Horror wipeout at Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch awakens childhood trauma of near-drowning for pro scooter rider Corey Funk!

"I never wanted to get in the water again. I never wanted to try surfing until I came here and I got swallowed up and it really scared me."

Corey Funk needs little introduction, of course. He is the storied twenty-six-year-old pro scooter rider (“Watch me twirl, daddy!”) from Temecula in California who operates the YouTube channel Funk Bros with his brother Capron and cuz Tyler. The gang have six-million plus subscribers with vids regularly hitting more than a million clicks. 

Plenty of social juice, an inspiration to god’s chillun etc.

Now, following a visit to Surf Ranch courtesy of his sponsor Red Bull who stumped up the seventy-gees to hire the joint and which confuses Funk who suggests, therefore, that each of his ten waves cost seven gees apiece, a wipeout sends the star into a nightmarish spiral back to when he nearly drowned as a kid. 

“My second time out,” he begins, tears forming, “I got swallowed by a wave (long pause) and it scared the crap out of me. It brought some trauma back from when I was a kid. I got sucked over a wave when I was a kid and I wasn’t able to get out the wave. Multiple waves came, back to back to back and kept me under the water. It really scared me. It scared me so much to a point where I just never wanted to get in the water again, I never really wanted to try surfing until I came back here and I got swallowed up again and it really scared me.” 

Redemption follows, this being the safest wave on earth, policed by the world’s best surf coach Tahitian Raimana Van Bastolaer, and Funk is soon barebacking the famous man-made wave, literally putting his life on the line for his YouTube video. 

 

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Essential.