Twenty years ago, Northern California gained a transplant that would quietly go about changing the face of big wave surfing. There’s a good chance you don’t know his name, but there’s an even better chance you’ve seen him surfing.
Alex Martins picked up and left his home country of Brazil two decades ago, intent on bettering his life. He didn’t move to surf, though. His mind was solely on working hard and finding a life path that would make him a happier person. “When I first moved here,” he remembered, “there was no time for surf. I have to work hard.” What he found, though, was a path that he never really had any chance of straying from: the path of a dedicated big wave surfer.
He soon found himself living just a stone’s throw from Maverick’s–and he began the first tentative steps down the road that lead him to where he is today. In Red Bull’s This and Nothing Else, we walk with him down that road, and he tells us exactly how he ended up on it.
