It was all quite dispassionate, the bouts arranged and refereed by older Freitases, and more or less fairly conducted. This went on until the nonkinsman was defeated. If he lost, the next biggest Freitas would be sent in. The Freitas clan’s method for training its members in battle, it seemed, was to find some fool without allies or the brains to avoid a challenge, then send their youngest fighter with any chance at all into the ring. My first opponent was so small and young that I doubted he was even at our school. I found myself facing off there with a number of boys named Freitas-none of them, again, apparently related to my hairy tormentor from wood shop. There was a cemetery next to the campus, with a well-hidden patch of grass down in one corner where kids went to settle their differences. My orientation program at school included a series of fistfights, some of them formally scheduled. He becomes acquainted with festive Hawaiian celebrations such as “Kill a Haole Day”, in which any white person was fair game to be beaten up. Upon arriving at the rough-and-tumble Kaimuki Intermediate School, Finnegan is regularly whacked over the head with a two-by-four during shop class. His childhood, like the childhoods of many Baby Boomers, seemed to be defined by violence. The stories from Hawaii were by far the most interesting part of his adolescence.
He lived a typical suburban Los Angeles life, with the exception of a couple of short stints in Hawaii, where his dad worked on site as a film producer.
William Finnegan grew up in the post-World War II boom of Southern California. William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life is a 447-page meditation on this sort of devotion: a life designed around chasing the evanescent moment just before the crash of a wave. I’ve long wondered: “What if I were to pursue one of these passions to the absolute limits of my abilities…even if it meant the utter and deliberate neglect of every other area of my life?”
Throughout life, I’ve had various passions – chess, boxing, travel, options trading – some more serious than others.
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