Bodysurfing at Newport Beach

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Outside Magazine August 2004

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Bodysurfing
The Lip Comes Down (cont.)


	Current wave master Matt Larson (Jake Chessum)

"TERRY WADE WAS A FREAK," says Fred Simpson. It's a sunny afternoon in June, and Simpson is holding court with a group of Crew members at El Ranchito, a Mexican restaurant on Newport Boulevard. Matt Larson sits quietly at one end of the table, while 18-year-old Sean Starkey, a freckle-faced blond and the son of an Orange County plumber, leans in over his nachos. A half-dozen other guys—including Nickelsen and Ron "Romo" Romanosky, a stern Vietnam vet and 30-year Wedge devotee—chatter about a big swell on the way.

Though Simpson no longer rides the Wedge, he remains the group's respected oral historian. This afternoon he's telling the gang about Wade, who ruled the wave during the seventies and early eighties.

"He'd sit way the hell outside and wait for the real freight trains," Simpson says. "When it gets to 30 feet, the jetty starts looking like a submarine going through the incoming swells—and you can hear the wave coming down the rocks, boom-boom-boom . . .

"When the Wedge gets to 30 feet," says Simpson, "the jetty starts looking like a submarine going through the incoming swells. You can hear the waves coming down the rocks, boom-boom-boom."

and the peak is like a small planet, like the back side of Half Dome, and you're going, Where the hell does it get vertical? It keeps going down and down . . . and now it's too late, see, because now it trips and you fall off that goddamn roof. Wade knew how to ride those things."

Of course, not everyone did. In 1987, Mike Cunningham, winner of that year's World Bodysurfing Championships, decided to take a spin on the Wedge. "He tried to do an underwater takeoff, getting pretty," says Simpson. "Guy falls out and goes 'Aaaaaaaa!' Boom! The lip comes down on him and bursts his eardrum. He tried to tap-dance." Simpson wags his finger. "The Wedge ain't a stage. No tap dancing allowed. No cute. He came up bleeding from his ear, going 'Oh, God, somebody help me.' " (Simpson helped Cunningham out of the water, and he recovered fully.)

As the guacamole goes around, the Crew offers more tributes to the Wedge's cruelty.



	Wall Street refugee J.T. Nickelsen, defender of the turf (Jake Chessum)

"When all hell breaks loose in that tube," says Rick Pianni, 36, a local commercial real estate developer, "it's like getting nailed by three linebackers at once."

"Your nose fills with sand, your mouth fills with sand," chimes in Karl Larson, Matt's 37-year-old brother, who lives in Irvine and joins his sib on the Wedge every chance he gets. "Your eyelids blow open and fill with sand."

"My shoulder got shoved straight down out of the joint," adds Pianni, the only Crew member who can afford a house adjacent to the Wedge. "My wife had to drive me to the hospital." "How many places did ValueJeff break his ankle?" asks Karl, using the Crew's nickname for an airplane mechanic who frequents the wave. "Fifteen?"

"Maybe 16. He'll never be the same."

And on it goes. Terry Wade's Wedge career ended when he hit bottom one too many times—after landing on his tailbone hard enough at age 19 to rip his Speedo and hard enough again at 29 that he had to be dragged out of the water. He retired from the scene in 1998, at age 38, with his lower vertebrae fused and braced by titanium. These days, Wade lives hours inland, in the scorching Central Valley town of Bakersfield, teaching flying whenever his chronic pain eases up. Simpson narrowly avoided a similar fate back in 1988, when he, too, fell out of the lip: "I did a compression fracture on my second lumbar, slipped a disc, split my ass cheeks, and bit both sides of my tongue off."

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