on life and death

v5: I’m sure you’ve had instances in the past where your friends or someone you know has passed away in the type of extreme conditions of these sports, how do you deal with that?

Mickey Munoz: I don’t know what to say about that either. It is like skydiving for instance, there is not much room for error and usually if you bounce, you do not recover.

My brother in law is in the film business and he is a writer and director, so when he can he hires me to do stuff with him.  We did a couple of real interesting shoots, one of them was a man who invented sky surfing, Patrick de Gayardon.  He basically has a snowboard that he bails out of it of an airplane and he was the first guy to do it.  He is the Kelly Slater of skydiving, brings the sport into a whole new arena.  One of the things that he did, and they have done this in the past, was with Batman type costumes.

It’s obvious what they were trying to achieve, be a bird and not have to use a chute and someday land. He started experimenting with these flying suits and carried it a step further than most by using slots in the wings. Like the chutes that they are using now that are more like wings, not just drag coming down. They have a lot of forward speed and control because of that.  They get these nice foils by inflating the canopy and literally making a foil out of it.  So Patrick de Gayardon started doing it with webs under his arms and crotch.  He picked up an aficionado, an English guy, who was experimenting with him.  I asked Adrian how many jumps did he have, and he goes, “Just to give you an idea, I had somewhere between two and three thousand last year.”  Well, that comes out to be six jumps a day, every day.  This guy had a lot of time in the air!  About four months ago Patrick de Gayardon bounced, as they call it, people had thought he was invincible.

He had pulled himself out of a lot of problems.  Well, this flying costume is very interesting because behind you is this turbulent bubble, which causes a lot of lift, so there is a lot of pressure on your arms and legs and now you have to go back and
pull the pilot chute out in clean air to open.  Well, he had packed a bunch of chutes the night before, this last jump in Hawaii, and he and Adrian did this jump dressed in these flying costumes. They did dogfights and came together holding hands and flew for a while, laughing, and Adrian said it was one of the best jumps he’s ever had, especially with Patrick, who was his guru.  When it was time to pull, they parted and Adrian went one way and pulled, and Patrick went down too low, pulled and had a malfunction and fought it all the way to the ground and bounced.  It killed him.  I hope I am answering your questions.  Patrick’s saying was, “Live your dreams, do not dream your life away.” And basically that’s what he did.  I think you have to keep going for it but not foolishly.

Especially when you are young you don’t know your limitations, so you do it and that’s how things are accomplished.  I’ve raced motorcycles for years and eighteen year olds go right by you, and you’re thinking, “They can’t do that, they are going way too fast for that corner!” (laughs)  But they do it anyway!  Surfing is the same!

I used to sell surfboards for Hobie on the East Coast and I did the whole tour from Miami to Maine.  I’d go to the dealers and kind of smooze and surf and service the accounts.  One day this dealer friend of mine from Maryland took me surfing in small swells with long boards and we are the only ones out. The waves are blown out, real funky surf and he rides a wave in.  I look, but don’t see him and keep looking, but still don’t see him, then when I finally see him; he is face down in the water.  I grab a wave and paddle in next to him and gently pull his face out of the water.  He is fully conscious, yet he is drowning in three feet of water with a broken neck.  A kid from the beach comes out and we slide him onto my board and carry him onto the beach.  We call the ambulance and they want to take him off my board and onto a stretcher.  I go, “You don’t touch him, strap him onto my board and him into the ambulance.”  It saved his life but he has three kids and his wife is pregnant with their fourth, he is a quadriplegic.  He went through hell and wanted to die.  Here is a guy who loves the water, has kids, a business, and a loving wife and suddenly he is in bed and a day for him is taking a dump, brush his teeth and get back to bed.  That’s his full day.  But he kept this surfing consciousness, if you will.  We would send him things and he would hang feathers, rocks, and shells from various beaches from around the world over his bed and vicariously fly and surf with these talisman like objects.

He learned to take photos and adjust his camera with his tongue and learned to write with a pen in his teeth so he could write surfing articles.  An amazing guy!  Then about five or eight years ago, time flies, maybe you even know this story, but when people ask me the best wave I’ve ever been in was or my best surfing experience, it was when Bill came out to California for a visit, he was sponsored by Hobie, and I planned to take him out on my boat.  It was his wife’s second time on a boat and Bill is saying, “ I can’t get on that boat.”  You have to realize he is a two hundred-pound guy in a wheelchair.  Well, my catamaran is low enough to the dock that I just put down a piece of plywood and rolled him and put him up against his ferring and strapped him in and off we go.  On the boat were myself, my wife and another friend of ours, Bill and his wife.  It was almost twenty-five years to the day that we surfed together and he broke his neck. So we went down the coast, a good, six-foot day and he is all excited looking around at the surf and everything.  A set comes and since he is facing forward, he has no clue of what is going on.  I’m looking back and we get this wave with the boat and he just went totally nuts!  We had surfers just doing roundhouse cutbacks behind us and everything.  He is in his wheelchair trying to lift his arms and screaming and yelling and hooting since he had not been in a wave physically for twenty-five years.  I pulled out of this wave and I was in shock because we could swim away, but if the boat goes upside down, he is dead.  Pretty much since he is in a wheelchair, upside down, strapped in! We pulled out of this thing and his face was totally lit up!  Both of us were in tears, absolute tears and hugging.  We then anchored, went surfing and when we came out, and there were this outrageous sunset.  His wife is sitting in his lap, this total romantic deal.  About a year later he sent me a photograph of him taking scuba diving lessons!

So imagine now being underwater breathing as a quadriplegic, you are now gravity free almost, weightless.  Anyway, he sends me a picture of him and his wife kissing underwater without their mouthpieces in.  The point of all this, Bill writes that it’s better to die living then to die dying.  It kind of goes along with what Patrick said, “Live your dreams, don’t dream your life away.”   So within your limits you got to keep pushing it.

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life and death

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