Nestled off a short dirt road in the Adirondack Mountains, just beyond the reach of cellular service, lies Trout Lake. Overlooking the water is a cabin owned by 48-year-old Hollywood stuntman Tom Place, something of a local legend, known more in this small Upstate New York community for his weekend recreational activities than his formidable IMDb credits he’s racked up as a Hollywood stuntman. Because for many years now, Place has been routinely diving beneath the lake’s surface in search of something he lost more than three decades ago: his Rolex Submariner.
While at the cabin, Place often runs the six-mile perimeter of the lake in the early morning hours. Tom’s family has spent summers in the area since 1979, and built their own cabin in 1991. When he first broke into the film and television industry in the ’90s, Place, who maintains an athletic, sturdy build, noticed that the old heads would get winded pretty easily, especially during fight scenes. Now that he’s an old head himself, he’s determined not to suffer the same fate. The work is grueling on the body, the days are long, and there’s a genuine element of danger. Place has been a gun-toting henchman, a motion-capture carjacker, a precision driver, a New York City cop, whatever the script calls for. But on his days off, you’re most likely to find him with a SCUBA tank strapped to his back, as he plunges below the depths in search of the one that got away—his grail watch in the truest sense of the term.
Austin Rogers
Rolex watches were something of a Place family tradition. In the late 1970s, after serving in the Vietnam War, Place’s father found success as a commodity trader at the Cotton Exchange headquartered at #4 World Trade Center and bought a pair of matching Rolex watches for himself and his wife. “Those were basically their only watches for the next 20 years,” Place recounts. “That’s what I grew up seeing on their wrists.” The watches rarely came off, Place continues, “whether he was doing oil changes on the car or painting the shed. SCUBA diving even, he always had that DateJust on.” In 1996, Place followed suit, cashing in his life savings of $3,100 at a Mayor’s Jewelers in Brandon, Florida, on a 16610 Rolex Submariner Date, an 18th-birthday gift to himself. He’d chosen it over a more affordable Tudor Submariner—only $990 at the time!—and a 16710 GMT-Master II with the signature red-and-black “Coke” bezel. He picked the watch for its hardwearing nature, a quality that would become indispensable in his future line of work.
That same summer, Place and his brother regularly took his family’s 17-foot speedboat, dubbed the Calypso 2000, out for an activity they’d invented called “power jumping.” It’s the sort of thing only an 18-year-old future stuntman would come up with: the pair would take turns sprinting full-out across the cramped deck of the boat, before flipping, rolling, diving, or otherwise flopping into the lake below. And on this fateful occasion, Place was wearing the Submariner he’d drained his savings account for mere months prior. “My wet foot slipped on the wet boat,” he recalls now. “As I fell backwards and sideways, my Submariner caught somewhere on the railing. I still don’t know exactly where or how it happened, but the clasp got caught and pulled.” Place suspects the small spring bar within the clasp failed, releasing the watch from around his wrist. While he fell in one direction, Place says, “I could see the watch flying the other way into the lake.”