<!--garashi has done so many hundreds (thousands?) of softball interviews for the global surf media that his life story pours from those pouty lips in a smooth stream of burnished inevitability and performative surprise, as if he himself were still learning amazing new details that make his tale even more delightfully perfect.
In a sunny open room of a luxury oceanfront home on Oahu with views of a wind-tossed sea, Igarashi politely offered me a glass of water and sat dutifully at a table while explaining that his mom, Misa, came from a wealthy soba-noodle family that counted among its ancestors ?a really, really, really, really famous samurai.?
His dad, Tsutomu, came from a similarly wealthy family in the construction trade and fell in love with surfing as a kid. Tsutomu was in his early thirties and pursuing a career as an aerobics instructor when Igarashi?s mother-to-be, who led aerobics classes of her own, got pregnant. According to Igarashi, ?It was like, ?How cool would it be for our kid to be a surfer?? And then, like, ?Oh wow, imagine if he was, like, a pro surfer.??
Thus, the classic transition from Act 1 to Act 2 in the so-called hero?s journey: accepting the call to adventure. In the case of the Igarashis, that adventure involved pulling up roots and leaving behind affluent but tradition-bound families and lives, chasing a dream for their unborn child by moving clear across the Pacific to Huntington Beach in time for Igarashi?s birth on October 1, 1997.
It is a lovely and wholesome image: young Misa teaching aerobics in Los Angeles while Tsutomu manages a Japanese restaurant to make ends meet; little Kanoa waking up every morning at 5:30 for surf practice with Dad; sunrise in the water at the beach; cookies from a local bakery for breakfast before school. To this day, Igarashi, who clearly adores his dad and holds his mom in something closer to reverential respect, describes it as joyful father-son time.
It paid off, too?a local surf shop sponsored the cute little Japanese American grom when he was just six. (?Grom,? or ?grommet,? being the technical surf-culture term for any very young ripper; ?ripper? being, in turn, the technical term for any great surfer, as in ?one who rips.?) Igarashi won his first youth contest at seven and started getting free shoes and sunglasses from Spy Optics and Vans by eight. From nine onward, with all expenses paid by sponsors, Igarashi and his parents passed weeks each winter on the North Shore of Oahu, the proving ground for all serious aspiring pros.
Back home in California, the Igarashis spent weekends being the surf-cultural equivalent of the archetypal American sports-obsessed family of high achievers: driving epic hours to contests everywhere from San Diego to San Francisco.
Not that there?s anything wrong with that. In fact, Igarashi is at his most winning when he talks about how much his parents did for him and what an entitled little peanut he was along the way.
?It still eats me up to this day just knowing what my parents were doing,? he says. ?I remember my dad waking me at 3 A.M. to drive because check-ins were at seven.?
Little Kanoa always slept fully laid out in the back of the car, with a mini mattress and pillow, while Mom and younger brother Keanu slumped in the passenger seat and Dad drove.--->
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<!--?I wake up and I?m there,? says Igarashi, burning with indebtedness. He even recalled times when they drove all that way in the wee hours only to see Kanoa lose in his first heat and immediately demand to be driven home.
?Almost psychopath stuff,? he says. ?That?s one thing that I can never repay my parents. It?s crazy. I lose sleep over it.?
(Courtesy Red Bull Content Pool)
Igarashi says he was 13 when he decided he was ready to move up to the Pro Junior Circuit with athletes as old as 21. He found a contest in Florida and asked permission to go. Mom refused, quite sensibly: long way, expensive, adult men fighting for their careers. Igarashi says he waited until Mom fell asleep, found her credit card, and used it to pay his entry fee, book plane tickets, and reserve a car rental and hotel. (He knew how to do all this because, as the family member who spoke the best English, he had long handled logistics for the entire clan.) Mom was furious but came around and even chaperoned Kanoa to Florida.
?I remember thinking, This is the first time I ever felt pressure in my life,? Igarashi says. ?The amount of anger my mom had, and then translate that into, like, understanding why she was mad, and then translating to, like, we?re there and imagine how bad it would be if I didn?t do good.?
He rewarded her by winning the whole damn contest and claiming an $8,000 prize check.
Back home, with a taste of just how successful he might actually become, Igarashi says, he asked his father why he hadn?t pushed him even harder as a kid: ?Like, ?Why weren?t you screaming at me to go surf more?? I kind of thought maybe, Did he not care that much??
Tsutomu?s reply, in Igarashi?s telling: ?Well, you know, it?s not that I didn?t care. It?s just that I want you to live your dream, not my dream.?
One might argue that this particular ship?Kanoa living out Tsutomu?s dream?had sailed quite a long time before. But that would also require admitting that fathers and mothers have been putting their own dreams onto children from time immemorial, that a father could imbue a kid with a dream worse than life as a pro surfer, and that nobody becomes as good of a surfer as Igarashi without an authentic hunger of his own.
By the time Igarashi was 16, sponsors were sending him on so many all-expenses-paid surf trips to so many gorgeous and ultraglamorous beaches and islands with other super-hot pro surfers that Igarashi was missing an awful lot of school. Mom, ever the sensible one, argued for backing off surfing in order to finish up. Igarashi, having none of it, chose instead to drop out of high school, get his GED, and join the World Surfing League?s so-called Qualifying Tour, a lower-tier circuit of contests all over the world.--->
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