The Sliding Door Moments of MARK MATHEWS

How one life-changing injury, an unexpected friendship and a lifetime spent chasing giant waves reshaped one of Australia’s most respected big wave surfers

A young man by the name of Jason Apps rolled into the hospital room in a wheelchair. For Mark Mathews, lying in a Canberra hospital bed after one of the most catastrophic wipeouts of his life, the encounter would change everything.

Only days earlier, Mathews had been flown off a remote reef on the New South Wales South Coast after a surfing accident so severe surgeons feared he might lose his leg. His knee had exploded against the reef, tearing ligaments, severing an artery and destroying nerves. The future he had spent decades building as one of Australia’s best-known big wave surfers suddenly hung in the balance. He was angry. Bitter. Feeling sorry for himself. Then Jason was wheeled into the room. “He was a fan of my surfing,” Mathews says. “He was 19 and he’d broken his neck snowboarding before my accident and he was quadriplegic.” The contrast was immediate and confronting. “All of a sudden I’m going from being full of self-pity and angry about how bad I’ve got it to looking at this kid.” The shift in perspective was instant. “That changed the trajectory of where I was going,” he says. “Instead of going down into a drug-riddled hole of depression, that moment changed my outlook and perspective on everything.”

Today, remarkably, the two men live in the same apartment building – Esprit, at Rainbow on the southern Gold Coast. Mark even pushes Jason into some waves trickling through Snapper Rocks and Greenmount when conditions allow. The friendship has become an emotional centrepiece of Mathews’ keynote presentations around the world. It is also the perfect lens through which to understand the man behind the giant waves. Because while the public image of Mark Mathews has long been built around fearlessness, the reality is far more nuanced. His life has not been about conquering fear. It has been about understanding it and embracing it. Then sharing what he’s learned with the world. And perhaps that journey began with his father.

Photo: Brian Usher

Long before sponsorships, helicopters and Red Bull film shoots, Mathews was a surf-obsessed kid growing up in Maroubra – a place famous for producing some of Australia’s toughest and roughest surfers. “It was a pretty tough hood,” he says. Yet inside the Mathews household there was another influence entirely. His father, Phil Mathews, was a respected surgeon at Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney. His mother Betsy was a nurse. Education, discipline and professionalism surrounded him. But beneath it all, his father carried another identity. “He was a surfer first,” Mathews says. “That’s why I love surfing because he loved surfing.”

His father had grown up idolising surf culture and watching classic surf films like The Endless Summer. One of his close friends was legendary Australian surfer Terry Fitzgerald. In another life, Mathews believes his father might have pursued surfing full time himself. Instead he chose medicine. So when his son began showing promise in the water as a teenager, Phil Mathews offered advice that would shape the course of his life. “Go surfing,” he told him.

Photo – Madison Tessarolo

It was not blind encouragement from a parent disconnected from reality. Quite the opposite. It came from someone who understood sacrifice intimately. “When I had thoughts of being a doctor like him, he also knew I was too dumb to be a doctor,” Mathews laughs. “In reality surfing was embedded in him and maybe he didn’t have the opportunity to do more of because of his career as a surgeon. “I loved surfing with dad. It’s ironic that the only road trip I did with him was here to Rainbow Bay where I now live – he was on call all the time and generally couldn’t get away.” But beneath the joke was something more profound. His father recognised that surfing was not simply a pastime for his son. It was his purpose. That support became critical during Mathews’ teenage years, because outside the family home another education was taking place.

Photo: Juan Medina

Maroubra in the 1990s and early 2000s was raw, tribal and intensely competitive. Mathews grew up around the Bra Boys generation, watching older surfers like Koby Abberton push Australian surfing culture into something harder and more dangerous. “I lived with Koby and his brothers Jai and Sunny and those guys and learned everything about big wave surfing basically following their lead,” he says. “It was a tough environment. You either took off on the biggest wave of the day or you walked home from the South Coast,” he says. “That’s what it felt like trying to impress those guys.” Mathews was younger than many of them – “five or six years younger,” he says – but desperate to earn respect. At 14 he tattooed “Bra Boys” across his back. “There were positives and negatives to that area,” he says. “But I would never have got a career surfing big waves without that mentorship.”

Unlike some of the naturally fearless personalities around him, Mathews says he was actually the anxious kid. “When I was young I was probably more scared than my peer group,” he says. “I’m neurotic, man. I think about all the things that can go wrong.” Ironically, he now sees that as one of the reasons he survived. “If you’re not neurotic doing dangerous stuff, you die straight away.” Fear became something he studied obsessively.

As the waves grew larger, so did his fascination with psychology, resilience and high performance. He devoured books, research papers and neuroscience studies trying to better understand how humans process fear and stress. “I became fascinated with how you deal with fear, how you build courage and resilience,” he says.

Mathews knew early he was unlikely to become a world tour surfer in the mould of Kelly Slater. Instead, he identified a niche. “I realised I wasn’t good enough to be top 20 in the world,” he says. “So I found a part of surfing where there wasn’t much competition – big wave surfing.”

That moment came in Tasmania at Shipstern Bluff around 2000. At the time, the monstrous slab wave was barely photographed and largely unknown outside hardcore surfing circles. During one session Mathews surfed the wave alongside surfers including Kieren Perrow and Drew Courtney while photographer Sean Davey captured images that would travel around the world. “It was the first time the wave had really been shot properly,” Mathews says. “The photos went everywhere.” Soon after, sponsor offers arrived. His first major deal came with O’Neill. “I wasn’t making a fortune,” he says. “But I made enough to travel and surf. And I actually discovered I was better at the business than I was at the surfing.”

Photo: Andrew Chisholm

Over time the deals grew bigger. Eventually Mathews estimates he was earning upwards of $200,000 a year through sponsorships and partnerships. He developed a reputation not only as a surfer but as a savvy operator who understood branding and storytelling. Then came 2016. Mathews was filming a Red Bull project at a remote reef break nicknamed “Killers” south of Ulladulla. “It wasn’t even particularly huge, about 6-8 foot” he says. “But it’s a slab wave that comes out of deep water and breaks onto really shallow reef.” “The tide was wrong and the swell direction was slightly off. But it was the final day available to capture the footage. “I got a wave that was too big for how shallow it was.” As the wave crumbled above him, Mathews attempted to dive forward off his board and escape over the back. Instead the ocean grabbed him. Smashing him onto the reef, his leg became wedged in a hole while the force of the wave twisted his knee backwards catastrophically. “I tore every ligament and tendon in my knee, tore the artery and all the major nerves.”

His friend Richie Vaculik dragged him from the water while emergency services raced to the scene. The reason he still has his leg today came down to timing and extraordinary luck. A rescue helicopter happened to be immediately available. A leading vascular surgeon happened to be working in the public hospital that day. Astonishingly, the surgeon had trained under Mathews’ father decades earlier. “For five days they didn’t know if they could save it,” says his wife Britt. “Doctors monitored his toe constantly with a stethoscope waiting for signs of blood flow returning. “On the fifth day we finally heard a pulse.” The injury effectively ended his full-time surfing career. But it also forced another transformation.

Public speaking had existed on the side of his surfing career for years, though he disliked it intensely. “I’m hyper introverted,” he says. “I was more scared standing on stage than surfing giant waves. “But I knew I could develop a career out of this and there was a real niche in this. I also felt I had a story to tell and could also share my understandings of how to manage fear. “These are things I had obviously learned along the way as a professional big wave surfer but I knew that everyone has to deal with fear in their lives now matter what they do.” Yet once surfing was taken away, he redirected the obsessive discipline that had driven his surfing career into mastering speaking. “I treated it like surfing,” he says. “Every line of the keynote became valuable.”He analysed timing, delivery and audience psychology with the same intensity he once applied to waves. “If one line in the keynote is worth fifty grand over ten years, you work on that line.” The result has been extraordinary.

Today Mathews speaks globally to corporate audiences about fear, resilience and performance under pressure. He has joined the likes of former presidential candidate Kamala Harris as a keynote speaker at one of Australia’s largest real estate conferences, AREC where he was described as ‘one of the highest rated speakers in the 27-year history of AREC’. He has been described by Google as ‘one of the best speakers we have ever worked with’, by Sentinal One as ‘hands down the best speaker I’ve ever heard’ and ‘top rated speaker of the entire event and one of the best in Intuit Connect history’. What resonates most, however, is not necessarily the giant waves. It is the honesty. People expect the stereotypical adrenaline junkie. Instead they encounter someone deeply reflective and self-aware. “I explain that I’m more scared standing on stage than surfing those waves,” he says. “And people relate to that.” “It’s not about pretending fear doesn’t exist,” he says. “It’s about what you do with it and we all need to learn how to manage this as it’s part of the human experience.”

The emotional core of his talks remains the same hospital story – the moment his perspective shifted forever. Away from the stage, life now looks very different. Mathews and his wife Britt met on the Gold Coast in 2010 after she was introduced to him by surfer Dingo Morrison while studying at Bond University. “He asked me out on a date and the rest is history,” Britt laughs.

Photo: Brian Usher

The couple married in the Maldives in 2018 after surfing all day before exchanging vows on a secluded sand island. Today, they live in the recently completed luxury apartment Esprit at Rainbow Bay where Britt has built a successful career as a content creator and producer while Mark balances speaking engagements with family life.

Their luxury dual level penthouse, featuring the best of James Lane Furniture and overlooking the famous southern Gold Coast point breaks, was developed by friend and Gold Coast surfing community identity and supporter Paul Gedoun of S & S Projects. Their recent move to the Gold Coast with their daughters Matilda 6, and Araminta 4, reflects the next chapter of the Mathews story: calmer, grounded, but still deeply connected to the ocean and Mark’s surfing roots. And perhaps that full-circle feeling is strongest when Mathews thinks about his late father. One of the only surf road trips they ever did together was to Rainbow Bay decades ago. His father had told him then how much he loved the area. Now Mathews surfs there regularly with his own children. “He wished he lived here,” he says quietly. “So now that I live here, it feels pretty special.”

Photo- Madison Tessarolo

For a man who built a career riding the heaviest waves on Earth, the most important lesson ultimately came not from the ocean, but from perspective. A hospital room. A young man in a wheelchair. And the sudden understanding that life, even broken and uncertain, can still move forward in a positive direction despite the bumps and sliding doors along the way.

To follow Mark & Britt – https://www.markmathews.com

https://www.instagram.com/markmathewssurf/

https://www.instagram.com/iambrittmathews/