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As big wave champion Billy Kemper and a group of others helped pull fellow surfer Mikey “Redd” O’Shaughnessy to safety after a severe wipeout on the reef at Pipeline on Sunday, Kemper was stirred by what he had seen in his friend’s eyes and the dark memories it brought back.
“Did I see flashbacks, did it bring back a bad taste in my mouth? For sure, it brought back the fear,” Kemper said. “What I had seen in his eyes was what I had felt in Morocco.”
A year ago this week on what Kemper would describe as “the best (surfing) trip ever that turned into like the worst possible circumstances,” he was slammed into a reef on the North African coast with such force that it was expected to cost him his mobility and career, if not his young life.
On the last day of the trip, Kemper said, he and a group of friends were enjoying 15-footers at the face with 20-second barrels, “Historical wave swells that you might not ever get to surf that good again in a lifetime.” After more than nine hours in the water, Kemper wanted one more wave and got hammered by what was described as a low-tide drainer. “When I was coming up into the barrel the water was pulling so hard off the sand that it caught me outside of the rail and I landed on a rock on the right side of my body and it absolutely destroyed me.”
Kemper said, “I was knocked out and when I came to I didn’t really know if I was paralyzed or not. I couldn’t really move any of my limbs or body. Once things started to clear, I could feel the break internally in my pelvis. I found out what fear was. The trauma it brought was a feeling that I didn’t even know existed. I didn’t know a human could endure something at that level and continue to push forward and survive. It was that hard.”
The 30-year-old Maui native and four-time Jaws winner’s traumatic experience and his inspirational pursuit of a return to surfing are poignantly chronicled in the six-part docuseries “Billy” by filmmaker Layne Stratton that debuts Wednesday on worldsurfleague.com.
Given 72 hours to live if he didn’t get full medical treatment after receiving just the basics in Morocco, Kemper was put aboard a medical transport. Then came the task of securing reentry to the U.S. during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic for what became four surgeries, full knee reconstruction and stem cell treatment for a collapsed lung, broken pelvis and shattered right knee.
All the while there were haunting questions. “There was lots of doubt … and pain I can’t even describe. I didn’t know what was going to happen,” Kemper said. “I had no idea what my legs and knee were going to be able to do. There was definitely doubt, but at an early stage I got through it. It was like, you look down the line of time and, ‘OK, if I’m not surfing in five years, what am I gonna be doing?’ Surfing is my life. It is what I am. That’s why the doubts were easily erased.”
That and support from family, friends, doctors and the World Surf League propelled him through months of therapy and arduous rehabilitation in a relentless drive to someday return to the waves that have been his passion since his mother and brothers first set him on a board while in diapers.
On Father’s Day 2020, his right knee still in a brace, Kemper loaded his 2-year-old son on the front of a surfboard off Waikiki Beach and paddled. “I was just lying down and we caught a wave together,” Kemper recalls.
“I just remember having my feet on the board and just barely standing up. The wave was probably just inches high. But I’m feeling the wax under my feet. Weird as it sounds, it would be like an NBA player putting on a fresh pair of shoes and feeling the stickiness of the basketball court again … and getting the smallest bit of energy out of what you love. It was like that for me. Right there I felt my feet sink into the wax and I was like, ‘I’m coming back. This is it.’ From there on I started surfing fairly soon, not in big or heavy waves, but working my way back.”
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
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