By Martha Jenkins, Special to the Star-Bulletin
Writer Bruce Jenkins, left, counts surf legend
Buffalo Keaulana among his heroes.
Sports writer lives
the surfer’s dream
Bruce Jenkins winters in Hawaii,
By Greg Ambrose
rubbing elbows with his
big-wave heroes
Special to the Star-BulletinIT'S amazing that a smart guy like Bruce Jenkins hasn't figured it out yet. For the past 24 years the award-winning sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle has spent the entire month of February with his wife Martha in Hawaii.
The idea is to ride some warm waves, hang out with old friends and let the relaxed island lifestyle gently wash away the stress of covering the world's top athletic events on deadline.
That's the plan, anyway.
"I've got the whole winter off, but it doesn't quite feel like it," Jenkins says. "I've never worked so hard in my life."
Jenkins has spent nearly three months in Hawaii this year, and it's the same old story. Work, work, work. Finally, Martha Jenkins has abandoned all attempts to enjoy her Hawaiian holiday and has joined her husband in the work frenzy.
While Bruce has interviewed heavyweights in the Hawaii surf scene, Martha has been by his side, shooting action and portrait photos for the same American and European magazines.
If he stayed at home each vacation, he would get more rest. But Jenkins can't help himself. His addiction to Hawaii started when he was 10 and his family took a vacation aboard the Matsonia in 1958. It was pure magic when the green islands gradually emerged above the blue horizon, and when he spent a day bodysurfing at Makapuu, he was hooked.
Jenkins had been coming to Hawaii on a yearly surfari for more than a decade when the waves changed his life again. Just before midnight on Feb. 22, 1986, Jenkins caught the biggest wave ever, estimated by one reliable witness at 100 feet.
Unfortunately, Jenkins was asleep in bed when the huge wave instantly turned his beachside rental unit into shattered glass and soggy kindling. After one brief moment of terrifying confusion, the impact rendered Jenkins mercifully amnesiac. Fortunately, he survived. But he wasn't the same person.
Jenkins returned to the mainland and wrote about spring training and the 1986 baseball season in a daze, then told his editors at the San Francisco Chronicle he was through with reporting. "After that wave hit me I knew my life was going to be different," he says. "I knew I had been given a second life."
He was keen to head down to Malibu and ponder why he was still alive. But his editors valued his writing skills, and were determined to keep him on the staff. They let Jenkins write sports stories from southern California while he sorted out his life.
When he finally returned to northern California in 1989, the editors awarded Jenkins the exalted status of sports columnist.
"I don't have to write about anything I don't want," he says with a grin. After 16 years of editing, writing headlines and covering every superstar's sprained ankle and contract negotiation, Jenkins doesn't even have to go into the newsroom to work.
He travels the world to cover the Olympics, World Series, Wimbledon, Super Bowl and NBA championships, and sends his stories by modem to the Chronicle.
Getting slammed by the huge wave cured Jenkins of a curious affliction -- he'd go mute in the presence of Hawaii's big-wave riders. The same guy who could easily walk up and converse with Magic Johnson, Joe Montana and Barry Bonds was struck dumb in the presence of Kenny Bradshaw and Darrick Doerner.
But surviving the ultimate wipeout opened a conversational door, and Jenkins was able to probe the mystique of our ocean heroes. The result was "North Shore Chronicles," the first book to capture the spirit of surfing's most eccentric characters.
Jenkins also began spending each vacation writing for surf magazines, with a greater passion than he found for his sports columns.
"The experiences I've had in interviewing Rell Sunn and Pat Curren, the Jose Angel story and now Laird Hamilton, that stuff is irreplaceable," he says. "You don't find people like that in mainstream sports. There are no Rell Sunns, there are no Brian Keaulanas.
"Being a surfer myself, and knowing what that takes, I have so much respect for them. Usually the more you are around baseball players and football players, the more you wish you had never heard of them."
Except for a very few well-paid exceptions, most professional surfers receive little more than the fleeting memory of good waves for their efforts. "It's a renegade thing to begin with," Jenkins says. "It's not like being a football player, where everybody in town knows you and loves you and wants to be you and wants to date you.
"With the really good surfers there's something that goes on out there that they bring back to land with them, that transmits through them in the look in their eye and the way they move. I don't see that in other mainstream athletes, who tend to preen and profile. Surfers understand that the ocean is in charge."
Jenkins could vacation anywhere in the world when February, the slowest month in the sports world, rolls around. But he is always drawn to Hawaii.
"Every day it's clear what I'm going to do. If the surf is too big, I'll watch the greatest show on Earth at Pipeline, or go to Makaha. If it's junky, I'll work. If it's 4 to 6 feet, I'll surf.
"It has never let me down. I always wind up getting the wave of my life every winter. The water is perfect, the weather is perfect, I've never had a bad day in Hawaii. I went through Hurricane Iwa in 1982, and even that was great."
Now approaching 50, Jenkins gazes contentedly out at the tropical blue waves and thinks to himself, "I'll still be able to make those waves when I'm 60."
When not enjoying the pleasures of Hawaii, Jenkins and his wife Martha live in a modest home just north of Half Moon Bay, where Hawaii big-wave rider Mark Foo drowned while surfing the cold waves at Mavericks.
Although their house is a few blocks mauka of the ocean, the living room window offers a breathtaking view of Montara Beach just beneath Devil's Slide.
Over the years, Jenkins has finally attained that Hawaiian ideal to ride whatever vehicle is appropriate for the circumstances: longboard, shortboard, kneeboard, or just a pair of swim fins.
"Some of the most fun I've ever had in Hawaii is bodysurfing Makaha when all the boys are out. Seeing Rusty Keaulana ripping a wave, I'll take a deep breath and go way down and be looking up as his board goes whooosh by me and Buffalo is on the next wave and I just want to yell out loud.
"I feel I'm plugged into the essence of it. It's not always you being on the wave yourself."
It's a feeling that surpasses his greatest moments on land. "The Barcelona Olympics of 1992 is by far the best experience I've ever had in journalism. I wasn't familiar with anything I was covering. I did an unbelievable amount of homework, and seeing it pay off over there, where little notes I had taken helped me on deadline, was fantastic. But mostly it was just the feel of being in Barcelona, with that magic of Europe."
And it didn't even come close to the feeling of a perfect day of surfing, Jenkins says. He wakes up every morning on the North Shore to the sound of big waves under blue skies.
Meanwhile, his friends and colleagues back in San Francisco have been hammered by El Nino, enduring more than a month of deluges, mudslides and floods of Biblical proportions.
"We don't even deserve all the goodness that is coming our way over here," he says with a satisfied smile.
