100 Foot Wave Crashes to Shore
Spoilers follow for the third season of 100 Foot Wave, which concluded on HBO on Thursday, May 29.
Throughout 100 Foot Wave’s third season, the surfers we’ve watched for years tackling the ocean and hurtling their bodies through roaring cyclone barrels talk about reaching the end of their time on the water. The word finish comes up more than once. Dramatic conversations are had about when enough is enough. It’s unclear if this is the series’ last go-round; HBO hasn’t yet confirmed whether it’s renewed. But there’s a wistful, nostalgic air to this season that certainly feels like an ending — at least for protagonist Garrett McNamara, whose popularization of big-wave surfing is the reason this show exists, and who is learning to accept that he needs to walk away from the sport as his body begins to fail him. It’s a realization that is devastating to watch, even for a man as barbed and mercurial as McNamara, and it elevates the series into a larger interrogation of who we become when the thing we love leaves us behind.
There are decades of American stories about this: the plight of the aging man, realizing that after a lifetime spent defining himself through his work, he might no longer fit within the industry he helped build. Understandably, people might be tired of this canon — of Willy Loman, John Rooney, Don Draper, Kenny Powers — but done well, it still feels like a universal story of how difficult it can be to reinvent yourself outside the context of what you produce. It’s an especially interesting story when told through the lens of sports, where one’s sense of self is so linked to their body, their labor, and how those two are intertwined. 100 Foot Wave’s third season rubs shoulders with a number of other stories in this space — think Michael Jordan’s teammates talking about his nearly sociopathic competitive spirit in The Last Dance; or in the fictional realm, Poker Face devoting two separate episodes to aging sportsmen — and it’s curious about the way extreme specialization and success can lead, once they’re gone, to bone-deep solitude and rangy aimlessness.
The surfing makes it all so much more intense, though: the vastness of the ocean, the unknowability of its depths, how tiny these athletes look on its surface. The line between triumph and tragedy is incredibly thin, and 100 Foot Wave conveys that simultaneous elation and danger with every swooping drone shot of a surfer cutting a line through a swell and every splash of filmy foam on the camera lens. And the updates the series makes to this classically male story allows it to interrogate McNamara’s growing awareness of his status on the margins of a sport he once dominated. The second season brought in younger surfers who were drawn to places like Nazaré, Portugal, after McNamara helped make these locations known internationally, subtly pushing him aside to trace their journeys, their sponsorships, and their desires. And when the third season re-centers McNamara, it doesn’t feint at him somehow overcoming his battered body to make it back to the top, nor does it suggest that he should; it’s not trying to impose a conquering arc upon this man. Instead, it’s honoring what he’s achieved, and also allowing his family, friends, and loved ones to grapple with all they’ve given up, all the time he’s spent away from them while chasing the impossible dream of a 100-foot wave. McNamara is the heart of this show, but 100 Foot Wave doesn’t valorize him to get that point across. Someone doesn’t have to be perfect for the collapse of their dream to be moving.
Instead, the driving action of this season is grappling, and the unifying emotion is a kind of grief. McNamara can be domineering, but his resigned tone in the season premiere, “Risk,” as he estimates he’s suffered 100 concussions in his career and talks about the holes in his memory from those wipeouts, is crushing. Even worse is his wife Nicole’s matter-of-fact reaction to a neurologist’s order that he stop surfing: “I think he’d rather die.” As the season goes on, McNamara tries to be more responsible: He gets in better shape, he’s more present with his wife and kids, he volunteers to drive Jet Skis for other surfers. But just like the waves he so covets, we see the toll of this forced-upon rationality building and building until it explodes outward. He becomes an overzealous advocate for his younger family members getting into surfing, sometimes pushing them more than they want to be pushed; he treats every surfing trip like it’s going to be his last, and then loses his temper when he thinks longtime friends like Andrew “Cotty” Cotton aren’t driving as well for him as he does for them. The man is trying to outrace his own irrelevance, but time always marches forward, our bodies always fail, there’s always a younger person snapping at your heels. Even if you’ve never surfed in your life, 100 Foot Wave makes both McNamara’s fears of insignificance and his family’s fears of losing him, either physically or mentally, equally relatable.
Amid all that sorrow and uncertainty, 100 Foot Wave also finds places to acknowledge why this sport pulls so many into its grasp and to recognize the bonds that this elite community reinvigorates year after year as they travel around the world chasing storms and swells. Some of that’s celebratory, like the Brazilian team cooing over Lucas “Chumbo” Chianca’s baby daughter, and amateur surfer and beach lifeguard Luke Shepardson unexpectedly winning the Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational in Hawaii. Other moments are more downbeat, like when the formerly close, nearly siblinglike surfers Justine DuPont and Tony Laureano end their professional partnership, or when all the Portugal regulars throw flowers into Nazaré’s waves to mourn Brazilian legend Marcio Freire’s death there in January 2023. And the series delivers its wildest sequence yet in this season’s third episode, when McNamara, Cotty, DuPont, Chumbo, and a few other surfers travel 100 miles off the California shore to Cortes Bank, a highly isolated location where surfing is extra-dangerous because there’s no nearby land. Surfer, editor, and “Cortes Bank pioneer” Bill Sharp calls it the “most disorienting surf spot on the planet,” and the footage there feels like that part of Interstellar where Matthew McConaughey visits the wave planet, a corner of the galaxy that doesn’t seem to follow our rules of geography or gravity.
The shadow hovering over all this is how clear it is to these surfers that they might eventually end up like McNamara, and how much affection and grace they offer him in light of this realization. McNamara can be a bully, he can stir up shit between people, but he’s also, as DuPont says when he calls to invite her on the Cortes Bank trip, “the godfather of every surfer here,” the person reaching down to lift youngsters up. McNamara may tumble into a pit of self-loathing every so often (who hasn’t?), yet whenever he crawls back out of it, it’s to praise Cotty’s surfing, or to encourage brother-in-law CJ Macias to confront his PTSD after a wipeout last season, or to devote himself more fully to his younger children than he did his older ones. “I hope he can reflect on what he’s done for so many people, but Garrett’s Garrett,” Nicole says. “He just festers. He’s his own worst enemy.” 100 Foot Wave is aware of how difficult it can be to love someone like that, but also how important it is to try if they’re willing to try, too, and it makes this season that much more precious and poignant to watch.
In the finale, “Family Business,” the McNamaras decide to move from Hawaii to Montaldo, Italy, a mountainous rural village where they’re raising their children on a sort of commune with other families. It’s odd to see McNamara on land that isn’t sand, doing chores like sorting firewood and overseeing villa renovations, and there’s a bit of a convincing-himself quality to his “community, children, I’m just happy” reaction to his new oceanless surroundings. On its own, the final shot of McNamara, who has declined a surf trip to Mavericks, California, because he’s spending Christmas with his family and is “happy right here,” is a perfect way to end this story. The conflict inherent in McNamara single-mindedly staring at a storm tracker on his cell phone as his family celebrates around him is exactly the emotional whirlpool 100 Foot Wave has been circling all season: how hard it is to give up one identity for another.
But on a broader, humanist level, that final shot is also exactly why McNamara’s time on 100 Foot Wave should come to its end, whether or not the series itself does. The show presents surfing as a balance between surrendering to nature while conquering a wave, a push-pull dynamic that can only work in equilibrium, and McNamara has been a compelling personification of that, someone who trains and strives and competes to maintain sangfroid. The kindest thing now would be to keep 100 Foot Wave going without him, and allow him to achieve that balance within himself.
Related