I DON'T KNOW HOW MANY FIGHTS I've been in. I don't even think about that kind of stuff. I'm just trying to stay out of fights now. But, yeah, there's one I'm most known for.

It was at Pipeline in 2002. Typical December day there—solid six-foot swell, hundreds of people on the beach, and too many guys in the water. I was on the beach when I saw this guy cut Braden Dias off. He could have killed him. Braden and I are good friends, both Hawaiians. I didn't even wait for the guy to come in before I started running down the beach. I just kind of lost it. He didn't want to fight. He kept saying, "No, no, no." But I hit him three times. I didn't know the guy. I heard that he was some kind of fighter from Brazil. He was bigger than me. But it wasn't really a fight. You can see that in the video—it's online somewhere.

I really regret the whole thing. Immediately afterward, though, my thinking was, If this makes people hesitate before they drop in and put someone's life in danger, then some good can come of it. Pipeline was just out of control.

I don't remember the first time we used the name Wolf Pack—probably around 1995. People just started calling us a pack of wolves. Originally it was just us Kauai boys—Kai Garcia, Chava Greenlee, Andy and Bruce Irons, Reef McIntosh, Danny Fuller, Dustin Barca, Dino Hawelu, and my half brother, Kamalei. We just brought the mentality that we grew up with all our lives to Oahu: You respect your elders, you respect the locals, you don't drop in, and you don't endanger other people. Our goal was simply for the place to be safe and for us to get some respect.

It's not in a lifeguard's job description to remove people from the water if they're not skilled enough to be out there. So we did it. We would tell people to go in if we thought they were going to hurt somebody. And if they stayed out there and put someone else in danger … Hey, we don't have any rules that say, "If this guys drops in on you, you've got to fight him." But that's a life-threatening situation, very emotional. I have no control over what anybody who gets dropped in on is going to do.

The problem is that it's not that hard to paddle out at Pipeline. So the uneducated walk out and the water's blue, it's sunny, there are chicks on the beach, everyone looks healthy. But more people have died in the water there than at any other wave. It breaks with a 20-foot face in four feet of water, with a reef right below. The wave moves really quickly, and if you get bounced off that reef, you're in trouble. Flesh gets ripped off. Limbs get broken. Malik Joyeux, one of the best big-wave surfers in the world, died out there. It's a really unforgiving place. We were trying to make it safer.

Looking back, yes, I could have just talked to the guy who cut Braden off. He was already scared when he saw me, and I think he regretted what he'd done, so I didn't need to take it that far. I wish it had never happened at all. And thank God I didn't hurt him that bad. But look, I wouldn't just paddle out at Huntington Beach and take all the waves from the guys who live there. There's localism everywhere. Australia, Brazil … You fuck with the Balinese, they'll chase you with machetes. I beat up that guy, but I wasn't swinging a machete at him.