But judges handed victory to Kemper, who went over to Lenny’s boat, beat on his own chest, and yelled, at Lenny, “This is my wave!”Īlong the way, he has also become a kind of secret spirit animal to the world’s tech elite-a sweet, smart, curiosity-driven mascot who has excellent toys and wears his mastery far more lightly than the masters of the universe ever do. When the contest horn sounded, many of us watching assumed that Lenny had won. When that tube collapsed on Kemper, burying him under 30 feet of white water, he resurfaced and did exactly the same thing on yet another wave. On his second wave, Kemper displayed absolute mastery of his own fear by willfully soaring inside a tube the size of a whirling subway tunnel and frothy enough to dismember a horse. And Billy Kemper excelled at those kinds of risks. “The last 15 minutes I couldn’t even paddle for a wave, because my brain was scrambled, but I knew I had done enough to win,” Lenny said.Īt the time, however, judges in traditional big-wave contests placed enormous value on pure risk-taking, encouraging surfers to take off at a wave’s biggest and most dangerous point, and deliberately ride across the most dangerous parts of the face. On his third ride, Lenny slashed a big turn as if that wave were 4 feet high instead of 40-right before his concussion made it impossible to carry on. Lenny rocketed into a whirling tube big enough to fly a small spaceship through, soared back out into sunshine, and finished safely. Grabbing a fresh surfboard and “still seeing cross-eyed,” he caught another monster wave.
#MAYA 2022 MAC DRIVER#
Like, I went from the super-confident monster that I had kind of forged myself into, then all of a sudden I felt very emotional.”īadly concussed and with a broken surfboard, Lenny let a Jet Ski safety driver take him back to his support boat. I’ve never experienced that, where my personality changed when I hit the surface. You get sent so far out of this realm that you see everything-like it’s a black hole or a wormhole or something.”ĭescribing that fall at Jaws in 2018, Lenny said, “I ended up in a dark part of the water, and it compressed my head so much that it felt like my brain got rewired. “If it’s the worst possible wipeout, where you’re unsure if someone will live or die, that’s when they get sent to the 13th dimension,” he said.
He seemed to mean that big-wave wipeouts are so violent they transport a fallen surfer to an alternate world, with severity of wipeout corresponding to the number of dimensions in that world. “We call it going to the 12th dimension,” Lenny told me recently, with a chuckle. (And I’m not particularly squeamish: I’ve been surfing and writing about surfing for 30 years.) I happened to be on Maui that day and was watching from a nearby cliff as Lenny disappeared deep underwater. The wave’s enormous lip landed on Lenny like a truck-sized hammer. He landed facedown and skipped like a stone into the impact zone. Early in that final heat, lying prone on a 10-foot surfboard, Lenny paddled to catch a 45-foot-tall wave, hopped to his feet, and rode down the watery cliff. Lenny found himself facing off against a childhood rival from Maui named Billy Kemper, a living embodiment of the traditionalist tough-guy ethos. None of that served Lenny particularly well, however, when he reached the final heat of the Jaws Challenge after the contest resumed the next day.
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