by Jamie Brisick
I’M THINKING ABOUT BRAZILIAN PRESIDENT Getúlio Vargas, who shot himself in the heart in 1954; I’m thinking about Pepê Lopes, who died in a hang gliding accident while trying to win a second world title in Japan in 1991; I’m thinking about Aryton Senna, the Formula One racer who died on lap seven of the San Marino Grand Prix in Italy in 1994. I am not thinking about death explicitly, but death hangs over all of this.
I’m bodysurfing the north end of Barra da Tijuca, a spot called Praia do Pepê, named after the aforementioned hang glider. The swell is out of the southwest; the waves are a whomping four foot, mostly lefts, with the occasional short burst of right. The water smells of sewage, with a distinctly Rio tang. My romantic self likes to think of it as bathing in the collective DNA of this city of six million. My more practical self fears Hep A. On my feet, Da Fins, recommended by bodysurfing guru Mark Cunningham. At the tip of my fingers, a hand plane, which I have learned to hold with my inside hand. This is why I love bodysurfing. This is why, on my recent trips to Rio, I end up bodysurfing more than board surfing: I’m still learning new things. At age 47 I may be declining as a surfer, but as a bodysurfer I’m unquestionably improving. The tadpole grows feet and hops across the terra firma. The surfer sheds board and swims off to eternity.
Along the beachfront are high-rises, one of which is a 15-story apart-hotel that is my home for the next month. It’s really my wife’s place. She is here on a three-month contract to co-direct Amor e Sexo a documentary TV series that explores love and sex. She arrived from New York, where we live, a week before me. “We’re staying here,” she said over Skype, and aimed her computer at the building. I recognised it immediately: Barra Beach Towers. I used to stay there in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, when I was a pro surfer. In fact, mostly everyone on tour stayed there. I had what now seem to be prescient moments.
In 1989, while sharing a room with fellow pro Bryce Ellis and playing heated games of Backgammon into the wee hours, I became haunted by the Rolling Stones It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll, specifically the song ‘Time Waits For No One’. One night I couldn’t sleep. The melody was soothing, but the lyrics were galvanizing. I had the idea that I should get up and run sprints along the shoreline. We pros did a lot of this: raising heartbeats, inciting adrenalin, simulating make-or-break moments in the dying seconds of world title-deciding heats. But it is never a good idea to be alone on the beach in Ri
