“It Felt Like My Whole Leg Got Velcro Ripped Off, But It Was Still There”

“There is a tide in the affairs of men,” Shakespeare scribbled, “which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”

20 years old is a particular “flood” in a budding professional surfer’s coming-of-age. There are extreme examples of this: Kelly Slater and Gabriel Medina both winning their first world titles at 20, for instance. But the more common phenomenon is 20 being the point where a surfer transitions from promising kid to promise-fulfilling young adult.

Age is a constant point of paranoia for coming-of-age professional surfers. Whether due to the age structure of amateur competition, the necessity of acquiring paying sponsors before having to move out of mom-and-dad’s, or the fact that it’s easier for a brand to sell T-shirts by marketing their younger team riders, each birthday likely starts feeling less and less fun and more and more stressful.

For the past year and a half, 20-year-old San Clemente-ite Luke Wyler has had to wait out the flood on the sidelines after suffering two catastrophic injuries to the same leg. We called him up to ask him about it and this comeback edit, “GAPYEAR”.

The first one happened on a 2% trip (back when 2% was a thing, see our StabMic episode with Kolohe on this here) to the Canary Islands on a routine backside air.

“I was doing airs going backside, just having fun, and then—one of the airs, I just messed my knee up real bad. It felt super close to just snapping off, but it didn’t quite,” Luke explained. “I thought I was alright, but obviously it was hurt, so I had to sit and watch the rest of that trip, which sucked. After that, I was rehabbing, trying to get back in the water. I wasn’t out too long, but when I got back, I just wasn’t feeling myself.”

Luke then headed to Australia on the Gold Coast leg of the same 2% film tour. And, on a normal day at D-bah, the real injury occurred.

“I was still wearing the knee brace, but a couple sessions in I started feeling like I was landing stuff again. One session in particular — the day before I got hurt at D-Bah — I did a couple airs and told myself: “Okay, I’m just gonna commit 100% and try to land these things — because that last little one percent of commitment is kind of everything, you know?”

“Sure enough, the next day I went back down to D-Bah, found a ramp in the crowd, did that same backside full rotation — and when I was coming down, the lip caught my tail, my back foot came off the board while my front leg was still locked in, and I landed flat in the flats.”My front leg kicked up and fucking — I felt it hit my ear. Like fully just folded in half. It felt like my whole leg just got Velcro ripped off, but it’s still there. Like — what the hell just happened?“

Then the pain kicked in.

“It was the worst pain I ever felt. I tried to make it in, but every wave that hit me sent my hamstring curling back up. I made it to the beach, tried to hop on one leg, it gave out, tried to army-crawl up the sand. Thankfully, two Brazilian guys saw me and carried me up the beach to a bench in the D-Bah parking lot.“We drive to the hospital and it’s closed — like the only day all year they close the hospital. I’m just like, what are the odds of that? We had to find the next hospital, 20 minutes away — and it’s their first day open, so nothing’s figured out yet. I roll in, and there’s these two big Aussie blokes at the front not even looking at me, not worried at all — I guess because my head’s still attached to my neck. Eventually the nurse asks me what I think happened, I say something about my hamstring, and the nurse looks confused. ‘You know what a hamstring is?’ I asked. And the nurse goes, ‘No.’ It was a long day.”

Eventually, as things preternaturally do in San Clemente, good fortune came back around the corner. The airline sat Luke next to an actress from Pretty Little Liars (who he exchanged pleasantries with), he found a great doctor, got excellent surgery, and was on the mend.

Luke said the hardest part was the mental journey back to surfing at full throttle: “I felt like a big part of it was psychological. You always hear about that when people get injured, and you think your body will feel good and you’ll just figure it out — but it really took me a long time to get over the mental barrier of trusting myself to land it. Even surfing by myself, no cameras, I’m thinking: am I really going to hit this air section? Is it worth it?”

But, a year later, Luke is fully back in action. He just made a few heats in Virginia Beach’s dreaded/beloved QS 4000 event, his new edit is out, and he’s open for business in terms of sponsorship.

His goal? Make the Challenger Series this year.

You can keep up with Luke’s comeback on his YouTube channel.