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“I was just ready to be not good at something, which is more fun.” “I wasn’t bored with surfing, I was just sick of the pressure,” he remembers. But by s16 he’d burned out, turning his attention to motocross, snowboarding, and skateboarding…anything but surfing. As a prodigious pre-teen, with a 2-to-20-foot surf-anything approach and a pedigree that linked to some of California’s early surf pioneers, Fletcher seemed destined to eclipse the accomplishments of his older brother Christian-the bad-boy forefather of modern aerial surfing. In a span of three minutes during his Round of 32 heat, he earned two perfect 10s and the respect of a community who’d all but forgotten about him. As the crowd whistled and screamed from the channel, Fletcher cleared his mind and followed his heart. As the swell pulsed, and many seasoned competitors looked over the ledge and pulled back out of an innate sense of self-preservation, Fletcher put on a display of purely instinctive, balls-out charging that happens only a handful of times per generation. He’d promised himself that if he could make an impact and win some heats, he would end the marriage and make a serious attempt at being a profession surfer.Īs if on cue, a monster swell collided with Teahupoo’s treacherously shallow reef during the final rounds of the event, giving the surf community its first up-close and uncomfortable look down the throat of the world’s most captivating and frightening wave.
#Nathan fletcher surfer pro#
It was the spring of 1998 and with no sponsors, less than $300 to his name, and his two-year marriage to a woman named Roxanne Hammer unraveling at home, the 23-year-old entered the Gotcha Pro Tahiti at an offshore reef pass called Teahupoo-a name most surfers couldn’t yet pronounce. Nathan Fletcher’s life was at a crossroads.