Just about a year ago, Bede Durbidge had the worst wipeout of his life at Pipeline. It was during a strangely dangerous run of swell that nearly killed Evan Geiselman and Owen Wright. Last December was a bad one on the North Shore. But after a year of painful rehab, yesterday Bede pulled on a jersey again for the first time.
“It’s so cool to back,” he said after his heat. “I was bummed after the heat because I didn’t get through, but then I was like ‘you know what? I’m happy just to be here surfing heats with a jersey on.’ It could’ve ended my career–it was a pretty horrific wipeout. It took a lot of therapy to get back to where I am now. [It was] a lot of hard work, but I’m just stoked to be back here in Hawaii.”
For months after Durbidge’s wipeout, his career looked to be over. The injury to his pelvis was a bad one, but it could’ve been much worse. “Underwater I was freaking out,” Bede recalled. “[I thought] I was gonna be a paraplegic. When I hit, my legs went numb and just shooting pain. I wriggled my toes and I was just like, ‘Oh, thank god.’ I was just happy with that. I was still getting thrashed around and I could feel my midsection was loose and wobbly. I knew I’d broken something.”