Pittwater Life June 2017 Issue

Surfing Life
Surfing Life
Knee deep: Brother Tom
faces up to ‘Robo’ reality
Surgery reminds us we’re all human, surf star or not, writes Nick...
One Thursday morning
a month or so
ago, I walked into
a rather expensive North
Sydney private hospital
ward, looked at my younger
brother stretched out fast
asleep with a large strip
bandage running down the
centre of his right knee, and
realised: It’s finally, actually
happened.
The morning before, a
surgical team had pushed
an epidural needle into
little Tommy Carroll’s spine,
drenched him in general
anaesthetic, cut off the base
of his right femur and the
summit of his right tibia,
and with the help of laser
guidance and GPS, fitted a
titanium/cobalt joint in their
place.
The surgery is a
punctuation mark. It ends
40-some years of Tom’s
struggle with this knee
– a struggle that began
with a teenage wipeout at
‘Pissing Point’, Umina, and
continued through a full
knee reconstruction and
ACL replacement, several
arthroscopy clean-out
procedures, and endless
weights and Yoga sessions,
as he tried to keep the unruly
joint in line long enough to
win all those Pipe Masters
and world titles, etc.
It’s also a reminder:
surfing might make us feel
like we’re gonna live forever,
but it’s as likely to wreck us
as anything else.
Elite-level surf injuries
have changed a lot since the
early 1980s, when Tom was
first battling back from the
reconstruction. You can trace
the changes directly to the
changing styles of surfing
through the period. Back
then, a study done by the
late Brian Lowdon of Deakin
University showed the most
PHOTO: WSL / Ryan Heywood
Flat-out stoked: Tom’s surgery ends the 40-year battle with his
right knee that spanned the length of his pro career.
common injury was a knee
– more particularly a medial
collateral ligament strain,
which made sense because
at the time, surfing was
all about straining. These
were the days of flat decked
surfboards, on which you
squatted down low, pushed,
shoved, and power-battled
your way across the wave. In
an awkward situation, your
back foot would either slip
off the tail, or your entire
leg would be compressed
sideways along the board’s
length, flexing the knee
in ways it was never built
to be flexed. The old Ace
knee bandage was never so
popular.
By the early 2000s,
when the Association of
Surfing Professionals’ then
chiropractor Dean Innis
undertook a similar study,
he found the focus of injury
had shifted away from the
knee and toward the ankle
joint and lower back. Curvier
surfboards, faster-twitch
styles, late-takeoff tube
riding and air moves
were changing the
injury game as
much as they were
changing the judging
criteria.
Today, the injuries
are more extreme.
Not so much at
world pro tour level
(where the ankle’s
still the big one) as
in the increasingly
occupied heavywave
space. Behind
all that charging
15-metre waves
at Shipstern and
Jaws are things
you never saw
last century.
Impact injuries:
broken femurs,
broken backs, destroyed
shoulders, concussions,
ankle dislocations. Most of
these injuries pass us by;
they barely touch the radar
screen, if they’re heard of
at all.
I won’t even get into the
fact that almost all these
with Nick Carroll
injuries are being racked up
by males.
Meanwhile, the over-50s
among us head for the
orthopaedic specialist’s
office, hoping to extract a
few more years of magic out
of the situation.
42 JUNE 2017
Celebrating 25 Years