On that warm Tahitian morning four years ago -- the morning that made surfing history -- Laird Hamilton drifted alone on a jet ski, head bowed, preparing to do what he'd been doing since childhood: feed his demons with an act of suicidal physical courage. It had been a costly way of life -- scars covered his body and his second marriage was unraveling -- but Laird seemed happy, with a breeze off the green mountains and huge surf exploding onto the coral reef. Because he was about to ride the world's most dangerous waves, he offered thanks to God and prayed for his own safety.

Not a month earlier, a young pro had been killed here by an eight-foot wave, his spine snapped and half his face ripped off. Gazing out to sea, Laird faced waves more than twice that size. He knew very well the risk he was going to take, but he was answering a profound hunger. "My whole life has been a search for a productive place to put my energy," he told me later, adding that he "can't be a good husband, a good father, even a good citizen" if he allows those energies to turn dark.

Good waves make surfers frantic with desire, and Laird steadied himself by triple-checking his safety gear. He felt a preternatural calm, knowing his moment had come and that "now was not the time to be anxious," as he put it in his peculiar diction. "Now was the time to move cautiously and straight."

After the first few waves, Laird's longtime surfing partner Darrick Doerner got nervous and quit; another surfer stopped after a bloody wipeout. For the next few hours Doerner manned the jet ski, towing Laird into the scariest waves anyone had ever seen. Laird was elated, thanking God for "blessing us with a little vision of His power."

Shortly before midday Doerner towed his friend into the biggest wave of the day. As Laird let go of the tow rope and surfed off the cliff, the shouts from two boatloads of onlookers turned from exhilarated encouragement to stunned disbelief. When the ride ended Doerner zoomed in with the jet ski. Laird was all smiles -- his driven, searching life finally making sense.

Then Doerner towed him into a 10-second horror show that changed the sport forever.

Catching any wave requires getting your board to move faster than the wave itself, so you can overcome surface friction and shoot down the front. The bigger the waves get, the faster they move, but there's a limit to how fast humans can paddle. Waves over 35 feet were the "unridden realm" until the early 1990s, when Laird, Doerner, and their friend Buzzy Kerbox began using powerboats, and then jet skis, to tow one another into 50-footers at a Maui break called Jaws. At first, traditionalists called the motor assist cheating, but soon they were buying their own jet skis and copying Laird's marquee act.

In Tahiti that morning Laird was hunting an even starker line to draw in the sand, a new way to prove that he was the best there ever was. Sheer wave height counts for a lot, but surfing also has an alternate path to glory, based on a wave's power -- or "thickness." Nobody wants to fall on a very tall wave, but a very thick one is far more lethal.

Think of it this way: big surf is generated in the chaos of a distant storm, and while rolling across the open ocean it consolidates into a stretched-out sine curve. Approaching California, the ever shallower continental shelf drags on those curves, slowing them down and pushing them into a peaklike shape until a thin lip spills over. And even on a towering wave, the face can still be a relatively gentle ramp.

But off the southern coast of Tahiti, near the village of Teahupoo (pronounced CHO-poo), the ocean depth goes from 2,000 feet to six feet in the space of a few hundred yards. Antarctic swell hits the sharp coral reef so hard and fast it has no time to push into a peak. Viewing an incoming Teahupoo wave from the side, you see just the flat ocean surface behind and a vertical wall of water in front. At the last moment, the whole top half of that cliff soars forward in a massively thick lip. The world's finest surfers have to struggle for balance here, screaming through a giant tube over sharp coral with no way out. If the pursuit of sheer wave height is a mountain-man game, easily appreciated, the pursuit of thickness is the connoisseur's dance with death.

Teahupoo is considered the world's thickest wave, and to understand why Laird came here-- and the lifelong drama that led to this single ride -- you have to go back to the painful and rarefied scene of his childhood. Start with the alcoholic father walking out soon after Laird was born; the child's resulting closeness to his single mother is the hallmark of the psychological type known as the puer aeternus, or "eternal boy," the asocial risk-taker who is certain he's meant for such greatness that nothing is ever good enough. Then there's the particular notion of greatness that Laird absorbed -- growing up in Hawaii in the late 1960s, when surfing was in its golden age and Oahu's North Shore, where he lived, was its field of heroes.

Laird was not even three when, trying to bodysurf, he caught the eye of a 17-year-old surf star named Billy Hamilton, one of the most graceful men ever to hang five. They've both told the story a million times -- as the standard first chapter in the Legend of Laird -- but by all accounts it's true: The two felt an instant bond, and Laird said to Billy, "I want you to be my daddy. Come meet my mommy." Billy and Laird's mother Jo Anne fell in love. Laird got himself a last name, a dashing new father, and a role model young enough to be his older brother.

Maturing in Oedipal rivalry with one of surfing's great stylists, and with few other children around, Laird absorbed a hypermale honor culture that defined masculinity in one way: fighting your way through the violent pecking order to ride the biggest waves at Waimea Bay and the deepest, thickest barrels at the Banzai Pipeline, and never flinching.

"I grew up with men," is how Laird explains it now, his voice insistent and defensive. "I was a kid surfing with hardcore guys, and they're dead serious. I screamed, yelled, just to make people conscious of me. They'd be like, 'Get out of my way, punk!'"

Laird has a booming nasal voice, and often speaks in halting bursts, playing out imaginary dialogues: "Oh yeah!" he yells, parodying a macho baritone. "You got to be competitive with the men! Even my dad told me, 'When you can ride behind me, then I'll stop taking your waves.'"

As a five-year-old beach rat, Laird also lived through big-wave surfing's foundational legend: the huge Swell of '69, when the legendary Greg Noll defined the upper limit of human possibility -- the beginning of the unridden realm. By paddling into, and barely surviving, a 35-foot wave, Noll threw down surfing's ultimate gauntlet. Laird was already trying to beat it two years later: At age seven he took one look at a 40-foot waterfall and got Billy to take him to the top. When Billy looked away, Laird jumped off. "That was in me," Laird explains. "That was my personality. A proving-yourself thing, too. Trying to outdo your dad."

Another hallmark of the puer aeternus is an early betrayal by an important adult -- a father's desertion -- and Laird got a double dose. After Jo Anne and Billy had a son of their own, named Lyon, Billy walked out on the family, moving alone to Kauai. Surfing had begun its decades-long focus on contests in small surf, and although Billy was putting food on the table by competing, he grew sick of the sport's growing commercialism. He later invited the family to join him, but Kauai's remoteness only deepened Laird's isolation. Stories of Laird's boyhood resonate with maladjusted ferocity -- punching a teacher, getting in fights. On Laird's last day of formal education, in the 11th grade, "somebody slammed my face in the desk and I tried to throw him out a window. The principal suspended me, so I flipped her the bird and walked out, started pouring concrete and surfing my ass off."

Billy admits that he didn't raise Laird so much as grow up with him. Laird says, "We had a heavy duel going, which was a driving force in spurring my stuff." Billy divorced Jo Anne more than 20 years ago, but Laird still calls him "my dad" -- with all the love and struggle and unresolved tension that implies. "Him and I were super-competitive, radical-kind," Laird says. "He'd be like, 'You'll never do more than I do in surf.' Him and I were, like, grinding."

Visiting Laird Hamilton today means flying to the windward side of Maui and driving through sugar cane fields past the old plantation town of Paia. He has a compulsion to dominate every situation, and that includes telling you how to find him: "I'll be out surfing," he says. "You'll see me." Yeah, but where? "You'll see me," he says, getting testy. It sounds like hide-and-seek, but then you round a bend on the twisty two-lane coast road, and there he is. A quarter-mile ahead, well offshore, among 30 prone surfers no more distinct than black specks, and who else could be the bronze giant standing tall on a 12-foot surfboard, driving it forward with a canoe paddle? And while we're at it, who even uses a canoe paddle?

At the time Laird came into his own as a surfer, in his early 20s, contest surfing dominated the limelight -- partly because big-wave riders still couldn't break Greg Noll's 35-foot ceiling, and partly because contests are easy to sell. As a result, most ambitious surfers -- such as six-time world champ Kelly Slater -- started following the contest circuit to fame and sponsorship fortune. But Laird, deeply a product of the old anticommercial North Shore, refused to play. Not only had he seen contests break Billy's heart, but contest surfing is like figure skating, a style-based performance rated by subjective judges. Laird is an exceptionally beautiful surfer, but at six-foot-three, 220 pounds, he's like a tyrannosaurus compared with most lithe, little pros. And his need to win -- at anything and everything -- made competition emotionally intolerable. "I hate losing," he says. "So I just figure if you don't play you can't lose. And if you never play and never lose, then people think that you can always win."

As if trained for a war that was already over, Laird spent years stalking the margins of surf culture, getting attention by taking weird risks nobody else would take: leaping off a 125-foot sea cliff, in Levi's, for a video; paddling across the English Channel on a surfboard. Two years after learning to windsurf he was jumping off 30-foot waves in 50-knot winds. With friends on Maui he attached a modified parachute to a harness and helped invent kiteboarding. Then he, Brett Lickle, and Rush Randle bolted an aluminum hydrofoil to a wakeboard and created "foilboarding," in which the surfer rides just above the surface. "But as soon as Laird knows he can't be the very best at something," says an old friend, "he moves on." Thus his current interest in stand-up paddling, which is aesthetically beautiful and so new to most surfers that he has almost no competition.

Laird's unwillingness to follow rules he hasn't written has been expensive: A fashion photographer once saw him on a Kauai beach and put him in men's Vogue, but after a single, demeaning cattle call he quit modeling. And his experimentalism kept him on the sidelines of the surf world for years. Tow-in surfing drew particular skepticism: Jet skis are noisy and dirty, and they really are a kind of cheating. But by allowing Hamilton to break Noll's 20-year-old limit, jet skis also let him reassert the mythic world of his youth -- in which surfers were rock-hard daredevils confronting the power of the sea, not just dancers refining their pirouettes. Soon the photographs of the statuesque man riding 50-foot tsunamis gave him a toehold on a viable career -- along with a stint on ESPN, he finally found sponsorship, albeit from a little-known French beachwear company called Oxbow. Laird and his friend Buzzy Kerbox bought land together on Maui, and Laird married a Brazilian body-boarder, Maria. In 1995 she gave birth to their daughter Izabela.

But with that first big round of success Laird also became known as something of an unstable egomaniac. He has the gravitational charisma that dominates any room, and acquaintances praise his big heart, but they also volunteer troubling stories -- like the time he saw a rival windsurfer enter the kind of porta-potty that stores all its waste in a tank beneath the toilet. Laird toppled the thing and sat on the door, trapping the man in hundreds of gallons of urine and feces. He admits to having broken both hands "by hitting oak doors instead of people."

"I know I'm bad," he says, and he looks to his Christian faith to guide "the way I conduct myself about violence, all the desires of the flesh. I'm so excessive, my hardest part is taking it easy. It's like the grinding stone knows only one thing: to grind."

Even those who love Laird can't help mentioning his cruelty, using words like "harsh" and "gnarly" to explain why he so often drops friends with no thought to the consequences. Among the first of these was Kerbox, who helped Laird build a house on the property they bought together, then saw their friendship explode in an ownership dispute. Laird's friendship with Rush Randle fell apart over the licensing of one of their inventions. Another person recalls Laird treating even Maria this way: publicly chewing her out when she committed the surfing equivalent of a traffic violation. "He's got everything," one acquaintance says of that period, "this beautiful woman, but there are weights counterbalancing him. He's the most loving person, but if you are in his way, it won't be for long. He'll just let you know: 'You better get out of my way.'" Which is what happened to his wife in mid-1995, when a cable sports TV show, The Extremists, with Gabrielle Reece, came to Maui to film a segment on tow-in surfing.

If you created the perfect mate for Laird Hamilton in a laboratory, you couldn't do better than Gabrielle Reece. She's not only dazzling and aware of it -- Elle listed her among the five most beautiful women on earth -- she's also every inch of Laird's six-foot-three, which makes him look short by comparison. She's a world-class athlete and is phenomenally well suited to both understanding Laird and helping him get where he wants to go.

After a modest childhood in the tropics with a single mother, Gabby made herself one of the most famous female athletes in the world -- by playing professional volleyball, of all things. While the first man to ride 50-foot waves was struggling to find sponsorship, she was a $35,000-per-day model, and her signature Nike kicks were the first women's athletic shoe to outsell Air Jordans. By the time she brought her television crew to Maui, her name was appearing regularly in gossip columns -- linked to such celebrities as A-Rod, Matt LeBlanc, and Dean Cain.

Laird took Gabby tandem surfing for the cameras that first day, the two of them on one huge board. "That was pretty much it," she says in a low, soft voice. "You feel Laird in the water. You know instantaneously you're okay. To have someone I feel safe withÉit's a very intuitive thing for a woman. A lot of women confuse it with bank accounts, but that's not what I need."

If you can picture Laird the surfer as a big game hunter, picture Laird the lover the same way -- with Gabby as the female equivalent of a hundred-foot wave. One week after meeting her, in an emotional BASE jump, he walked out on Maria and baby Izabela and joined Gabby in Los Angeles. They later returned to Maui, but it's a small community. "He lost all his friends," says an acquaintance. "People got bitter. I didn't know who he was anymore."

Laird and Gabby married in 1997 -- the same year his mother died of cancer. The marriage turned out to be a great career move, because along with Gabby, Laird got her manager, Jane Kachmer. "I knew he needed some professional organization," Gabby says, "and I told Jane, 'Help this guy.'"

Soon he'd made the cover of National Geographic, dropping into a 60-foot beast at Jaws. He took over The Extremists and applied his kamikaze approach to everything from street luge to bungee jumping. But he wasn't satisfied. "I can't remember how many times I've heard Laird say, 'I thought I'd just have to be the best at what I do and it would all work out,'" Gabby explains. She understood what he was going through. "He had to endure the confusion of, 'Okay, let me get this straight...if you sink a little white ball into a hole, everyone thinks you're the top all-time athlete. But if Tiger has a bad day, he flies home in his private jet. If I have a bad day, I might be dead.'"

By the end of the '90s Laird was also facing a mixed professional blessing. Partly due to his own achievements, big-wave riding once again dominated the sport, but that meant that dozens of professional surfers were suddenly buying their own jet skis and riding waves every bit as big as his. In 1998 Ken Bradshaw caught one that witnesses called the biggest ever ridden -- unverified estimates ranged up to 85 feet. All of a sudden surfing history was on the move, and Laird wasn't driving it. He'd pioneered the quantum leap into the unridden realm, but what now? Go ride a hundred-footer? Waves that big come only once a decade, and even if he could find one it would just be a logical progression instead of a mind-bending leap forward.

When Laird is breaking new ground in gargantuan surf he feels wonderful inside. All the self-doubt fades. "I'm the nicest guy you ever met," he says. "Going from the ax murderer, full-on Friday the 13th, whatever, to just peace. Peace, my friend." But when frustration mounts, watch out. "He's either loving or he's hating," Gabby says, with unruffled sympathy. "He's either happy or he's not. Anger is a big thing that motivates Laird. And sometimes, if you're close to him, you're going to get hurt. And it's not fair. When you get the flipside, which is this joy and energy, you never felt it brighter. But he knows he hurts people, and he just doesn't give a shit. He thinks, 'Fuck everybody. Tomorrow I'm going to have to deal with it, but that's tomorrow.' He needs friction, and he's going to create it. It's what he thrives on."

The grinding stone, as Laird says, knows only one thing: to grind. "He'll know he's starting to tweak me," Gabby says, "and he'll just go for it. I'll give people all the room they need. But when he's in those moods, I'm like, Why is he coming at me right now? Why is he digging the hole even deeper? But Laird, when he realizes it's a hole, he drops a bomb and makes it a really big hole."

In early 2000, as Laird's Teahupoo expedition approached, his wife began to look beyond their relationship -- she began training in Las Vegas for a new career in professional golf, even entertaining inquiries from Playboy. She had a lot of compassion for Laird, but she wasn't going to be another victim. "Sometimes you see his jaw all clenched," she says, "and you think, This guy's in pain. He's thinking, How come nobody else is tortured like this? How come I'm so frustrated? And he'll say, 'I need to go scare myself.'"

Dropping into a Teahupoo wave is less like roaring down a mountain than slipping over the edge of a cliff into a fast-forming canyon. As Laird releases the tow rope that morning in Tahiti, the wave just falls away below him, until hundreds of horizontal feet of water have dropped into a 20-foot precipice. He sails down and left, escape already impossible, and then the hoots fade as the wave morphs into an outsize behemoth -- the movie star unaware that Godzilla looms behind him.

Near the bottom, as he compresses into a tight crouch -- and this is where surfers watching the video shot that day freak out -- the whole top half of the wave launches into a single, solid lip, encasing him in a mineshaft with a 10-foot-thick wall in front and the ocean itself behind, all of it spinning. In waves of monstrous height Laird had survived horrendous wipeouts without a scratch; to fall on that Teahupoo wave would have been, as he put it, "like getting driven through a cheese grater by a steamroller."

Just staying on his feet required absolute technical mastery. Water was rushing up the face so fast that he had to surf almost straight down to avoid getting sucked up and over; he had to carve left to avoid running into a lethal waterfall. And Teahupoo's bizarre hydraulics meant that Laird was soaring through a curved wormhole, with no end in sight, his mind screaming at him, "Jump off! Jump off!" For a man who had never been able to find his own limits, he suddenly felt, as he put it, "max-max-max-max." Scarier still, a gigantic bolus of whitewater was filling the tube from behind, running him down like floodwater through the Holland Tunnel.

Laird is a powerful man, but every surfer who sees that footage has the same reaction: You start out thrilled, then your jaw drops, then you get worried, and then you get a guilty kind of nausea, watching a man flirt with on-camera suicide. Locked inside that blue hole Laird looks tiny and just barely in control, as if the slightest surface chop could topple him. You know that he's touching the edge of his abilities, and it makes you feel weak inside. You want to turn away and tell yourself your own inadequacy is okay. Then the whitewater explodes from the barrel's mouth like spray from a 30-foot-wide firehose, and Laird vanishes. The onlookers who could see what was happening were terrified.

Then he emerges, still standing.

And that's when the interesting part begins. As Laird climbs back into the boat he looks directly into the video camera and says, "Hi, Dad." He's talking to Billy, of course -- carrying on the dialogue they've been having since he was three years old. Seeming more stunned than triumphant, his next words are something Billy always told him: "Come home with your shield or on it, right?"

Trying to start a conversation in the boat, Laird finds the others too astonished to speak. They've just witnessed a defining moment in the sport's history, and they seem uncomfortably aware that Laird is not so much like them after all. He notices this and looks disturbed. His life's work has just come together; he's done something so extreme that all doubts are put to rest. Bradshaw, Doerner, Billy -- none of them could have ridden that wave, and, more importantly, none of them would have ridden that wave.

But what's it like to reach the end of your journey? To see at last your own glorious power, even as you face the truly suicidal nature of your hungers? Once you've brushed this close to death, are you really going to wake up tomorrow and try to get even closer?

Confusion sweeps his handsome features, and he searches the other faces. Perhaps to relieve tension, he loudly declares to a wiry blond man, "Hey, that was for you!"

The guy laughs. "For me?"

"Because you were towing before, you didn't get to see the first big one."

The blond man musters a hoot, honoring the gesture, but he has no illusion that Laird rode that wave for him. "Heaviest thing ever," he says, shaking his head. Everybody's trying to say what they think Laird wants to hear, but none of it comes out right. "You're a freak," one guy says. "I'm going to have nightmares tonight."

"You better check out a psychologist," says another.

Laird 's eyes soften to weep, his nose swells and his mouth loosens into a gentle smile, but then he shakes it off and waves to the second boat, where a half-dozen more surfers watch silently. He yells, "For you guys, man! For you!"

"Oh yeah?" comes a reply.

After a lifetime of setting himself apart from others, Laird suddenly aches to feel less alone. Speaking to the Tahitians in the crowd, he says, "Thank you for your love, your ohana." He gestures with a fist to his heart, but the others are simply too awed to respond. He looks one last time for what he wants but will never get from these companions, and then he puts his head between his knees and cries.

Men drive trucks on Maui, and Laird -- 40 years old now -- drives a mud-spattered 4x4 with knobby tires and that 12-foot surfboard on the lumber rack. Headed for his new property below the Haleakala volcano, he says, "I think, for me, right now? I'm on a steady climb to cruising altitude. Not to the stars! Just to cruising altitude. Above the turbulence."

In January 2001 Gabby gave Laird a fright no wave ever could: She filed for divorce, appeared spectacularly naked on the cover of Playboy, and attracted a mob of fans while shooting dice at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas with Charles Barkley and Tiger Woods. Newspapers even reported Gabby and Tiger dining alone in romantic restaurants. Laird was coming to the end of some long passage of the heart. His mother was gone for good; his competition with Billy was over. (Billy said uncle when he saw the Teahupoo footage.) Laird was still in his prime -- his big-wave career is far from over -- but the self-destructive side of his nature seemed to have run its course. Even now, when he looks back at the Teahupoo footage, he gets sick to his stomach.

Realizing that he was losing Gabby also changed Laird's outlook. "Once I felt my heart really get ripped out of my chest and get bounced around on the concrete," he says, "I thought, You know what? I have to do everything I can in order to not experience that kind of heartache. I have to behave differently." By early 2001 Gabby was back in Hawaii and Laird was working hard to change. Once he got over the inevitable letdown from Teahupoo -- he calls it post-big wave traumatic syndrome -- he felt...renewed. "I've still got two people inside me," he says. "I'm a Pisces. I got two fish swimming, but I can definitely say the good guy's winning." Gabby puts it in similar terms: "You slam the bottom and either walk away or suck it up and get through it. We realized that there is a ton of love there, so we dusted ourselves off, asked for forgiveness, and vowed we're going to do it better this time."

On a private dirt road Laird stops his truck to show off his future: 10 acres of farmland with wild mango and avocado trees, just up the hill from Jaws. Carpenters are framing a new 3,500-square-foot house, Gabby has their four-month-old baby girl, named Reece, and even Laird's ex-wife Maria and daughter Izabela live nearby. It's a hopeful picture: a strong and yearning man binding together the pieces.

He does dream of his next big stunt: maybe a dolphin suit for underwater bodysurfing, or stand-up paddling into a hurricane, so his body would act as a sail to blow him into a vast open-ocean wave. But his star is rising yet again because he continues to get towed into the maritime equivalent of seven-story buildings trying to fall on him -- right here at Jaws. "Big wave, little human," he says. "Somehow that crosses the bridges of understanding. I can take it to Siberia, okay, and I'd just blow the Russians' minds."

And the reality is, as Laird puts it, "I'm trying to have a house and family and all this stuff, so as the man, I have to create support. Even though my wife's successful, that has nothing to do with my own feeling of accomplishment. That's in my genetic makeup from Adam and Eve. So this is my wild animal hunt." Pointing offshore, where a new swell is building at Jaws, he says, "And that's the beast. But I also need to figure out how to capitalize, because I can't eat this one." That means living more like a mainstream athlete -- spending the off-season, for example, when the surf goes flat, at their two-acre Malibu spread, working out with John McEnroe, Don Wildman (founder of Bally Total Fitness), and Chris Chelios of the Detroit Redwings, who claims that nobody pushes harder than Laird. For the rest of the year he lives right here at Jaws, so he won't miss a single wave.

"I'm very happy for Laird right now," Gabby says. He's done stunt work on the film Die Another Day and been featured in a segment on 60 Minutes, and he's also trying to do a better job as a businessman, so he'll have something to do when he's past his athletic prime. His new company, in partnership with Jane Kachmer and Dave Kalama, is called BamMan productions: "BAM!" he says, by way of explanation, "Be a Man!" The name appears to be free of irony for Laird, but coming from the great puer aeternus himself it sounds like a call for a new definition of manliness, one that includes love and responsibility. BamMan just finished an extreme-sports television pilot starring Laird and Gabby together, and Kachmer and Laird are both producers on Riding Giants, directed by Stacey Peralta, who made the skateboarding documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys. When Sony Pictures Classics releases the film to theaters this month, the wider moviegoing public will get to see why Laird Hamilton is the greatest big-wave surfer of all time.

He seems to be, for once in his life, relishing what he has, not what he could have -- standing in the Maui sunshine like Odysseus back on Ithaca, his trials behind him, the suitors slain, and his wife and child his own again. Right on cue, Gabby rumbles up in a camouflaged off-road golf cart and hands baby Reece to her husband.

"You want to play Cirque du Soleil?" he asks the golden child, holding both tiny feet in the palm of a single massive hand. Gabby groans in protest, but Laird lights up with real joy, somehow getting four-month-old Reece, who can't even sit up on her own, to stand upright in his outstretched palm. Then, steadying his daughter over the dirt like a beautiful baton, Laird Hamilton dances for balance in the middle of his life.