View this post on Instagram
BJ Penn has been through a lot in his life. He’s been punched in the face more than most, for starters. He’s wired his brain to work through fear, work through pain, work through nerves, and work through pressure. But his terrifying wave pool experience put all that to the test.
Penn didn’t disclose which wave pool where he nearly died because in his words, he’s “not the kine guy shows up to your house to play and gets hurt and tries to sue you.” What happened, though, is something out of a nightmare. Penn took to Instagram to write about it, and the story is harrowing, to say the least.
According to Penn, the incident happened in 2020. “Last year when I got sucked into a wave pool engine room and thought I was going to die,” he wrote. “I kept thinking ‘don’t die for your kids.’”
He’d been surfing for about an hour when the incident occurred. Penn, who was sitting beside the wall where the waves come from, explained that the first swell is a “dud,” created to get everyone ready for the next waves.
“The dud wave came back and because I was so close to the wall the wave swallowed me and pushed me and my surfboard underneath a huge cement wall,” he continued. “I remember feeling like I was getting sucked in a pipe and at that moment I got scared. It ended up pushing me into a big dark cement room that fills up with water to push the next wave for the wave pool.”
The room would fill up with water to the top as the machine worked to produce the next round of waves.
“It felt like I was in the movie SAW or Final Destination,” Penn said. “The room would fill up with water to the top and I would hold my breath and then it would push the water out to make the wave and it was really rough inside there.”
Thankfully, one of Penn’s friends was there — not in the machine room, but outside in the pool. Penn stayed calm, knowing that his friend would realize what had happened and come to his rescue.
“I knew he would come in there to rescue me so I stayed calm,” Penn said. “A lot of other people might have panicked and maybe gave up but I just stayed strong for my kids. Anyway, to make a long story short I survived that mother fucker.”
He didn’t come out unscathed, however. When he emerged into the light, he was covered in cuts and scrapes.
“Everything I bumped up against in the room that hurt me got infected,” he went on. “I got a bad sinus infection and a couple of facial fractures from getting knocked around the cement walls and from the fractures the dirty water got in my face and infected my whole sinus. I was on antibiotics for three weeks for my face.”
While the story Penn tells is purposefully vague about location and the people involved, it’s a stark reminder that wave pools are still relatively new, and, like regular surfing, there are inherent dangers. Thankfully, BJ Penn survived to tell the tale.
