ROB HARRIS  –  LIVE WHILE YOU LIVE

Live while you live. I don’t recall exactly how I bumped into Rob Harris in 1992, but I remember standing in front of manifest talking. He was in his mid twenties, black hair combed straight up like a wave, confident, almost too good looking.  But something was also disarming about Rob. He was friendly, easy going, didn’t seem to be aware of being cool, he just was.

Rob was practicing freestyle skydiving and he invited me to come fly camera with him.  It was my first time filming freestyle and I expected an almost impossible chase, super fast and changing fall rates. I’d heard from other camera flyers that freestyle was difficult to film, and I didn’t know what to expect from my own flying skills. It was really exciting.  On exit, my body was charged. Rob did barrels out the door and swung into a Daffy. Then he started a series of back and twisting layouts. I flew after him twisting my own body, arching, flaring, diving to catch up again and again. He was all over the sky and I felt like a human jet on a mission to keep him in frame. After deploying my parachute, I was out of breath and could hear my own heart pounding. It was exhilarating, and I was hooked. 

When Rob started to sky surf, he he invited me to fly camera for him at a competition in Eloy Arizona. It was the first ever world meet for skysurfing and we’d enter the intermediate division. I accepted, and we traveled to Skydive Arizona, the biggest drop zone in the US where board jumpers from around the world including the great skysurfing pioneer, Patrick De Gayardon, came to compete.   We were awestruck to see so many famous skydivers who we recognized from Parachutist and Skydiving Magazine and it felt great to just be there among them.

The competition in the intermediate division was relatively straightforward; tape five dives, turn in your favorite, and wait for the results.  Rob had less than 100 jumps, but his presentation was smooth and he looked cool and confident. And although we’d barely trained together, we had a chemistry the judges liked and we took first place in the intermediate division.  We both loved the experience and we began to talk about training together and becoming a team.

We began to train at Skydive Taft, in Taft California.  Our goal was to compete the following year at the ’93 world meet in Empuria Brava Spain.  I loved the training because we were both learning so much, and it was exciting to think of competing at an advanced level with the best sky surfers in the world.  After a while I was hooked on three dimensional camera flying and the choreography that Rob and I were practicing.

The owner of the drop zone, Bill Jones, saw potential in our team and, about a month before the competition, on slow days when nobody else was jumping, he’d fly the two of us in his Cessna 206, sometimes six or seven flights a day at no charge.  It felt great to have the positive attention and support.

On the flight to Spain, We flew business class to Spain via British Airways. From Barcelona we traveled to Empuriabrava via train.  The competition was a huge event with sky surfers, free-stylists, and camera flyers from around the world who were decked out in the latest equipment.  It was a beautiful venue with airplanes lined up, ready to go, and hundreds of spectators gathered around TV screens to view the meet.   It was an exciting environment, and also pretty intimidating.

We arrived a few days in advance of the competition to get over our jet lag, and to do practice jumps.  I remember the airplanes at Empuriabrava had CD players that played techno all the way to altitude.  It wasn’t loud, but you could sense the rhythm.  It felt so European and I loved the vibe.

On day one of the competitition, we landed from jump #1 in 3rd place just behind the 2nd place team of Eric Fradet and Werner Normberg with the great Patrick De Gayardon and Gus Wing in first.

It was amazing! Rob was right up there with the big boys, and Norman Kent, who was a legendary camera flyer and celebrity in our sport, was judging my work! It felt like we’d landed on cloud 9 at sunset.   Then I caught the flu – a bad case of it, but we’d come too far and Rob was shining, so I kept going on adrenaline and flu medicine. Rob hurt his knee and a couple times had to sit on my leg to put his board on in the plane.  One one jump, Rob lost control and couldn’t regain his balance.  He tried to continue the dive plan, but his moves were sloppy and incomplete.  It was a horrible dive and Rob capped it off perfectly by raising both of his middle fingers to my camera.  In this competition, each team was granted one throwaway round, but we didn’t want the judges to see our disaster thinking it might influence their scoring on our following rounds, so before we entered the judges room, I erased the video and claimed that my camera malfunctioned.   Ultimately, we held onto third place and had the honor of sharing the podium with Eric, Werner, Patrick, and Gus.

In the summer of ‘94 we trained on weekends for the October ‘94 world meet in Eloy AZ and something just clicked.  We started to fly better than ever.  The rules of the competition were announced in the spring. Moves were rated A – D in order of difficulty and there were lists of advanced sky surf and camera flying moves. The rules became our obsession. Rob practiced D moves and I practiced D camera moves. We choreographed routines and wrote a wish list and our style was beginning to show.

In training, I was jumping an old Vector rig with an old Raven 210 parachute.  Bill’s son Jeff, couldn’t bare to have me represent Taft wearing such old worn out gear, so he loaned me his own rig with a high performance parachute.  I was going in style.

At the world meet in Eloy, Arizona, we walked onto the drop zone relatively unknown and without a clue as to how well we’d do. We hoped to medal again, but our goal was to make the top ten to qualify for the Extreme Games. Sky surf teams from around the world were there. The sky was full of canopies, freestyle and sky surf teams training the last couple days before the meet. You could cut the energy in the air with a knife.

Warming up for the competition, twice I almost knocked our team out of the running.  On one jump, I was flying on my back and found myself tracking toward Rob. The track was very efficient and my closing speed was enough to knock us both unconscious. Rob was hanging upside down, saw me coming and ducked up to avoid the hit and I flew past, maybe a foot below him. On another jump, I hooked Jeff’s high performance parachute and entirely misjudged my approach.  I pulled the breaks as far as they’d go, but hit the ground with a loud thud.  Other skydivers who saw me hit ran over to see if I was OK.  By some miracle, my collision with the ground was evenly distributed and nothing was broken.  I was fine, and still in the competition.

1994 World Skysurfing Championships, Round 1 Compulsory: We headed up to altitude. Bob Griner, Cliff Birch, Troy Hartman, and Vic Papadato were seated with us and barely a word was spoken. I think we all wanted to get the first jump over with, to just get a round in without a broken board, camera malfunction, mid air collision, brain lock, or loss of grip on exit.

There’s something about adrenaline that brings your performance up a notch.  Our exit was smooth and in sync, Rob was on his game as usual, and my flying felt smooth and accurate. It felt good. We ended the routine with a “Grab and Stab” where Rob covers the lens to end the routine.  At that moment, still in free fall, a huge weight was lifted and we knew we’d finished the routine in time.

We submitted our video to the judges and walked out to rehearse for the second jump.  After a while we started to feel a kind of buzz in the air, and people were beginning to look at us.  Before the results were even posted, the word was that Rob and I were in first place.

We were shocked, the judges were surprised, other competitors were checking the monitors. Who’s that guy in first place? Rob Harris had made his mark, and my camerawork looked great!

Round two was even better. Everyone was more talkative on the ride up, relieved I guess. Then rounds three and four also went really well.  ESPN was airing the event and we were still in first place, so now there were cameras covering us on the ground and in the air.  It was a lot of fun, all the attention we didn’t expect was suddenly upon us, and we still had our best stuff to show in the free rounds.

Being in first place, I felt a load of pressure.  Rob seemed calm, but my mind was racing. What if I blow a barrel, or flip too far when I go to my back, or forget to turn on the camera, or forget the routine?  I don’t know how sky surfers do it, move after move in a routine, so much to remember, so much to do. Easy enough during practice, but in competition, my brain goes into overdrive, heart pumping and I wonder if I’ll just fall from the plane and drift off somewhere, months of training only to drift off filming the ground.

That’s the beauty of training.  As discombobulated as the adrenaline makes you feel, the moves are burned into muscle memory and you often perform even better than in practice.  When I know a routine, I think a step ahead, but in competition, I think two steps ahead, waiting for the next move, the next cue. In the free rounds, I found myself looking out for Rob, analyzing his moves, rooting for him, because I knew my game was covered. Those moments were gems for me.  Rob was clearly the best sky surfer on the planet and I felt lucky to be his camera flyer.

We felt the energy of the crowd on the ground. In the dubbing room, the guys copying our tapes would group around the TV to catch a first look at the routine. Being noticed all of the sudden was strange. Rob seemed to handle it comfortably. I’d look around and see people looking back. That was totally new to me. I liked it, but didn’t quite know how to handle it. And I didn’t quite know how to handle the conversations with people congratulating me and saying my work was great, and wondering why they hadn’t heard of me before, and so on. It was great, and exactly what I wanted, but it also felt pretty uncomfortable.  luckily my wife, dad, brother, sister, their friends, and also Rob’s mom and friends were at the event with us, so I was able to hide a bit among them.

Rain and severe weather delayed the the meet for three days.  When it finally cleared, Rob and I finished in first place. The judging wasn’t wrapped, but our lead was solid and the last round went well.   Still, Rob would ask again and again, “Do you think we could win this thing?” “You think we won?”. He knew, but couldn’t quite grasp it.
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October 1994, Rob Harris and I were relatively unknown, and neither of us imagined how quickly that would change. Suddenly our picture was published full page in Parachutist, ESPN was broadcasting the World Meet, and we made the cover of skydiving magazines around the world.  It was a whirlwind, and the process was just beginning.

After winning our first intermediate competition, Rob and I naively sought out sponsorship and didn’t receive more than a couple tee shirts.  Now we had choices, offers, phone calls, letters.  It was amazing.  Each of us received two beautiful custom rigs from Sunpath, main and reserve parachutes from Performance Designs, and Cypress AADs.  So now we had two rigs each so we could jump one of them while the other is being packed.

The sponsored equipment we received was beautiful, stylish, and matching.  And the new parachutes were so slippery it took me a few weeks to figure out how to pack them!

TO BE CONTINUED