Meet Evan Geiselman’s Pipe Angel!

Two-time world champ bodyboarder Andre Botha's rep just got hotter…

When the Florida surfer Evan Geiselman was knocked unconscious at Pipe yesterday, it was a watchful bodyboarder who scooped up his body and got him to the beach.

Saved his life? Yeah, he did. The six-foot-three, 200-pound bodyboarder kept Evan’s face out of the water, blew oxygen into his mouth, all while currents blew them down the beach.

Given the spectacular form of the rescue, it’s entirely fitting that bodyboarder was Andre Bothe, a 35-year-old South African, who once won the Pipe contest and world title in the same year. Youngest ever world champion too (seventeen).

If you bodyboard, Andre’s name is up there alongside Mike Stewart, Ben Player and the Brazilan Guilherme Tâmega.

His story is good. He was total rockstar.

Let’s examine this except from an interview.

“Aged just 22, Botha was living in the States as a functioning alcoholic. Life was a blur that he can revisit by shuffling through some of the hundreds of Polaroids he keeps in a shoebox. Pictures of barflies and the fast friends made while partying. Selfies of himself not looking himself. And girls, lots of girls. Beautiful girls, doing things like kissing him or showing off their cleavage or posing in their underwear on their hands and knees with bottles of beer balanced on their bums.

“My life got a bit reckless and I wasn’t really dealing with reality,” Botha admits. “I wasn’t able to deal with life’s problems. That was my big burnout. And after that, I was always kind of living on the edge, just hopping around from one person’s house to the next and having a jolly old time. I wasn’t surfing. Things kind of spiralled, and eventually I realised that I couldn’t carry on living like I was. That I had to use my parents’ house as a place to kind of… rehabilitate.”

Read more about Andre here! 

And, here, the raw footage from Ev’s rescue.