Alec Cooke, better known as Ace Cool, was 45 years old when Nathan Myers interviewed him by email in 2001.

Boston, Massachusetts, near Harvard, on February 4, 1956. I was one of the first sperm-donor babies. My father was from Hawaii’s original Cooke family, but he had a latent condition known as Huntington's Chorea, which he didn't want to pass to me, thank God. My genetic father was a Harvard Medical School doctor and top athlete, a 6'2'' blue-eyed Swede, top of his class.

No, names weren’t included during those early days of genetic experimentation. You only learned about the donor in terms of accomplishments and IQ and things like that. You never met the actual person.

No, Hawaii. South Shore, Oahu, and Kauai.

My dad was a student at Harvard when I was born, and later worked for Douglas Aircraft. Mother was a homemaker, student, and volunteer worker.

My mom was bodysurfing with me in the womb until eight months into her pregnancy! At age three I would ride on my father's back when he bodysurfed. In fact, I used to stand up on his back, so I got a really early feel for surfing. At six, I got my own board and began surfing for real.

How would you describe your surfing career?

I was one of the first extreme surfers. I flew out to ride huge outer-reef waves by helicopter, with a mini-oxygen tank and a special 12-foot board. Nobody else was doing that. The Ace Cool Era was in full swing during the ‘80s. In 1982, the day after Hurricane Iwa hit Hawaii, I surfed Waimea Bay alone, all day. It was 30-foot, and I caught at least 30 set waves that day. I lost my board at dark and swam in. I got washed straight up the Waimea rivermouth in the darkness. There was a small group of the faithful waiting on the beach with a fire and a blanket and companionship to welcome the new Big Kahuna back to shore. But there’s more to the story. I owned a surf shop in Haleiwa at the time, the shop was looted the night before, during the storm. I found out and just freaked! I figured there was nothing left to lose, so I paddled out at Waimea that next morning, all alone, with blood in my eyes. I remember Richard Schmidt broke three boards just trying to get out. He never made it. Nobody even tried. I was a madman that day, and I pulled it off. A star was born!

The Kaena Point Challenge; how did that come about?

Not long after that day at Waimea, [surf photographer] Warren Bolster asked if I wanted to try something new and different. This was the huge El Nino winter of 1982-83, and myself, Bradshaw, Charlie Walker, and a few others were surfing 20-foot-plus Waimea day after day for all of February and March. It was phenomenal! So Warren comes up to me looking for something different, and the Kaena Point Challenge began for Ace Cool. Over the next year, we experimented with a small oxygen tank strapped to my back, and a special 12-foot board. Another thing, and nobody remembers this but it’s true, we did some early tow-ins in 1984 behind the back of Jeff Johnson's fishing boat. On March 5th, 1984, I did in fact surf Kaena, about 20- or 25-foot foot. Not big enough to be called a record, but some of the bigger Kaena ever surfed. 

 did an article called "The Kaena Point Challenge" and I was on my way.

I closed my shop in 1984, partly to concentrate on big waves and partly because it went broke. I continued to write about surfing for the 

 and to do my radio surf reports. Ace Cool was on a roll! Then on January 5th, 1985, I was flown by helicopter to Outside Pipeline and caught a legitimate 35-foot-plus wave! I made the cover of the 

, and a postcard of that wave was printed, and it said "The Biggest Wave...Hawaii," and it sold something like a million copies a year for 15 years running. It's everywhere, even now. We also made a movie called 

 that sold briskly out of Virgin Records in Europe in 1986. They played it on the Brazilian TV show 

 two years straight, every Sunday night. The people in Brazil could not get enough of Ace Cool!

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