always seems to be preparing for that two-wave hold-down—a terror he has experienced four times in giant surf. There is an intricate setup of lava tubes at Shark’s Cove, near Waimea Bay, and after years of free-diving the spot, Bradshaw knows every passage and tunnel—even if he has to stay down 90 seconds before seeing that little ray of light. And there are training sessions when he tries to stay under for two waves, forcing himself through the process, so he’ll be more prepared.

Some of Bradshaw’s critics find him pedantic as he describes his livelihood, feeling that he paints big-wave surfing as a too-dangerous, don’t-try-this-at-home brand of heroism. But with Bradshaw, there are always contradictions. He has taken the opposite tone in a series of interviews, suggesting that with the proper attitude and training, ordinary surfers can lift themselves to the next level. Also, while Bradshaw has been thrashed, rag-dolled, and beaten down more than any surfer in history, he doesn’t have a stocked shelf of mind-blowing stories, along the lines of Charlie Galento, Jim Neece, or Ace Cool. He is, by nature, a matter-of-fact person, which makes his statements seem all the more credible.

“I don’t think I’ve been held under for over a minute yet,” he says. “Sometimes I’ve wondered why it was taking so long to get to the surface (laughter), but it’s not like there’s another option down there. You just keep going forward, do whatever it takes. Sometimes I’ll talk to myself, like, ‘Well, this is why you trained so hard, for a moment just like this.’ I once heard Owl Chapman telling an interviewer about a wipeout he had at Waimea, and he’s all, ‘I felt like my arm was coming out of the socket, or my leg was gonna fall off! And my eyeballs are popping and blood’s coming out of my nose.’ And I thought, Dude, if that happened to me. I’d be dead.”

Bradshaw prefers the technicians, watermen like Brian Keaulana who make a scientific study of ocean safety. “Brian’s just unbelievable. First time he ever went to Peahi with Laird and those guys, he jumps off the machine right into the impact zone and says, ‘Come get me after the set.’ He wanted to take a few waves on the head, just so he’d know what he was getting himself into. That was great! How many people in the world would do that? I know Brian likes to run along the ocean floor with a big rock in his hands, and that’s incredible training, too. My friend Mike Gerhardt and I used to go down 60 feet at Makaha and cruise along the bottom. Then we’d do it without the rock, because when you think about it, the rock makes it a little easier. Staying down under your own power is harder. It’s more like the real thing, when the crisis really happens. I mean, there have been times when I wished I had a rock, because it would take me straight down and out of trouble.”

When a hold-down really gets bad, says Bradshaw, “your body starts sending little messages. After 30 seconds, your hands start getting numb, sort of an icy tingle, and then you feel it in your feet, your calves, and your elbows. It’s not a terrible feeling —it’s sort of like when your foot falls asleep—but if it gets to the core, your head, you pass out. But it’s a very slow process. Knowing that is really helpful in terms of retaining a sense of calm. It's a never-ending process, learning those kinds of things. For instance, there’s a way of handling a really bad caught-inside situation. You don’t dive real deep; that’s a common mistake. You want to avoid the initial explosion, then come up into it and let it push you in. Sometimes it’ll draw you up and you can actually grab a quick breath. What kills people is staying out there, diving deep again and again, and just scratching for the horizon. As long as you stay in the whitewater, even though you're in the middle of all that turbulence, you're heading out of trouble. I can’t emphasize that enough.”

A lot of big-wave surfers from the period won’t admit it, but on the heaviest days at Waimea in the 1980s, if they saw Bradshaw on the beach hesitating they wouldn’t go out. That’s because they'd seen him perform astounding feats of physical strength, out of sheer survival, and they didn’t feel capable of such deeds themselves. On a historic day in January of 1985, the magazines took note of a freak closeout wave, said to be 45' on the Island scale, that caught Mark Foo, James Jones, J.R Patterson, and Alec Cooke inside. A little later, Foo attempted to ride a 30' wave, and while he was sent flying into space on takeoff, it was one of the most radical things ever seen in big-wave surfing. And Foo made a very public claim about “the biggest wave ever ridden.”

But for those who watched the entire spectacle of Waimea that day, the real story was Bradshaw, surfing the place earlier in the afternoon as it escalated from 18- to 25'-plus and the water slowly cleared. Finally, Bradshaw was out there alone, still riding, having guided some very freaked-out surfers (a few of them Waimea mainstays) into shore. Bradshaw was having such a good time, he couldn’t understand why nobody wanted to share those waves with him. Then he looked to the beach and saw the cars of Peter Cole, Gary Speece, Bill Sickler, Tom Nellis, and everybody else who would normally be out there. The day had taken on an evil, foreboding touch and, quite simply, nobody but Bradshaw wanted any part of it.

And then it happened, the worst-case scenario: Caught inside, broken leash, west swell, and the biggest sets were closing out. Drifting toward the Haleiwa side, as boardless surfers inevitably will in those conditions, he had to swim through a giant set with the diving rock looming inside of him. Back outside, he made an all-out swim for Pinballs, hoping the oncoming set would wash him in—but he didn’t get quite far enough to penetrate the shorebreak. Bradshaw always heeded the words of Eddie Aikau: If you can’t get in before the rivermouth, you won’t make it through the shore break. You’ll drift steadily to the west, getting pounded the whole time, and eventually wind up on the diving rock—the place where Bradshaw had watched a bodysurfer get killed a few years back. Where they formed a human chain in '76 to rescue Waimea vet Kimo Hollinger.

With the moment of truth at hand, Bradshaw made a decision that defined him: He would swim back outside, his third lap, and try to get through Pinballs again. “I waited for another set, then charged right into the point,” he said. "I figured I’d climb right up on the goddamn rocks if I had to.” The sight was a revelation to those on the beach, including the veteran Nellis, who said later, “That’s just about the manliest thing I've ever seen done. That was heavy. It would have been real easy for the guy to just give up. But he finally got his chance, and he just stuck his head down and beat it for the beach. Insane.”

This is why Bradshaw gets so much respect from Cole, Van Dyke, Ricky Grigg, and other old-timers who spot him in the water. They see him as a man for all eras, timeless in his ability to persevere. “If you took leashes away—and I wish they would—Kenny would still stand out,” says Cole, “He’s a swimmer, he’s part of the ocean. I don’t even know why he uses a leash, because he sure doesn’t need one. He’s the kind of guy who would make 10 swims to the beach on a big day at Sunset, and every time he’d paddle back out more stoked than before."

Grant Washburn: “I happened to be in Hawaii during a swell about three years ago, and Bradshaw said he’d meet me at Waimea. As he drove up, he said he wanted to check it for a while. I said, ‘We can check it from the water.’ He was so psyched to hear that. He got excited because I was excited."

Van Dyke: “Ken shows up and it's like he's protected in a white shield of positiveness. He’s not all loaded up in one way or another, like some surfers, and yet he must be getting these tremendous endorphin highs, being out there as much as he is.”

Bradshaw did smoke a bit of weed once, back in the ’60s. A lot of his Texas friends were devoted tokers and he figured he should at least try it. “Yeah, and I got so stoned, I couldn’t even stand up on my board,” he says. “I swore right then that I wouldn’t smoke any more pot. And I was the only guy anybody knew who was straight. Over the years, I saw guys who lit up religiously before a surf—really top guys—and they still surfed great. But not for me. I’m such an extremist, if I'd gotten into drugs I could easily be like a lot of guys who get carried away in Hawaii, just wandering around Sunset Beach. It puts you in such a negative place—having to get it, the people you’re with, the illegal-contraband thing. I guess I like my freedom and I wouldn’t want to miss one day of living my life, even on a mistaken charge of being arrested. I could never imagine what it would be like to have it taken away from me.”

He remains a fixture at Sunset, out there ripping with his yellow wetsuit and orange board; no other image seems appropriate to the North Shore community. But that is no longer the real Bradshaw, scrambling for every wave and laying down the law. The sport has taken him to new places, where he feels more at home, and his frenetic mind can finally relax.

There was a day at Maverick’s, for instance. Bradshaw was out on the type of gray, windy, freezing afternoon when only the hardcore partake. Pretty soon Renneker and Washburn had gone in, and Bradshaw by himself. A big elephant seal rose to the surface, then a whale went by. An otter showed up. Two porpoises swam past. "First it was great," Bradshaw says with a laugh. "Then all of a sudden I thought, 'I don’t want to see what’s coming next.' It’s so wild out there, so raw. All those wonderful components of nature and just a few surfers who really want to be part of it. Guys in Hawaii go, ‘What on earth would make you surf that dark, cold place?’ Because of the wave. Because of the challenge. Because surfing teaches you how insignificant you are, then shows you the rewards. This is why we surf. Not to be better than the next guy, but to be in tune with the ocean and the world around you. When it’s all said and done you can sit back, hear the wind blow, and watch the whales go by.”

"THE NATION OF KEN," BY BRUCE JENKINS

Subscribe or Login

Subscribe or Login

Encyclopedia of Surfing

History of Surfing

Interviews

Features

The Sunday Joint

Videos

Contests