“I would go out to Jaws with pills, crush ‘em up, snort ‘em, and go back surfing Jaws”

Big-wave world champ Makua Rothman on his three wild years living hard in the fast lane.

The big-wave world champ, best-selling minstrel and scion of North Shore strongman Fast Eddie, Mr Makua Rothman, has proved to be his usual candid self on a podcast with the Narrabeen surfer Cooper Chapman, a former pro whose sister, Chloe, is the wife and baby mama of DJ Fisher.

Makua Rothman, who is forty-one, was last seen on these pages when he had a swing at local government following the collapse in governmental trust during the Covid  hellshow.

Makua Rothman tells Chapman,

“Between 2015 and 2018, I really went off the rails. I really did a lot of detrimental things to my health. I’d do pills, and be off them on a blocker when I’d compete. It’s wild when I think about what I could have done if I had the mindset that I did previously, or what I have now. I was still good enough to win a world championship, even in that mind space.”

His drug of choice, mostly, was the now infamous Oxycodone, the same doctor-prescribed drug that took down a generation of Hawaiian surfers.

“The worst part about is that I just thought it was cool. I didn’t have any pain. I wasn’t coming from an injury. A lot of people get prescribed them from an injury, and unfortunately, they can’t get off them. For me, that dopamine hit really took away the things I didn’t like about myself. It was the solution to my problem. The pills weren’t the problem; I had an underlying mental health problem of shame, guilt, and I wasn’t man enough to take responsibility for them. I masked them with alcohol. It was cocaine. It was all the above.”

“I’m lucky I’m not dead. I’ve competed and surfed in the biggest waves. I would go out to Jaws with pills in a pill container, crush ‘em up, snort ‘em, and go back surfing Jaws. I’m just blessed I didn’t drown. I eventually had a moment where I was done. I really wanted to live. I was ready to become Makua again.”

 

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I do remember the arrival of opiates to the mainstream vividly. It was 2005 and a one-time pro gave me a morphine tablet, he had several bottles following a knee injury, at a surf industry party. I enjoyed the feeling immensely and followed up, god I don’t know, maybe fifty times afterwards although when they became de rigueur at every event, including children’s birthday parties and before surf in even middling waves, I grabbed my coat, as they say, and left it to the playboys, many of whom still chase that only slightly neutered dragon.