"There is something about the story of Owen's injury that doesn't add up."
If you were to examine the life of Owen Wright and his storied family from any sort of angle or distance it would hardly need embellishment to make interesting.
The surfing heartthrob and one-time title contender turned real estate developer returns from a catastrophic brain injury, bleeding on the brain, paralysis and (temporary) inability to speakto win his first event back on tour one year later and return to his usual position as a world title contender.
Two-time world champ Tyler wins a tour event at fourteen, qualifies at sixteen, but throws it in (briefly) before returning to the tour and carving and plating her two titles.
Mikey? Hot and salty and greasy (like a sunbathing German) and a wildcard world title contender.
And, all wrapped up with a family pal-turned-bookeeper who fleeced ‘em of their hard-earned millions so she could have a little play money for the horsies and poker machines.
That theft of almost one million bucks led to his estrangement from Ma and Pa Wright, Dad would later be diagnosed with dementia and Owen would take up his care, friction with his siblings and his pop star wife Kita and a fear he didn’t have enough cash to get out of the pro surfing game despite his catastrophic 2015 brain injury.
“I wanted to retire but I couldn‘t financially (due to the impact of the offending) and fought back into my career risking my life in the process,” he told the court. “I was still being stolen from while I could barely walk and while the doctors were saying I would never work again in my career. The physical risk I‘ve taken on to keep surfing was a choice I made because I was not financially in the position to stop my career.”
Well, in wild claims made by Fred Pawle, whom you know as the Walkley-nominated journalist responsible for putting Sarge to the sword (irony!) and telling Matt Branson’s gay-and-proud-ish story, he says Owen has thrown a little fairy dust on the retelling of his Pipe brain injury in his new book, Against the water: a surfing champion’s inspirational journey to Olympic glory.
Leaving aside the clear embellishment of calling a bronze medal “Olympic glory” in the title, at the 2008 Games, for example, Swedish wrestler Ara Abrahamian hurled his third-place trinket onto the floor and walked out, punching the barricade as he exited, Pawle questions Owen’s “inconsistencies” in the telling of the events at Pipe.
There’s inconsistencies in Pawle’s arguments, too, his claim there’s no ten-wave sets at Pipe for one.
“There is something about the story of Owen’s injury that doesn’t add up,” says Pawle. Surfers are not always the most reliable storytellers… tall stories are part of surf culture, but, the inconsistencies of this story matter because it has become central to the Owen Wright myth.
