Before he headed off to Princeton Graham could always be easily spotted out on the water, because he was pretty much the only guy out at Ho’okipa wearing a Gath helmet. Originally it had been something his dad had insisted on but the Gath soon became a trademark until an accident on the US tour made him think otherwise.
GE: “The helmet was my trademark. I liked that it protected my head and that it looked different. In what other extreme sport do people not wear helmets? Look at skiing and snowboarding. All the riders wear a helmet now. I like to tease Ricardo [Campello] that he should start wearing a helmet because it’s cool, but at the end of the day it’s just common sense! I don’t wear mine as often now. The reasoning behind this isn’t very logical. Last summer, I smashed up my face during the Oregon AWT event. I cut up my skin and broke a tooth down to my gum. After it happened, I was in a ton of pain. The tooth’s nerve was exposed and would bleed constantly.
Losing the tooth affected me emotionally more than any broken bone or ripped skin and believe me I’ve had plenty of both. Teeth don’t fix themselves. While it looks perfect, the replacement tooth is completely fake and foreign to my body. And, what body part matters more than the face? And on the face, the mouth. Without a mouth, you can’t eat or speak. After the incident, I thought, how am I going to protect my face? I could add a full-on face guard to my helmet, ‘à la American Football’. But even that doesn’t fully protect everything. If I want to be safe, I might as well stop windsurfing, as windsurfing is about taking risks. I choose to risk my life and limb with the windsurfing I do. After those thoughts, wearing a helmet all the time seems silly and counter to my go-big-or-go-home windsurfing philosophy on the whole. That said, I still adamantly support people wearing helmets. Especially those riders who don’t put so much emphasis on taking physical risk. I still wear my Gath – just not all the time!”