Woods Out To Tame Rogue Wave

The Sunday Age

Sunday May 7, 2006

Will Swanton

Rebecca Woods is back in Teahupoo to face a wave that almost killed her, Will Swanton writes

REBECCA Woods was riding her bike. She was 10 years old. Three boys were teasing her sister about having Down syndrome. Woods jumped off her bike and pushed one of the boys in the chest. He crashed into the other two and they fell to the ground in a screaming heap. Cop that. It was the first sign of a girl with spirit.

Eleven years on, Woods is a professional surfer. She's in Tahiti for the Billabong Pro. She will grit her teeth and try to conquer a wave that nearly killed her. That was the first time. More recently, Teahupoo ripped her left shoulder from its socket, damaging cartilage and tearing tendons.

When Brazilian tough guy Neco Padaratz was treated in similarly cruel fashion, claiming he saw angels and the lights of heaven as he blacked out under a pummelling from the most feared wave on the planet, he took four years to summon the courage to go back.

Woods is returning immediately. "You have to keep trying," she says as though there's no other way.

Woods, from Copacabana on the NSW central coast, has three older sisters: Robyn, Jodie and Kate. Robyn is 24. She's the one with Down syndrome. She's the one with the beautiful heart. She's the one who does not have life easy.

When the desire to get out of bed in the morning isn't quite there for Woods, when a doctor says her wrecked shoulder will take three more years to mend, she thinks of Robyn and her parents, Dave and Kay, and knows what it really means to have to fight.

"To be able to wake up normally every day, I appreciate that," she said. "I've seen what Robyn has to go through. She motivates me and that will never, ever change. She's just the most beautiful person."

Reporters rarely conduct interviews that stay with them for weeks, months, years afterwards, prompting tears. In 2003, under a tree at Teahupoo, Woods gave such an interview about her family.

Given a wildcard into the Billabong Pro as a promising junior, she had just been hassled out of a heat by Trudy Todd.

Woods' father was arriving the next morning to watch her in a major contest for the first time, but she had already been eliminated. Dave Woods had not been on holiday for 21 years; Robyn had needed to be cared for.

Woods was furious about having fallen for Todd's gamesmanship. She vowed to qualify full-time for the World Championship Tour and exact her revenge. She spoke with a quiet determination. She spoke with tenderness about Robyn and her folks. Even then, having achieved nothing yet, she gave the distinct impression of already being something else.

"I used to be an angry little ball of energy," she said. "I'd react in a bad way when people treated Robyn differently. I've grown out of that now, I suppose, but I was probably always the protector.

"Rob doesn't have a totally great concept of what I do, but it was funny the other day. She came down to Mum and Dad and said, 'Can I take the newspaper story of Bec in to show everyone?' She does a day options program.

"Mum and Dad were blown away. They didn't think she knew a lot about what I was doing. That was pretty special. I was stoked."

Woods was good to her word. She went on to make the tour. She beat Todd in a one-on-one heat. Last year was her rookie year. She was 20, she was in the big time. But then Teahupoo threw her around like a rag doll again. "My memories aren't that great," she says.

A brief history of Rebecca Woods at Teahupoo: she first paddled onto the razor-sharp reef at 18. An experienced local surfer had recently been killed there. The memory was still fresh.

Teahupoo means crushed skull and here's why: the man had been hammered by a rogue set. Neither board nor body surfaced immediately. Then appeared his board, standing vertically from the water like a tombstone as the dead man lay on the bottom. Cause of death: a crushed skull.

Woods said: "I thought, 'What is this wave?' When it's big, it's like it's not even a wave. It's just this thing rising up out of the ocean. It tests your self-belief like nowhere else in the world. I copped the biggest wave I've ever seen on my head. I just froze. It really shook me up. I thought I was drowning.

"I had to get hauled out of the water. If there hadn't been someone keeping an eye on me . . ."

Revenge on Todd was a dish best served in warm Tahitian waters. But disaster was about to strike. A Teahupoo bomb yanked Woods' left arm so far backwards that her shoulder was dislocated and she was forced off the tour for six months.

"I'm trying to not think too much about the bad things in the past," she said. "You've got to try to think of Teahupoo as just another wave, but it's hard. It's intimidating because so much can go wrong.

"I hope I can handle it. The shoulder isn't quite right yet, but I can surf with it. It was the most excruciating pain I've ever felt when it flared up. The doctor was saying, 'In three years you'll be fine'.

"I was thinking, 'What? Three years?' What I'd worked so hard for had been taken away. I'd finally qualified for the WCT, I was where I'd always wanted to be, it was all good. But then it was all gone.

"I'd killed myself to get on the tour. It was my big dream. I kept asking myself, 'What's happened? Why has this happened to me?' It was depressing."

Life, of course, could be worse. "There are so many people with disabilities in the world and they don't complain," Woods said. "So I've got no right to. I hate it when people whinge and moan. I want to slap them across the face and say: 'Don't you realise how good you've got it?' I've met Down (syndrome) people who say: 'I just wish I could have a normal life'.

"When people start going on about how bad their lives are, or how bored they are, or how much of a bad time they're having, it just makes my skin crawl. What Robyn would give to have their lives.

"I know it's only human nature and I complain, too. But don't whinge too much. Sometimes I don't show much sympathy for people who do."

Dave remembered Rebecca playing with Robyn in a combined able-disabled basketball team. Rebecca was so protective of Robyn and played with such passion that junior representative teams started chasing her. No future there. Her soul was in surfing.

Dave joked about Woods issuing "more beatings than is probably legally allowed for a person with Downs" when she shared a bedroom with a snoring Robyn.

Woods laughed: "Robyn has cross-autism. She can have the most annoying habits. There are things she just has to do. She takes an extra five hours to do anything and we're all yelling at her, 'Robyn, hurry up'. She doesn't react. She just says, 'Yes Rebecca, yes Rebecca, I'm coming'. I tell myself I've got to be more patient but sometimes you get to that point where you snap.

"She's got the nicest heart, not a bad bone in her body, but it's always been a challenge for the family and it always will be."

Dave, Kay and Robyn planned to get up at 3am today to watch Teahupoo on the internet. Kay said she just wanted Rebecca to get out of the place alive.

Robyn brushed her hair for the photo. She smiled and said cheese. She has impaired speech, but could still suggest in the strongest possible terms that Rebecca was a smart alec for being such a good surfer.

We thanked her for allowing us into her home. Asked if she wanted to say one last thing about Rebecca, she replied: "I miss her."