Emperor of the Unknown
The sun hides behind a lead veil and the hour has yet to creep into double digits, but the pier at Huntington Beach is already crowded with people straining for a glimpse of the most famous lifeguard in the world. Tourists lean over the rail, scanning the scene of sand and cameras and buffed bodies in skimpy swimsuits. Down below, a security guard hands out postcards of David Hasselhoff in his trademark red trunks squinting in the sun.
The real Hasselhoff is sitting in a dory and holding oars, but the boat is pulled high above the surf line and the oars are really poles without blades that churn only air. Greg Bonnan, the lifeguard who created “Baywatch,” barks orders into a megaphone. “Action!” Hasselhoff and Mike Newman, a lifeguard who spends more time these days playing a lifeguard on the show than he does watching the surf from a tower, pull back on the fake oars and start grunting. They are supposed to be in a dory race, an exhausting event in which the two-man boats often shoot vertically over breaking surf. Here, the only time anyone gets wet is between takes, when an assistant spritzes Hasselhoff from a bottle. “Cut!” The crowd applauds.
Under a nearby tower, another lifeguard with the perfect surfer/frat boy look (tan, blond, killer abs) is reading his scripted lines, and no one is watching. But in his world--the world of competitive lifeguarding--Craig Hummer is a god. For the last decade he has dominated the sport--a brutal medley of swimming, running, paddling and kayaking events, spiced up by the whim of the weather and the waves. He has even played himself on “Baywatch” a few times. It’s a wonderful life--except most Americans don’t know that competitive lifeguarding is a sport. If you’ve heard of Hummer at all, it’s probably because of the flap over his appearance on “The Late Show With David Letterman,” where he read from a list of Top 10 lifeguard pickup lines.
“Craig would be a multimillion-dollar player in another sport,” says Arthur Verge, a lifeguard who’s also a history professor at El Camino College. But in America Hummer’s just a curio, a contestant in one of those weird events ESPN uses to fill up the air time between the real sports. And now at 32, when he should be in the top of his form, Hummer is giving up competitive lifeguarding to try to break into broadcasting and provide a decent life for his wife and young daughter. Which is why he is interviewing Australian lifeguards on the set of “Baywatch” instead of racing against them a few days later in the first American stop on a new series of international races called the World Oceanman. The camera starts to roll.
“ ‘Baywatch’ is one of the hottest shows in the world,” Hummer begins in his deep, projective TV voice, “and a select group of our Oceanman competitors got to hang out on the set with some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities. Oceanman racing actually got its start on the shores of sunny California in the ‘30s but it was Australians who visited the U.S. in the ‘60s who perfected the event. But California has once again taken a leading role as ‘Baywatch’ is responsible for exposing lifeguarding to a worldwide audience. ‘Baywatch’ has educated millions of viewers on the techniques essential for lifeguarding.”
Hummer films two good takes for a production company Down Under. He murders a third, flubs a fourth, but nails it on the fifth try. He breaks into a smile for several frozen seconds after he’s done speaking, squint lines etched deeply into his face. Then Hummer realizes that he forgot to switch on his microphone. “ ‘Baywatch,’ ” he says for a sixth time, “is one of the hottest shows . . . “
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On Dec. 16, 1908, a sudden squall blew out of the Pacific and slammed into Santa Monica Bay. Standing on the Venice pier as huge waves broke in front of him, George Freeth watched a fleet of Japanese fishing boats bob in the bay like toys in a tub. Freeth broke into a run, hurled himself into an oncoming comber and swam through the gale to reach a skiff and save its crew. Twice more he plunged into the chilly surf, helping to rescue 11 fishermen and attracting hundreds of onlookers. “Girls,” reported the Los Angeles Times, “crowded around just to pat his tanned shoulders and smile at him.” Freeth, who earned a congressional medal for his heroics, was America’s first great lifeguard.
He had been born 25 years earlier in Honolulu, the son of an English sea captain and a Hawaiian princess; his surfing and swimming prowess were immortalized by Jack London. In 1907, railroad magnate Henry Huntington gave Freeth a job as a lifeguard at his new Redondo Beach resort. Over the next decade, before he died at the age of 35, Freeth trained a generation of lifeguards, saved hundreds of lives and set a standard of athletic excellence that watermen have been trying to emulate ever since.
In 1926, the city of Los Angeles started a professional lifeguard corps, now run by the L.A. County Fire Department. Today there are approximately 700 lifeguards in the county; full-time pay starts near $38,000. About 110 work year-round. The rest, who work summers or weekends, do something else with most of their time: one is a multimillionaire lawyer, another teaches physics at USC, a third is a noted emergency-room physician at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
The job is competitive from the start: On a wintry day, about 200 would-be lifeguards race through an open-water swim; the first 50 or so who finish get a spot in that year’s rookie class. As a spectator sport, however, lifeguarding hasn’t grown much since Freeth’s time. The sport’s biggest events are lucky to draw a crowd at all; prize money tops out at $2,000; and even ESPN is hard pressed to feature more than the high-lights of a race or two.
It’s a different story in Australia, a nation in the grip of surf sports. Down Under, about 80% of the population lives along the coast; most lifeguards are volunteers who joined surf clubs as children to learn about water safety. Big lifeguarding competitions attract 50,000 fans and are carried on live television. Top pros can earn $75,000 on the circuit, and several times that in endorsement deals.
Consider Australian racer Dwayne Thuys, 34, who got involved with lifeguarding at age 5 and has been competing professionally for 13 years. His weathered face is on cereal boxes. A few days before the Oceanman event, I ask if he plans to retire. “Why should I?” he asks. “It’s not like you have to do your training in the morning and go to your day job. You can make a living at your sport.”
Unless you’re an American.
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As a child, Hummer hated the water, as if he knew there was some danger lurking there for him, addiction if not injury. He grew up in Ohio, outside of Columbus, and the pool terrified him. But at 6 he was transfixed by a swim team at a country club, thumping across the water in the powerful butterfly stroke. He joined the team and did the butterfly for a year. “I didn’t know it was the hardest stroke you could do,” he says. “It was the coolest thing.” By the time he hit nearby Kenyon College, the diminutive Hummer (5’4” and 130 pounds) was a champion swimmer, and competitive as hell.
“I was the littlest kid on the starting block, and people would make fun of me and I thought, ‘You just wait and see.’ ” By his senior year, Hummer had shot up to nearly 6 feet and 170 pounds. In April, a month before his graduation in 1987, he flew to Los Angeles to take the L.A. County lifeguard test--a way station, he thought, on the road to an advertising career. Hummer had never raced in the ocean before and the sight of 200 guys, many in UCLA and USC swim jackets, elbowing for room at the start of a one-mile ocean sprint floored him. “I thought that if I finished in the top 50 I was going to be lucky,” he recalls.
Hummer hummed the “Jaws” shark-attack music to himself and, about 15 minutes later, came in first.
Later that year Hummer won his first lifeguard sporting event: a run-swim-run race in Hawaii. He took up paddleboarding and surf-skiing (a surf ski is a rail-thin, sit-atop kayak). In 1990 he won the three-day National Lifeguard Championships (running, swimming, paddleboarding, kayaking and dory racing) and after that left most of the competition in his wake. Hummer trained six hours a day, determined to make himself synonymous with a sport most Americans knew nothing about. “I wasn’t the best at it but I could foresee the possibility of becoming the best at it,” he says. “That challenge was really something that consumed me.”
In October of that year, Hummer arrived in Australia for its summer racing season, the Uncle Tobys Super Series, in which top-ranked lifeguards travel the continent competing. Hum-mer, who 1751213088American to make a name for himself in the sport there. For the next four months he ate peanut butter and jelly and rice. He finished 21st out of 35. “I just knew I had to go do this,” he says, so he came back the next year, moving up to 13th. In his third season, Hummer finished ninth. Still, Australian sponsors weren’t interested.
“Where I was, in the Top 10, there’s no question I should have been getting at least $50,000 in sponsorship a year,” he laments. “But it just wasn’t happening.”
The next year, Hummer dislocated his shoulder in an Australian race and called it quits in the southern hemisphere. In the end, being from Ohio was a handicap. “From the age of 4, they’re running around the ocean, learning how to paddleboard, how to go through waves. Four-year-old kids here in the U.S. pick up a baseball bat or a golf club or throw a football. There, they get on a paddleboard. You can’t compete with that. Think about it: If you were doing something from the age of 4 versus when I started this, I was 22, there’s bound to be things that enable you, when push comes to shove, to make you a better athlete. It’s natural.”
In the United States, Hummer concentrated on sports modeling and commercials--much more lucrative and far less work (you’ve probably seen him drooling over a babe in a Carl’s Jr. spot and as a lifeguard rhapsodizing over a truck in a Ford ad). Then, in late 1995, the David Letterman show called, looking for lifeguards to recite a Top 10 list of lifeguard pickup lines (“Coast Guard regulations, Miss, I have to inspect you for sand mites”). Hummer says he talked to the producers, was assured they had gone through proper channels and he rounded up some buddies to read lines such as: “If you put your ear to my shorts, you can hear the ocean.”
Nothing happened when the episode aired, but when it reran in April, 1996, chief lifeguard Don Rohrer belatedly heard about it. He was furious, complaining that the profession’s reputation had been set back 50 years. He suspended Hummer for three weeks without pay. When Hummer received 100 calls from reporters in a day, he retained a press agent, which convinced some in the towers that the whole thing had been a publicity stunt. “This has been his meal ticket,” one lifeguard fumed. “He’s painting himself as the wounded martyr. Real lifeguards have nothing but scorn for what he has done.”
Hummer appealed and the suspension was revoked, but his enthusiasm for the job was frayed. This year he plans to put in just the four days minimum required to remain a lifeguard. “It’s kind of nice to know if everything else falls apart and I fail, I still have my job as a lifeguard,” he says. “I always make the distinction between competitive lifeguards and working lifeguards. Guys who work the tower day in and day out can take exception to the fact that I get all this publicity. I’ll hear people say behind my back, ‘That Hummer, he’s not even a lifeguard.’ I worked every summer as a lifeguard for 10 years. Why does that make me any less of a lifeguard because I parlayed that into something?”
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Hummer lives with wife Jennifer, a writer, and baby daughter Madison in a small apartment a block from the beach. The only trophy in sight is from a local race, “The Ed Perry Iron Man.” A foot-tall bronze figure holds an oar in front of a plaque bearing 22 names. Mike Newman, the lifeguard-cum-”Baywatch” regular, is listed four times. Then the Hummer reign begins in 1989 and continues for the next seven years, skipping only one year when he was out of the country.
He pops a tape into the VCR: It’s the Waikiki King’s Race, the highlight of a week of competition. The race first took place in 1991. Hummer came in second that year and the next. Then he won the next four years. The 1996 event started with 75 men blasting down the beach at Waikiki for a mile; Hummer and a rising Australian star named Steven Pullen left the pack eating their sand; by the 3-mile kayak event, it was a two-man race. Pullen started the mile-swim with a good lead but it was neck-to-neck by the end of the two-mile paddle. Hummer hit the beach first and ran across the finish line one second faster and $1,000 richer.
Hummer used to study his racing tapes--when he could find one, as most of the competitions weren’t recorded. Now he looks over his sports commentary, striving for the same excellence in his new milieu. Last year he hosted the King’s Race, although until the job came through just weeks before the event, Hummer was ready to compete. And he spent a good chunk of each week last year as a commentator with Fox Sports’ volleyball series.
At a volleyball game outside Sacramento last year, Hummer tried to tell me that his near-term goal was to make it to the Sydney Olympics as a broadcaster. But then he tripped over the remote possibility that the Aussies would slip some lifeguarding events into the program, and suddenly Hummer was beaming about competing. “If that happened, I’d freak,” he said. (Hummer, as it turns out, has never stopped training.) “How many athletes can say they were the first guy to represent their country in their sport?”
Back in the real world, Hummer changes tapes, playing his stand-up from a volleyball tournament in Vail. He sounds as if he’s had too much coffee. His interview with the winner goes as well as sports talk inanity ever does. Then Hummer flashes a big smile--grinning in profile before his face snaps toward the right direction. “Jeez,” he moans in his living room, covering his face with his hand and lowering his head in a gesture of unaccustomed defeat. “I looked at the wrong camera.”