#1185 - Kelly Slater

Joe Rogan (0:02)

Four, three, two, one. Kelly Slater, we've been talking about doing this for how long?

Kelly Slater (0:08)

A couple of years.

SPEAKER_3 (0:09)

It's been a while, man.

Kelly Slater (0:10)

Thanks for having me.

Joe Rogan (0:10)

Thanks for being here. I'm glad we finally got a chance to do it.

What are you in California for? I know you broke your foot, right?

Kelly Slater (0:15)

I broke my foot real bad.

Joe Rogan (0:17)

How'd you do that?

Kelly Slater (0:18)

Well, my girlfriend's from San Clemente, and her family lives there, and so we kind of live here, and we're not moving around too much.

So I'm just kind of here right now. I'm not competing. I broke my foot. I was surfing in South Africa about 15 months ago, and I was just on a wave that I wouldn't consider a very big wave. Nobody would really consider dangerous.

And it all kind of closed out, which is, you know, when it all breaks at once, I just pulled in the thing because I was going to sort of wash in on the rocks, right, where that was and change boards.

And I was practicing. I had to compete in about two hours from then. So I was just testing out different boards. For some reason, I wasn't riding the board. I was planning on riding competition. So I was going to come in and change and switch to my normal board. And I just pulled in this wave and just, I kind of hesitated. Like usually you ride those out and stay on your board or you jump off. And I was kind of between the two. And I kind of lifted my front foot off my back foot. My leg was straight because I was kind of going to, I think I was going to jump off. And as my foot got, my leg got locked back straight, the board flipped in against the toes. And it just broke the top of my foot in half.

Joe Rogan (1:25)

Oh!

Kelly Slater (1:25)

Like, immediate. Like, there was...

Joe Rogan (1:27)

Oh my God! We're looking at a photograph of the x-ray right now, and it's like every bone has snapped.

Kelly Slater (1:33)

Well, what you can't see, so... Do you know, are you aware of the Liz Frank joint?

Joe Rogan (1:37)

No.

Kelly Slater (1:38)

Which is like, that's where the first big metatarsal comes together, so that first big joint on top of the foot there.

Joe Rogan (1:43)

Why is it called the Liz Frank joint?

Kelly Slater (1:45)

Liz Frank was a doctor, I think. That's what I... I could... we could look this up.

I think that was the person that did the original surgery, which when you used to break your foot in a stirrup back a hundred years ago, they used to cut your foot off.

Joe Rogan (1:58)

Oh, God damn it!

Kelly Slater (2:00)

Yeah, so that was what... that was kind of how this sort of joint got famous. But normally what happens is those toes, those two bones right there, the first and second metatarsal, can either spread or converge one way or the other, and that's usually what a Liz Frank fracture is. I had the best of the three, which is... I had a crack. You can just see on the right side of... Yeah, if you go down with the cursor right there, just a little lower, there's a little crack right there.

Right there, on that corner.

And then the next one broke across. You can just see right there, it's cracked across.

Joe Rogan (2:36)

And then...

Kelly Slater (2:36)

So it kind of went in a line up and across the foot.

Joe Rogan (2:39)

And then the other two are just destroyed.

Kelly Slater (2:41)

Yeah, the third one displaced. The fourth one shattered into about eight pieces. The doctor said he lost count, putting them back together. And you would know from injuries, the problem with when there's shatters of bone, they're not getting the blood flow. So it's not like a four or five week repair job.

That was like nine months before that thing was back together properly.

Joe Rogan (3:00)

So when they do that, how do they piece that shattered one back together again?

Kelly Slater (3:05)

Delicately. And they put like a mesh over.

So you got to kind of like figure out how to... Well, I had a plate on the Liz Frank, and then I had a kind of a bridge across the third and fourth. And so they kind of meshed it all together. And then I think I had 16 screws combined in all that.