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 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.