I was just a boy when I first saw him.
Our eyes met and I found it impossible to look away. He of course didn’t have that problem as he staring at me from a magazine, perched on the side of a helicopter about to jump into the boiling sea below.
His name was Ace. Ace Cool.
Several years prior I’d become fascinated with another guy called Ace, this one painted his face and played lead guitar with the band Kiss.
I didn’t know it at the time, but Ace Frehley occasionally jumped up on stage loaded on opiates. Maybe I would’ve too if I played second fiddle to two Jewish guys wearing platform shoes singing songs like “Lick it Up”.
I also didn’t know it at the time but Lick it Up meant something else, but I sang along anyway, “It ain’t a crime to be good to yourself…lick it up, lick it up, oh, whoa yeah!”
Anyway, back to Ace Cool. He’s been missing since Tuesday. Word is he paddled out at Waimea and didn’t come back. Police later found his truck near St Peters Church with keys and his dog locked inside.
You can’t help but think how often he may’ve sat out there at Waimea under the watchful gaze of that church sharing the line-up with Kenny Bradshaw, Mark Foo and countless others.
Monumental egos battling it out on the biggest stage known to man. Ace though set a precedent for self-promotion ahead of his quest to ride the biggest waves known to man.
He handed out postcards with his picture on it, such a quaint notion compared today’s multi-platform approach.
As these things do, his brash calls drew the stink eye from big wave surfing’s glitterati and he was tarnished with the same brush still being used today for the likes of Garrett McNamara, Maya Gabeira and our own Mark Visser.
“But surfers like Ace get conversations started,” says surfing’s preeminent (and only?) historian, Matt Warshaw.
“He didn’t give that big a fuck what the cool kids think. In that sense alone he was a more likable version of Garrett McNamara, who more or less picked up where Ace left off and turned the volume way, way, WAY up. But media-wise, Ace was so small time, but it seemed to me like he was SURE, right up to the end, that his big break was going to come.”
As the surfing world prepared to lose it’s shit over the departure of Dane Reynolds from Quiksilver, rescuers quietly called off the search for Ace. Perhaps not the big break he deserved, but probably one he knew was going to come.
