Video from Andrew Jacobson on Vimeo.
A surf video about a come back from a tragic knee injury into surfing some of the heaviest waves around the world.
Andrew Jacobson is not a man who shies away from a wave that might hurt him. Quite the opposite, in fact. Andrew Jacobson lives for that kind of wave. But, as is often the case with people who chase big, barreling waves, disaster struck. It came at Cloudbreak in May of 2018.
On the day of that disaster, Jacobson was surfing during a rising swell that was forecasted to become something magical. The occasional double up rolled through the lineup, but the wave that wrecked everything was an insider. “Basically, I saw this wave coming,” he said. “There are three sections on the reef at Cloudbreak, and I was right in the middle when I realized I was too late.”
Jacobson jumped off his board and landed feet first on a shallow section of jagged reef. His knee snapped backward, which is not what a knee is supposed to do. When he fought his way back to the surface, he knew that something was very, very wrong. “When I came up,” he remembered, “I looked at my leg and it was the grossest thing I’ve ever seen. My leg was backward, basically from dislocating my knee.”
Mitch Parkinson, Jake Kelley, and Frankie Harrier were all in the lineup with him, and they managed to get him onto the boat. Once aboard, there happened to be an ER doctor named Mario Quiros aboard. He popped the knee back into place, but that was far from the end of the story.
The boat ride back to shore and the ride to the hospital took 40-minutes. Within a few hours, he’d made the decision to get his ass back to Los Angeles, pronto. Doctors there gave him the bad news: he tore his MCL, his PCL, strained his LCL and his ACL, and fractured his kneecap — pretty much everything you can do to a knee.
With the help of Dr. Neal Elattrache, who came by way of a recommendation from Laird Hamilton, Jacobson had his PCL sewn back together and a new MCL from a cadaver put in. For seven agonizing months, he was out of the water. Within a year, he was back surfing again, gingerly testing the waters. By 17 months, he was on a plane to Hawaii for his redemption. That’s the video you see above: “a come back from a tragic knee injury into surfing some of the heaviest waves around the world.”
Reverie features waves like Silverbacks in Panama, Pipeline, and a handful of others a little less… deadly. But all in all, it’s safe to say that Andrew Jacobson is back.
Tags :
Andrew Jacobson
Subscribe by Email
Follow Updates Articles from This Site via Email
No Comments