Barefoot Maui Boy to Champion in the Water: The Story of Fred Haywood

And if you don't have your speed up, they'll catch you.

So it caught me, and then I wrote down that wave, and that wave is now on the picture of my book.

SPEAKER_04: So many people think that my story is inspiring.

How I became blind at just 17 years of age.

They always want to know how I've done it and how I've kept smiling all along the way.

Well, I just mind you.

Other times, we are kind of freaked out at just how small the world really is.

And well, that was kind of the case with today's episode.

Today's featured guest, Fred Hayward.

So there's a site that I use for lining up many of the guests here on the podcast, and that's called Simply Podcastguests.com.

Now they are not sponsoring today's episode, but if they're listening to this podcast and they hear the story I'm about to share, well, they might be uh thinking they should be sponsoring the podcast.

Because I've been a big fan of podcast guests.

And well, it was today's guest that really kind of blew my mind because I got an inquiry to have Fred Haywood on my podcast.

I had no idea who Fred Haywood was, but the thing that immediately caught my attention was that he lives on the island of Maui.

And well, I was like, oh my goodness, this is too cool.

So I ended up setting up a quick little uh 15-minute Zoom call with Fred, as I do with all of my potential guests.

It's just a way for me to uh, you know, us get to meet and be sure that everything's a good fit and everything's squared away for us to then schedule a date for us to actually record, you know, the podcast.

Anyways, I'm on the Zoom call with Fred.

And me and him, we had been chatting for probably five, 10 minutes, and it gets mentioned that I live in Florida.

Now, me and him were complete strangers to one another, found each other through, you know, this website, and he says to me, So where are you in relation to Ormond Beach?

And I immediately just kind of freak out that he said such a thing.

And I said, I'm like, Fred, I'm like, Ormond, that's where I live.

I'm born and raised here in Ormond.

He's like, oh my gosh, he starts freaking out.

And he's telling me that he has friends who are from Ormin, the small little beachside town in East Central Florida.

And he's telling me that they actually just sold their house in Ormond and moved to Maui.

And more crazy than that is that at the time me and him were talking, they were actually at his house.

And so me and him are kind of freaking out at how crazy ironic this is.

But it gets even crazier because he races out into the living room, gets his friend, brings him into his office to meet me.

And that's when my mind is really blown.

Because this guy, well, he knew my family.

He immediately recognized my last name, asked me my relation to some of my family members.

And I'm like, yeah, uh, that's, you know, my grandmother and that's my uncle.

And we're freaking out.

Come to find out, him and his wife, who just moved to Maui, were good friends with my aunt and uncle.

How crazy is this?

And it was one of those moments when you sit there and think, wow, maybe there's some type of greater force working in the universe, bringing us together, having us meet people for a reason greater than we may even realize at the time.

And so, well, I just have to give it up to podcastguests.com and the amazing power of the universe to connect us with the people we need to connect with.

And at this point, you're like, okay, Kevin, that's super crazy, super cool.

But who in the world is Fred Haywood?

Well, that's who I'm about to introduce you to today, because today is episode 55 here on The Lowdown with Kevin Lowe.

I'm, of course, your host, Kevin Lowe.

And I'm sitting down with Fred Haywood all the way in Maui.

Fred Haywood is one of the founders of the sport of windsurfing.

Matter of fact, he actually held the world record in windsurfing for the fastest speeds.

And it wasn't soon after that that he also had his infamous shot of him surfing one of the world's biggest waves, they're back home in Maui.

Fred, well, he's also a record-setting backstroke swimmer.

And now, in his recent times, he has really built his name up for being a tremendous name in the reality space on the island of Maui.

Now, what brought me and Fred together for today's podcast is the fact that he's turned his incredible life story into a book, Racing with Aloha.

As awesome as Fred's book, Racing with Aloha, is, well, I kind of think talking one-on-one with Fred Haywood is pretty amazing itself.

And so, well, that's what I'm about to do and have you tuning in too.

As soon as you're done listening to today's episode, please be sure to check out the show notes where you'll find a link where you can go to purchase Racing with the Loha and continue filling yourself with some of the awesome stories that Fred Haywood has to tell.

SPEAKER_00: Sure.

Well, my dad was a doctor and he read an he read an advertisement while he was in San Francisco to uh move to Maui and work for a plantation doctor.

He was from my parents were from Montana, so they were quite adventurous already, you know.

One was from a farm and one was a doctor's son.

So they picked it up and just moved to Maui and worked for the sugar plantation.

My dad, given a house on the beach in Kahalouy Harbor, plus $400 a month, and he would service the plantation workers, and later he started his own practice.

But he would service these individuals that were living in plantation camps.

There was the Japanese camp, the Filipino camp, the Chinese camp.

They all had their names.

But essentially, I'd hop in his car every once in a while and go to the camps to do his service calls.

So can you imagine being visited by a doctor in your own home for a dollar?

unknown: No.

SPEAKER_00: I was down below um at you know at some of the camps with all the boys that were there, and they had a a fish grilling on the on the barbecue, or I was in the furrow at the Japanese camp hanging out.

So we made the most of it.

And life was quite adventurous in the 50s as a kid.

I was born in 49, so I had a chance to live all the exciting things that Maui offers.

We had waterfalls.

We had uh we could w go up to the top of the mountain and hike through a 10-mile crater.

We had campouts on the beaches, we could drive our trucks on the beaches, we surfed all the surf spots.

We we used the flumes of the irrigation for pineapples to jump in and fire down a nice ride and over a hump and into a pond.

We jumped off of waterfalls.

Every day life was about where are we going now?

Where are we going next?

You know, of course, living on Maui, and as I grew older and listening to the Beach Boys, two girls for every boy.

I hadn't seen a girl, I hadn't seen a girl in three weeks, four weeks, and they're saying in California there's two girls for every boy.

It got my interest.

I guess you could say it probably influenced me.

But we all loved surfing, and we started, dad had bought us used surfboards, narrow false wood clunkers, you know.

The biggest one we couldn't carry.

We had to get two or three of us to carry it, but three of us could ride the biggest one.

And we had surf right in front of the house.

So between that, diving, fishing, everything was outdoors.

Little did we know when tourism came on in the early late fifties, early sixties, it started to increase that the island would be kind of having its flood here now with this day and age.

You kind of gotta get sustainable tourism.

So it came from no tourist to uh kind of like a needing a need of a destination preservation today.

But we saw things change.

My brothers worked in the pineapple fields and picked pineapple and two older brothers did, and then I somehow figured out that I didn't want to do that, and dad says, Why don't you go work in the chicken farm?

Well, my brother worked in the chicken farm shoveling poop, and and when I went in for the interview, I told the gentleman who owned the chicken farms that I just didn't see myself shoveling poop.

So I didn't get the job.

I always knew there was something more.

So we had a swimming team here, and that seemed to be the best thing for mom.

She'd take us all out of school after classes were over and drive us to the swimming pool, and we'd all plop in and do laps with a coach named Benny Castor.

Now Benny was on the three there's a book called the Three Year Swim Club featuring Suichi Sakamoto, who was the coach.

And he took the plantation camp kids and let them train.

He wasn't he didn't know how to swim, but he took them and made them swim up current in the plantation irrigation ditches.

You know, might have been waist deep.

And so the kids were training up current.

Anyway, they were very successful, won some gold medals.

Suichi Sakamoto was honored, but the coach I had was one of the kids that was on the swimming team, Benny Castor.

And we swam in the a pool that had no gutters and no lane lines, and it was kind of like a wash bouncing around swimming.

SPEAKER_04: So now I I wanted to ask you real quick, now so when you started getting into swimming, like about how old were you at that point?

SPEAKER_00: I was in fifth grade when the someone came in and said there's a swimming meet in two weeks.

Who wants to go to a swimming meet?

And I said, sure.

Yeah.

So I s I I went to that first swimming meet and actually got a second place in backstroke that I just learned the week before.

SPEAKER_04: Oh wow.

So well, I started to say, I mean, you from growing up surfing and stuff, obviously you had already been pretty good at swimming in the first place.

SPEAKER_00: Right.

We didn't have courts, so we had to swim in for every time we lost our boards.

SPEAKER_04: Oh no, man, that's something I didn't even think about.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

And we were good at body surfing, so we were all around and we swam in some of the my I had my twelfth birthday at a waterfall.

Okay.

With a pond, and you know, 10 or 12 kids were all there, and we were jumping off the pond cliffs and into the water and having a big big fun.

So yeah, water was our natural resource, and we were living on it.

So swimming just came naturally.

I I got got a little bit of a hook, and then mom brought us all there, and I think they just enjoyed having five kids exhausted in the end of the day.

Probably gave them a little relief.

SPEAKER_04: Of course, of course.

That's awesome.

And then and then I wanted to ask you, so were you actually born on Maui?

SPEAKER_00: Yes, I was born in a hospital that no longer is there.

It's called Punane Hospital.

SPEAKER_03: Okay.

SPEAKER_00: My where my dad worked.

And um, sort of two of my family members were born on the mainland before they got moved over here.

My dad moved over here at 47, 1947.

SPEAKER_03: Okay.

SPEAKER_00: You know, before statehood.

Yeah.

Statehood came along in 59.

SPEAKER_03: Okay.

SPEAKER_00: And that's that's really when the attraction of Maui was born.

Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_04: Okay, cool.

So, okay, so so I I I had to just get a couple of those questions out that I I had been thinking of.

So now, so now back to back to the swimming part.

And cuz because you know, as as people are going to see, swimming became a big part of your life in the years to come.

So it did.

SPEAKER_00: Another way, my dad he he put us through prep school on on another island, which was a boarding school, another way to get rid of us.

I think he was trying to get rid of us.

There wasn't much educational opportunity here, and he could afford to send us to a prep school.

So we went to Hawaii Prep Academy.

They didn't have a swimming pool.

So my brothers and I, two brothers older than I were in school, and at the beginning we were driving to another school about 40 minutes away to go train.

But in my last two years there, we were training in a swimming pool that had been made from a raft in a harbor that was fifteen minutes away from school, so we could save a lot of time.

The coach built a raft that was held up with you can imagine two rectangular shapes with sixty-gallon drums holding up two by fours and plywood on each side, and and two long telephone poles connecting the two rafts.

So essentially making a twenty-five-yard pool.

We moored it in the harbor with anchors, and it was a few feet off of the jetty, so wow.

We trained in the ocean, and sometimes we would have the benefit of of not training in that pool, and he would take us to the furthest beach, and you can imagine we were gonna swim two or three beaches, maybe a mile and a half, two miles down the coast for a workout.

So he would stagger the swimmers, and as I got better, I was always the last one to start.

So he would stagger everybody.

So the slowest started first, and and you know, the twenty of us or so that were on the team, we all went in intervals of however much time it took to swim, because they knew that.

So I was always last trying to catch everybody.

So when I left Hawaii, I was second in back shook and first in freestyle in the state.

But by comparison to the mainland friends I met, I was nowhere.

So I was only training three months a year.

Okay.

And I took a trip after my sophomore year across the U.S.

with the Suichi Sakamoto of the three-year swim club, and we stopped.

Our first event was at Foothill College in California, and we're all sitting there watching the incredible swimming going on, and you know, way better than me.

And I got a tap on my shoulder, and I turned around, and this kid says, Hi, uh, my name's Mark.

What's your name?

I'm Fred Haywood.

He says, Well, I'm Mark Spitz.

And he just wanted to meet someone that was from Hawaii.

And within about 20 minutes, I figured out he was pretty good.

He was 15, but he was beating everybody in the upper age groups, too.

So I said, My goodness.

I came back to Hawaii after that trip and told my swimming coach that there's this kid on the mainland that's gonna beat everybody in the world and someday.

And it was an amazing trip we had.

And my coach said, Well, you know what, Fred, if you if you decide to go to the mainland for your senior year in high school and swim with Mark Spitz, I'll guarantee you're gonna go to a better college than if you stay here and get straight A's.

And I said, Well, that's highly unlikely getting straight A's, but I like the idea of going over there and training.

Can you help me do it?

So he wrote a letter to the coach.

They put they got a family to sponsor me and you know, charge a monthly fee while I was there.

SPEAKER_02: Oh wow.

SPEAKER_00: So I went and just lived with another family, the Finoran family that first summer.

And then the school year I lived with the Diaz family, making tortillas and eggs and beans and so And where was that at?

In Santa Clara, California.

Okay.

It was it was the the swimming hub of of the nation and the best coach in the world.

So yeah, I started training, but I hadn't trained for six months when I got there.

So I was pretty out of shape.

And I can remember the women passing me in the pool and I'm going, What have what have I done here?

What am what's going on?

I I remember one day getting out of the water and going, Quotes, I just want to go in the showers and kind of lean against the shower for a minute and get my breath because I'm exhausted.

So okay.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: You know, and the school year started and blah, blah, blah.

I I swam that summer and it was pretty neutral.

I didn't really improve in anything, but I was just getting back in shape because I'm now swimming against kids who swim 12 months a year, double workouts, and I'd been swimming virtually one, maybe two workouts, three months a year.

So I had no background and no muscle knowledge, no no shape.

So anyway, I I had a magical thing happen in the pool one day in workout as I was improving.

I swam 20 repeats with Mark Spitz, and we were doing interval training, which was really kind of new age style of swimming, where you get short bursts, short speed bursts with 10 or 15 seconds rest.

So we were doing 100 yard repeats, and I had swam 2100 yard repeats, and I could tell how well I was doing by the size of the bubbles that Mark Spitz was kicking in front of me.

If they were smaller, I was farther back.

If they were bigger, I'd had a good one.

That was my relative, you know, that's how far behind him I was.

So I turned over after 20 of those and swam 10 backstroke.

And now on the other lane beside me was the high school national champion backstroke.

Backstroker.

So I just swam 20 with Mark, who was number one in the nation high school in freestyle.

Now I'm swinging against the number one backstroke.

And I did 10 against him, and similarly, I'm in his bubbles.

He's he's a couple body lengths in front of me every repeat.

And on the 10th one.

He's just waiting to say something, and I finish, I'm just breathing like I'm trying to catch my breath.

You know, and he goes, Fred, you have the ugliest backstroke I've ever seen.

You're bobbing and weaving and hitting the lane lines, and oh.

I clenched my fist with anger, took a big breath and went underwater and blew out all my air and shook my hand, came back up and looked him straight in the eye and put my arms over the lane line and said, Mitch, you have the prettiest backstroke I've ever seen.

Now, what do I have to do to look like you?

So rather than hit him, I I uh schooled him.

And he goes, Oh, my coach sewed me with a tennis ball, but get out of the pool, I'll show you something with a towel.

We stood on the side of the pool, we had a five minute break.

We had another ten to do.

You know, we we had five minute breaks between each set of tens.

So I throw the towel at the pool deck and it lands six feet away from my feet.

And I was basically Swimming with a straight arm, and he wanted me to rotate my shoulders and put one shoulder over my chin while the other one was way down behind my back and rotate my shoulder so that my elbow came behind my back and my wrist would hit my hip.

And then I would do it on the other arm.

Well, it took me a few tries before I could throw it in because I couldn't believe that I had to bend my elbow body so much to make that stroke to get it to throw straight.

And I said, This is a lot of turning.

He goes, Yeah, do it and just maximize it.

Within a few minutes, I could throw the towel at the pool deck on either side of me.

We jumped in and started swimming the last ten.

And I beat him on the first one, and he didn't say anything.

On the third time I beat him, he renamed my mother and said, I can't believe I gave you this stroke.

You're just trying hard.

I said, Mitch, yeah, this stroke is easy.

This is really good.

I'm not trying that hard.

And he got angry and he raced.

And I'm now swimming five seconds faster on my repeats than I was the 10 before.

I beat him 10 in a row, and he he wanted to race on the last one, so I raced him on the last one from a push start.

And I swam my best time of my life on the 40th repeat.

And coach is looking at us, going, Oh my, Fred, I'm gonna put you in the dual meet against Mitch this weekend to see what's up.

You don't have to swim freestyle anymore.

So that weekend I swam with Mitch and beat him again and set the national high school record.

I swam uh now I had just swam three and a half seconds faster than I swam in Hawaii.

So I was now the number one backstroker in high school.

And the coach says, Well, I was gonna take Mark to the Nationals, Mark Spitz, and I better take you because something might happen.

I said, What's the Nationals?

Yes.

Where is it?

It's in Dallas, Texas.

Okay.

Like, do I have to do anything?

SPEAKER_03: Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: Just show up at the bus and we'll get you there.

Yeah.

So yeah, so I can't.

Would you like me to continue what happened?

Because it's an interesting story.

I of Oh, absolutely.

Mark was pretty excited that I had improved so much.

And he and his dad, his parents invited me over for dinner that weekend, the weekend after I had broken the high school record.

And I listened to Mark talk to his dad about winning six events.

His dad was saying, well, if you swim the 200 fly and the 100 free, that would be a good one on one day, but you don't want to swim the 400 free and the 200 IM on one day.

That's too much.

You know, and you could win the 100 free and 100 fly and the 100 I the 200 IM and the 400 free and the 200 free.

And he I was just like amazing.

They were talking about winning.

And this is against everybody.

And I'm I said, oh my God, this is what I came over for.

I my goals have been met.

I'm sitting here with Mark Spitz and his dad, and they're talking about winning all these events.

I was wondering what my friends back in Hawaii would have been thinking if they were a fly in the wall in this conversation.

And I was just kind of sitting there after an hour, Mr.

Spitz looks at me and says, Fred, well, you're going too.

What are you swimming and how are you going to do?

I was kind of shocked that he was even interested after listening to the six events.

Mark could only enter three.

That's why they were discussing it.

So they figured out ways three.

And I said, Well, Mr.

Spitz, I'm swimming 100 back.

It's the only event I qualify in.

And maybe if I could swim a half a second faster, I could get a third place.

Well, what do you mean?

Yeah.

What does that mean?

I don't understand.

You'll say, I swim, I I went in more detail.

Maybe I could get a third place.

I just don't get you, Fred.

You're not making any sense.

What are you saying?

And I went further into detail and I moved my time six cents of a second faster and explained.

Last week I was three and a half seconds slower, and I just ran three and a half seconds faster and qualified to go to the national.

And I think if I can go half a second faster, maybe I could get a third place.

SPEAKER_01: Okay.

SPEAKER_00: Because at that point I was ranked ninth in the nation.

He looks across the table at me and he says, Fred.

He starts to raise his voice.

He says, Fred, there is only one person in the pool everyone's gonna remember.

And he points his finger right between my eyes across the table.

And he says, Second through six are all losers.

And he slams his hand fist on the table.

He says, Don't you ever forget that?

He screamed at me.

And I'm going, Oh my god.

I kind of slumped down in my chair.

I thought I'd I I I felt embarrassed because I was talking about getting a third place.

You know, I I don't like to talk about my futures or brag about what I'm gonna do because that doesn't make any difference.

You can, you know, you can sit there and talk about everything you're gonna do, but my God, I was I was kind of shell-shocked.

And I don't know, PTSD or something.

I really walked around for a few days just thinking about that.

I always thought of myself as a B minus student.

If I if I could pull in in there and skate, I could I could I could do this, I could go to a better college or whatever.

And I think it spilled over into my swimming.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so so what happened?

SPEAKER_00: What happened?

I I three nights later I had my first swimming dream ever.

Okay.

I dreamt that I won the nationals.

It was plain as day.

I was I won the nationals.

I had never, ever dreamt of swimming, but I think he just put something into my head and spun it around.

You know, first I had this stroke tip from Mitch Ivey, and this now I'm getting a mental earthquake from Mark's dad.

And now, mind you, my dad has never seen me swim at this point.

SPEAKER_02: Oh wow.

SPEAKER_00: I had a dream that I won the hundred back.

I woke up, I I remember writing a letter home, and my mom and dad are going to the nationals next week, and I just had a dream that I won it.

Can you believe that?

I I couldn't believe it.

Well, we went down the nationals.

I swam a second and a half faster again, and won, beat everybody that had just finished their NC2A championships and open and everything.

So all of a sudden, now I'm the national champion.

First, I was a high school champion two weeks ago, and now I'm the national champion.

So the coach was right.

If you go over there and swim, you might go to a better college because I think I got 20 or 25 letters of opportunity to go get a scholarship.

Wow.

But after that swim, a writer, a sports illustrator was up, he asked me to come interview, and he was kind of amazed that I came from a pool in the ocean of raft.

He says, Well, do you want to call somebody and let them know?

I said, Sure, let me call.

I'll call my parents.

Yes.

So I dialed my folks back in Hawaii.

My dad answers, Dad, guess what?

What's that, son?

I just won the nationals.

He goes, is that a high school meet?

I go, no, it's everybody in the nation.

I just beat the NC2A champion and all the high schoolers, and I'm number one in the nation now.

Isn't it great?

He goes, I don't know what's great about it.

Well then, I'm not sure, but people are slapping me on the back and telling me it's great, that what I just accomplished.

And that's all I'm saying.

He goes, Well, it's over now, isn't it?

Yeah, Dad, it's over.

And he says, Well, I just want to let you know all that, but I'm real proud of what you've done here.

So congratulations.

But see, our family was from humility and aloha.

We never boasted.

We never, we never had a podium for someone who wanted to talk about their greatness.

What would happen is our family would, you know, start the jokes.

Oh, you're the big swimmer.

If I talked about one time I came home and said that I had won an NC2A championship, and my brother goes, Oh, you're the big swimmer now, huh?

I shut up.

Two weeks later, when ABC Wide World Sports was played in Hawaii because they had to send the tapes to play for our television.

My dad saw me swim for the first time when I won the national.

So the book that I ended up writing, Racing with Aloha, was a lot about these stories.

And now I'm 17 and I'm a national championship champion, and I'm going, Dad Stanford wants to give me a scholarship, and there's a two-page form that you have to fill out.

It's a financial statement.

My dad says, What do you mean?

They want to know what I make and what I have and what I'm doing.

I said, I guess it's just a standard two-page form, sign at the bottom, and we'll get the scholarship.

He dad, of course, dad goes.

He says, Well, son, you know, you just go to Stanford and let me pay for it.

Let that scholarship go to someone who needs it, because it's none of their damn business what I have and what I make, and I'm not going to put it on a piece of paper for he was happy to spend the money.

And so I ended up going to Stanford, which was way beyond my dreams.

So I continued swimming at Stanford and always thought about writing a book at 17.

But uh, I graduated at 21 from Stanford and and and I won a few NC2A championships and swimming, did a lot of that.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: After that, I I thought, oh my goodness, I just want to get on with my life, you know.

I remember leaving 10 days before graduation ceremony because I had finished all my my finals and everything was done.

I had to wait, go wear a cap.

I wasn't gonna wear a cap and gown and spend another 10 days.

I wanted to come home and go surfing in mountains.

Yes.

So I did that.

Wow.

So that was my swimming, and it was the flash pan performance of you couldn't even imagine how shocked I was, you know, come from nowhere.

One of my friends that was from Hawaii had been training with me in the summer before my senior year, and he had gone back to Punahou and Oahu to be the class president or something.

And he came to the nationals and he knew where I was at three months before.

SPEAKER_02: Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00: And he he ran down the side of the pool when I won.

And he must have said, I can't believe this.

I he he said it like four or five times in a row.

I can't believe this.

I can't believe this.

I can't believe I can't believe this.

You just won.

What the blank.

Unbelievable.

So I know it's crazy, isn't it?

SPEAKER_04: That that I mean that that really is amazing.

And and I mean, what a like awesome story of for kind of anybody, of coming from, you know, this, you know, virtually nothing in terms of of you know high-tech nice swimming pools and stuff.

I mean, a makeshift pool in the ocean to to becoming this champion swimmer.

I mean, talk about every like sports hero like dream story come true.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and you know, I had once read in a um reader's digest story about some guy back when I was in grade school who went down the pool and swam a record in the pool, you know, and that actually happened to me too, before I swam in my first race against Mitch Ivy that weekend.

I swam the same time in the pool by myself with the coach.

You know, you carry on these visualizations from youth of something that moved you, and you try to replicate, I guess, what happened.

So, anyway, my theory at this point was that okay, if you wanted greatness, you had to find where the eagles were nesting and step into their nest and see what happens.

Just be patient because you're not gonna be able to fly like an eagle.

You just have to learn how to grow feathers over time, and once you're ready to fly, you'll have been coached or schooled by the best.

Yeah, so that's essentially what I was doing.

I was just gonna go find the eagle's nest, Santa Clara Swim Club, hang out with them.

I didn't know it would be a swimmer that showed me the stroke, and I didn't know it would be Mark Spitz's dad.

I thought I was going to train and beat Mark Spitz in Freestyle.

So the energy didn't quite flow like I had anticipated it, but you just don't know where your opportunity is coming from.

And I always think that you got to stay out of judgment and go to curiosity.

And a classic example of that was how I responded to Mitch Ivey when he was insulting me about my stroke.

SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00: I had to unclench my fist, scream, breathe out, breathe all my water out, and come back and put a big old smile on and ask, tell him he had the prettiest stroke, and what do I have to do?

You know, what do I have to do?

unknown: Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: Every time there's adversity in your life, there's opportunity sitting on the bench watching.

And all you have to do is work through the adversity without judgment.

SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.

And and I mean, and honestly, I mean, you you bring up a really good point because if you really think about it, that one decision you had played such a pivotal role in in your future, and the fact that if you had not taken the time to take a breath, compose yourself, and come back at him with the response you did, everything could have been completely different.

Right.

He wouldn't have taken the time to to teach you and get you to to swim differently, therefore completely changing the trajectory of your life.

SPEAKER_00: It is, and and so many people have these opportunities out there where they can change their life, but they're immersed in their ego and judgment to defend and not accept the constructive criticism.

Accept it and ask for more.

Because it's not in defending it and being right about a beautiful stroke and you're gonna not listen to anybody.

Well, no, turn that around.

So I've followed the Eagles pretty much all my life.

I came back and I wanted to go surfing around the world because my friends were surfing down in Indonesia and they found some surf spots on Bali and Grajagon, which was in G Land, they call it now.

It's one of the most magnificent surf spots on the south tip of Java, Indonesia.

And I'm sitting around with my friends reading a letter about the best surf he's ever surfed, and blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I said, Boy, I want to go there.

And I was, I had taken a job of construction, and one day I was working, and a realtor went in and sold a unit down below me, and he was walking by, and I just said, How much was that one worth?

I could tell he had sold it.

He said,$1,800.

Quickly, he knew his commissions, and I was thinking, oh my goodness,$1,800.

Let me divide$5 and 15 cents.

Now, mind you, I was sitting on top of a three-story block wall with rebars sticking out.

I was standing on the on the wall, three stories up without any safety lines, and there's this big guy holding up a cement post coming from the cement truck, and it was shooting cement out, and I had to hold on to the rebars and hold on to this tube of cement going into all the holes.

And I wasn't afraid.

I I could surf, you know, I could stand on the wall.

But I was sitting there and I seized an opportunity right at that point, you know, by asking him.

And that afternoon, when it was Friday afternoon, I went down to a real estate office and said, Oh my god, this is ridiculous.

How can I get into real estate?

I want to work 15 minutes for $1,800.

I couldn't even divide$5 and$15 into$1,800 to figure out.

It was too big of a number to figure out how many hours I'd have to work to get that much money.

SPEAKER_03: Yes.

SPEAKER_00: They said there's a real estate class tomorrow.

It's the second of eight or ten classes, and just go in there and tell them you want to get in, you want to pay for the class, and you'll catch up.

I showed up there the next morning.

I'd washed all the cement off my arms and legs and face and showed up for my real estate class.

Six months later, I sold my first house.

And two months after that, I was down in Indonesia surfing with my friends and beautiful waves.

So my dad says, Oh, you just started your career and you're getting on a roll and leaving.

I said, No, Dad, I I accomplished my goal and I'm I'm taking a vacation for two months, surfing with my friends.

And we got some of the best surf in the world on that trip.

SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.

That's so awesome.

Now, now I'm super excited though, talking about surfing and stuff, because at some point, and I have no idea the timeline as far as like when you when you came back to Maui, you know, after college and all that, and then you know, starting this real estate and then going on the surfing trip, you really got into I I guess I guess literally which is a pioneer of of windsurfing.

SPEAKER_00: So we did these surf adventures down in Bali and Java, and I surfed with some of the greatest, and I had I had some pretty amazing experiences down there, which are in the book.

But we came back to Maui and Yes.

Of course, now mind you, I had my sister had a shop in Maui, and she was telling me all about how Puka Shells were selling so well.

And one day I paddled down the coast with some friends on our surfboards to look for one of their surfboards, and I came into a beach that was just mounds of puka shells and debris all over the place.

So I ended up bringing back 40 pounds of Puka Shells from Bali in 1974 and started stringing Puka Shells while I was on open house at real estate.

So I survived because I had spent all my commissions and I was broke again.

But the Puka Shells, I could sell them for$30 a strand, and I had 40 pounds of them.

So I probably made another$2,000 and felt pretty good about that.

Um and real estate charged on.

That was I got licensed in 73, and here it is 21, and I'm still licensed.

Oh wow, that's awesome.

Yeah.

But what transpired was in around 1980, 79, 80, remember when Interest Carter was in charge of the presidency and they moved interest rates from 9 to 9.

SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00: So imagine now you can get a mortgage at 2.75%.

In 1980, you could get a mortgage at 19%.

Now imagine how your business crashes.

I had five uh places that I had bought in the 80s or in the 70s and now it's 1981.

I realized that I couldn't afford to make the payments on $8,000 a month in 1980.

So I discounted all my properties 20% and offered the remainder of my equity as a 6% commission to the outside broker, which was unheard of.

But I was out in two weeks.

Yes.

So now I was free.

I got had this worry off my shoulders, you know, if they didn't have the obligation.

And it made up a saying that the agony of the obligation is greater than the ecstasy of the equity.

You know, when you're upside down, you really feel that a lot more than when you're right side up and things are good.

We deal with stress a lot differently.

Two weeks after that, I'm at a party with my friends, and I had met the I had met the inventor of windsurfing son Matt Schweitzer and was sailing with him and Mike Waltz, who I'd met on the beach in Kanapalli where I was living.

But I ran into Mike and I had another friend on the island, Bell King, and I said, Hey, why don't we open a windsurfing shop?

My brother had had passed away in a traffic accident at around the same time.

And I was living in the same house, and we could do a commercial property in there.

So I kind of questioned myself and said, Well, what would brother Jim want me to do?

He'd want me to go out and catch some more waves, make my life more exciting, you know, of course because I was feeling pain from losing him.

Basically, we started sailboard snowy, and I had a little bit of cash and a lot of spunk.

And I said, Okay, this shop is gonna either make me a great entrepreneur or I'm gonna learn how to windsurf better and figure out how to get sponsored.

And so that was my goal, and figured teaming up with a national champion and um another friend would do it.

So we had hired someone to Jimmy Lewis to make our sailboards because we realized that the future of the sport was making custom equipment because we started with plastics, plastics delivered from Windsurfing International, and we ended up within a month or two designing our own boards.

One day I came home and I had five surfboards, and I realized all my surfboards were gone.

And my partner, I went to the beach, my partner was out riding my surfboards, which were all small custom boards for surfing.

And I said, Oh my god, this is great.

I ended up riding all my surfboards with a sail on it, too.

But they weren't built very well to stand the jumping and the stress of windsurfing.

So of course that's when we started building boards and started a contest and first Kokeepa wave riding contest.

We did slalom contests, and things were really fun then because photographers were moving to Maui to get into this sport and and following all of us along the shoreline because riding waves and sailing was a lot more fun than flat water on a lake on the mainland or in Europe.

One day this guy from France came and bought a board from us and broke a world speed record, and we saw a picture of it, so we put an ad out in Windsurf magazine that we had built the fastest board in the world.

SPEAKER_04: Okay.

SPEAKER_00: Without any permission.

We were cowboys, and he comes walking into the shop one day while I'm there.

His name's Pascal Maka.

He had broken the world speed record.

I just thought that was great.

He says, Fred, you gotta pay me for that advertisement.

I said, Oh, Pascal, we don't have any money.

We're just on a shoestring budget, you know, we're having fun.

But maybe I can get you a discount on the board.

That's the best I can do.

And he kind of he wasn't real happy with that, but he took me out and I said, Well, don't worry about it.

Yeah, Pascal.

I'll just come to Weymouth and beat you next year and take your world record.

What do you think about that?

And he goes, Ha ha ha ha ha, you're funny, friend.

That's all I needed.

I started sailing down the coast at full speed on our shoreline.

And we have some of the best winds in the world, they parallel the coast.

It means that we can basically reach all the way down the coast at full speed, and then I would wrap up my stuff and get out to the highway and hitchhike back up with all my equipment, and then re put it together at the furthest up wind, sail down again and do it maybe several times a day.

So for the next year, I was doing this.

We were also uh involved in some new equipment.

I had built speed boards with the shaper, and I find myself in Brest, France, the next year at a contest with 315 speed sailors all trying to you know break a world record.

But I wasn't familiar with their water, but they never had any really good wind.

It maybe blew 15 or 18 knots, but my equipment wouldn't start going until 25 knots.

I couldn't, I couldn't get my board up and planing until there was a lot of wind because I had small sales, I had tiny equipment.

So I got 315th in my first speed contest in Europe.

And the next week was I was going to see Pascal Baca in Weymouth.

And I so I went to Weymouth to go to that contest.

That was where the record was broken the previous year, where Pascal had broken it.

And so all of a sudden they had gargantua winds, and I broke a world speed record on my equipment.

Oh wow.

And beat everybody, beat Pascal and reassuring.

SPEAKER_04: So so the winds that day were stronger than they normally were?

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

I mean, it was probably blowing 35 to 45.

SPEAKER_04: So it really was like this ideal scenario then for the type of board in sale that you had designed that was that's awesome.

SPEAKER_00: I was only the only thing I was going for was break Pascal's records.

And it happened.

And I had also been working with the Maui sales and Neil Pride, and they had a wing mass built.

It was, you know, on these boats that are racing now with the hydrofoils.

If you look at their mass, they're all wing mass, they're all carbon fiber with heart shells shaped, and they rotate and do everything.

Well, I had the first one of those on my sailboard.

I had a it was teardrop shaped and it was pre-pregged carbon fiber molded around some foam and and heated in an oven with a track on the back that I could run a sail up in the track.

Typically, our windsurfing was a cylindrical pole that you had a sleeve that went over it.

So this was this was a track on the back of this mask.

Yeah.

And it was super badass and fast.

And I broke a world record.

And I'm going, well, my goodness, this is amazing.

What's next?

SPEAKER_04: I was gonna say, so so now we're we're at at record number two.

First was swimming, now speed sailing.

That's awesome.

SPEAKER_00: I had a little bit of sponsorship to get there.

I was paid my expenses with the Neo Pride sales, and you know, I knew I had to do something else.

I was hoping that they would sponsor me.

When I came back to Maui, we were back in the shop again, and this was in October 1983 in Weymouth, inland.

I had broken the record.

Now it's February 84, and I'm driving down Hanna Highway, if anyone knows where that is, on the way to Paia, and my friend Arnaud de Roney.

He's got a scarf around his neck, he's driving a convertible.

And if anybody knows Arnaud de Roney, he is quite a quite a charismatic character from France.

He was called himself the Baron.

Okay.

I don't know if he ever was, but he was like me.

He wanted to sail across all the straits around the world.

And he had sailed the Bering Strait from Alaska to Russia, and he had sailed several others.

He sailed from Tahiti west to an island 1200 miles away called Ahi.

After 11 days, he landed on that.

And he had he was kind of a sophisticated, he had solar panels built into his board where he could convert seawater into freshwater, and he had a kite, he had pontoons that he could pump up and be able to sleep on the board.

Wow, that's insane.

Yeah, so we were doing a lot of sailing together, and he he actually took the pictures of me breaking the world record, and then it was from just before that time, and he had put her on a bunch of magazines because he was kind of a press photographer too.

SPEAKER_03: Yes.

SPEAKER_00: But he loved the adventure, and he had a book deal to sail all the straits of the world, and he was lost at sea sailing from Taiwan to China.

It blew 90 knots that day, and they never found him.

So it was a sad one.

But that was a few years later.

SPEAKER_03: Yes.

SPEAKER_00: I ran into him on the way down to H'ipa, and I had been sailing it for the last five days, and Arno stops me on the side of the highway, and he says, The biggest waves in the world are coming to Hokipa today, and I have a helicopter coming at noon.

You show up at noon, and it's nine o'clock in the morning, and I'm going, Yeah, I know, I know.

Big waves.

He says, Yes, you'll be famous from these big waves.

Just come at noon because I'll have the helicopter going, and there's a few other sailors coming.

I said, Well, I don't want to come at noon, it's too early.

I'm gonna come at 3 o'clock, 3:30, because I'm gonna be on the biggest wave in the world at 4:30.

He goes, No, I'm spending all this money.

You gotta come at noon and get the photography, and we'll get the pictures, and it'll help your career.

I go, yeah, but I've been sailing the last five days.

I know the tide changes.

Every day it moves forward an hour when the biggest waves are coming.

And it's been really big, it's been 20 feet, but now maybe it's 30 or 35 foot faces, maybe double that in in the face size, you know, Hawaiian size.

We were going.

But anyway, I'll be there at 3 o'clock.

It's no big deal.

I don't need any photography.

And he goes, Oh, he was so incensed.

He drives off.

I show up at 3 o'clock, and there's a helicopter out there.

There's three or four other sailors, and I rig up and I jump on my board to get out, and I'm getting bashed by the waves because I have to sail through breaking water, breaking waves.

And what you need is a little bit of a lull.

So after swimming back to shore maybe three times and getting pummeled by these waves, I had a little break in the waves, and I managed to kind of inch through.

I could not plane my equipment.

You know, when you're sailing, once you get your speed, you'll skim on the water.

You're not not underwater.

But I had to push out underwater, you know, through these waves.

And I remember seeing some that were that were in my face, feathering a hundred yards in front of me.

And oh my god, this is the biggest thing I've ever seen.

I don't know whether that lip's gonna hit me, land on me.

SPEAKER_03: Yes.

SPEAKER_00: And I actually counted to five going up this wave.

One, two, three, four, five.

And then I would fall off the back of it, boom, and do another one right behind it.

Oh, all of a sudden I got out.

Now it's been about 40 minutes trying to get out, and I get outside, and now I can do a little bit more planing because I'm not in such turbulent water on the inside, and I could plane, but the helicopter's gone, all the sailors are gone.

You couldn't see the sailors from the beach because the waves were too big, they were just gone.

You just see the helicopter hovering over it.

Head once in a while you'd see a sail come up on a wave, but now I'm out there, everybody's gone.

And I said, Well, this is it.

And it was kind of a surreal experience of having these beautiful big waves coming in sets where I would have to turn in front of them and start sailing and then feel the surge of wind.

Because when there's waves, waves will increase the speed of the wind around the waves, and that's what I was using to get planing.

I sailed in and out, and I would ride a kind of just ride a big wave until it was just about to break, and then I would turn off and go back out because it wasn't big enough.

And around 4:30, I realized that there was a really big one out there, and I'm going, Oh my god, this is it.

It's probably standing 10 or 15 feet above all the other waves in the set.

I said, This is what I've been waiting for.

SPEAKER_03: Yes.

SPEAKER_00: And I'm a mile and a half outside.

I turn around about a half a mile in front of it to get going.

And these waves are running really fast.

And if you don't have your speed up, they'll catch you.

So it caught me, and then I rode down that wave, and that wave is now on the picture of my book on the front cover.

But that wave, I ran down in front of it, and the wave in front was so big that it blocked all the wind.

When I was out on the flat in front, I was trying to escape it.

But now I'm finding myself going backwards up the face because I've lost all my wind and I'm opening and closing my sail and wondering where my wind is.

And all of a sudden the wave breaks right on my tail block, and white water goes over the top of me and everything, and I start to let go of my sail thinking that I'm I'm sunk.

It is it, I've lost it.

But it didn't throw me off the board, so I can remember just climbing my fingers back onto my boom that I was holding on to and and pulling on it.

And I felt a little puff of wind and they popped out of the white water and came out.

And I sailed right back up to the beach, and the wash of the wave was so big that the wave went all the way up Hokipa beach, and I landed right at the edge of a small cliff where everyone parks.

Like I had just sailed to the top of the beach, which is unheard of because there was so much wash.

And I'm I get out and nobody's around, it's just quiet.

SPEAKER_03: Yes.

SPEAKER_00: All of a sudden I look up and I see this guy running down from the top corner with a camera banging against his chest, screaming at me, and he's and it's Arnaud, my friend, that had been up in the helicopter.

Apparently, he understood what I was gonna do, and he got off the helicopter on the point and was sitting there waiting for me.

And he he says, I just shot a roll of film of the biggest wave in the world, and you were on it.

You're gonna be so famous from this.

This is so much bigger than your world record, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And he says, I can't believe it.

Of course, he was a marketer, so he went and guaranteed all the magazines, eight exclusive pictures, and he had a roll of 20.

So he would just move the pictures around and give them a sequence that was a unique eight, although they were matched, you know, in other photos.

So, oh yeah, we got this one, this one, this one.

Anyway, so that picture got in a centerfold of Life magazine the next month, and it went on probably 10 or 15 covers of shots or centerfolds of of water magazines.

And it is not the biggest wave in the world, but we just called it the biggest wave in the world because that's what all knows that it was.

And now it's remember, I just set the world record in in October 83.

Now it's February 84, four months later, and I get a call from my sailmaker, and he goes, Okay, this is the biggest one-two punch into the sport we've ever seen.

We're gonna sponsor you, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So I didn't didn't work real estate again until 1990 when I retired from windsurfing.

I got travel around the world surfing and windsurfing and get paid for it, and actually ended up cash flowing.

So my dreams were big, and fortunately things worked out.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, no, man, that's so awesome.

And so so now we we we've we've been alluding to it as we've been talking through our conversation about your book.

And so tell everyone what is the name of your book?

SPEAKER_00: We had a challenging time coming up with a title, you know.

I thought blown away, I thought about, you know, I thought about a lot of crazy names, but then we thought about racing at the speed of Aloha.

What were we doing out here?

Well, we were always sharing Aloha, you know.

From my swimming, I came from humble beginnings, and our family was always pretty humble about what our accomplishments were.

And we were always sharing what we knew in the sport.

I passed a lot of stroke tips on to people when I was swimming, when I was windsurfing, we shared boards.

I wrote in a couple contests, like for instance, there's another waterman, Laird Hamilton, who wrote the forward for me in the book.

He's famous for all of his health food products now, but he was a great waterman as well.

And I talked him into moving from Kauai over and hanging with us on Maui because I said all the photographers are in Maui.

And if you want to get sponsored in the sport, you got to come to where the photographers are at Hokipa.

Anyway, I talked my sponsor into getting a partial sponsorship for Laird to get over to a French contest.

And we were at the contest, and I was probably in third or fourth place, and the wind died, and we're sitting around, and all of a sudden the wind comes up, and it looks like it's gonna do it now.

And whoever runs the course is gonna do really well.

Oh wow.

So I hand my equipment to Laird and I said, Laird, take my equipment and go run it so you can appease the sponsor because the sponsor said he would pay for Laird's expenses if he got in the top three, and he was he was in about eighth place or something.

So I gave him my equipment, he ran through the course and wins the contest.

unknown: Okay.

SPEAKER_00: I did it again in Australia.

I lent uh Anders Bring doll my board while we were sailing in the contest because I had to use a bigger one.

I was gonna go break a world record with a bigger sail.

So I gave the smaller board to my uh associate there, he was on the same team at Neil Pride, and and he wins the contest.

Well, I broke a world record on a different size of equipment.

That was really funny because I had been interviewed by the press down there, and they said, Well, give us a call if something's gonna happen.

If you're gonna break a world record, let us know.

SPEAKER_03: Okay.

SPEAKER_00: I was uh up eating a meat pie in Fremantle, Australia, right?

We were up above the contest.

And we could we called the the wind that came in at around noon to one o'clock the doctor, and we could see that the doctor coming in to the contest.

So I called the press and I just said, Hey, we're gonna go for the record on a larger sale today.

If you get there in an hour, you might be able to take a picture of this.

Well, we'll be ready.

Just look for the biggest sale.

And I we drive down the contest.

I hadn't under the board to to to use the smaller board, and I'm on the bigger board now.

And right about I'm trying to get my equipment water started, and I hear this woof, woof, woof, woof, and it's a helicopter and pulls up to the contest.

I water start and sail right through the the course and break a world record, and the helicopter followed me down the course, and it was the newscaster.

That night they had my video all across Australia on the national news breaking a world record.

Oh wow.

And we were just giggling because what were the chances that they would pull up at the right time?

SPEAKER_04: Exactly.

SPEAKER_00: But you put it out there, you know, you don't know what's going to happen in your life.

You you just make do with what you're dealing with.

I had an opportunity to make a call to someone that could have helped my career, and it worked out.

I listened to someone giving me a stroke tip.

So what do you call your book?

I wanted to write my book at 17, and I'm now 71.

So time hasn't, it's still the same numbers.

It's just, I'm a little dyslexic, 717.

The time is good.

Let's just do it now.

And we really had a lot of aloha.

And we thought, well, we could name the book Racing at the Speed of Aloha.

And then I said, no, I just like racing with Aloha.

I wrote the book from a hospital bed because I stepped off a curb and twisted my ankle and I tried to recover and I ended up landing on my left leg, literally physically landing on it.

And I tore all three hamstrings off my pelvic bone.

And that was about 20 months ago.

So during COVID, I was in a hospital bed in my house and with a brace on, and I had reattach all three hamstrings onto my pelvic bone, and we were putting the book together.

So I I went from a hospital bed to a wheelchair to a walker to crutches to cane.

And I'm walking okay now.

I have a little limp.

I have a sciatic nerve problem, but it never slowed me down.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: I still felt the thrill of what I was doing, you know.

And if you got the stoke, it you don't have to worry about setbacks.

SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00: Everybody's got adversity.

Kevin, I admire you here.

You are a podcaster, and you can't see.

SPEAKER_04: Exactly.

Exactly.

And and it is.

It's you know, is there's there's a lot of things in this life that happen to us that can stop us.

And it's easy to let it stop you.

But you've got to find that part in your life that drive to to just keep going and realize that that life isn't over, you know.

It could be just beginning.

Exactly.

Exactly.

It we we never know.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I have no regrets, I have no anticipations, you know.

If you just set yourself up to whatever happens to go to next without anticipations, you know, you're just gonna put your best out there.

That's all you're supposed to be doing.

SPEAKER_02: Exactly.

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00: Whether you win, lose, draw.

It doesn't matter.

You just do the best you can do.

So now we're just having fun, you know, Kevin.

It's it's really fun.

I don't have a single picture inside my book.

And with all these sports, everyone's going, Well, did you put a lot of pictures in your book?

You gotta watch social media if you want to see pictures.

We were on Facebook and Instagram with a lot of pictures, but I thought we could advertise the pictures and then tell the story.

And the story is about how I felt and how we handled.

And I didn't want to write a picture book story and you hold on your coffee table and admire.

I I wanted to write a story that moved people, got them off their duff, made them challenge themselves, get going.

And especially during COVID, there was so much dark web political BS that was just mortifying for people.

So I thought, wow, this just has to be racing with Aloha because that's what I was about.

And I treated people really fairly, didn't take any prisoners.

SPEAKER_03: Yes.

SPEAKER_00: You know, I wrote a book that's clean because I thought I wanted to be that ten-year-old boy sitting in the class reading that reader's digest about swimming the fastest time he'd ever swam, and it was a record in the pool with by himself with the just the coach.

I I wanted to write a book that made people change how they feel.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, and I and I admired that.

SPEAKER_00: If I can get into your feelings, I've accomplished something.

If I can tell you how great I am, I've not accomplished the thing.

SPEAKER_03: Yes.

SPEAKER_00: If I can share feelings, that's what we want to do in life.

We share our feelings, and people get soaked from what you're feeling and what they're sensing.

Actually, I had I had a dozen or so of my friends.

I've got the book in Maui right now, but I I can't really give it out or get it to people because people have ordered it on Amazon.

We have a we have a website called racingwithaloha.com that we've expanded twice because so many people have been on it to check out the book.

It has a bunch of pictures.

My intention was to write a book that would hook you and want you to finish the book.

You know, it's not like it's gonna talk about conquests, it's gonna talk about those, but it's also gonna move you.

I actually had an old roommate call me and said, Fred, I don't I don't read very much, but my God, I read your book and I could not put it down.

It's the first book I've ever really enjoyed.

I said, Well, that's great.

And I last week I had a friend call me and said, he was on page 15.

He says, Fred, I'm in tears.

I I realized how my parents treated me and what that did to me, because you know, he came out the closet and great guy, and and his dad actually had his brother beat him up all the time.

So, you know, you get in these consequences of family and relationships.

And he said, and he called me back, he was crying, and he just said, just brought all this stuff up from your dad and Mark Spitz's dad and all these dad things.

I was just reviewing my dad.

After page 100, he called me up and he says, Okay, I've got it.

I got it.

I'm I'm moving through all of this, and I just want to tell you that the book has just moved me incredibly the right way.

Wow.

SPEAKER_04: And and that right there, I'm sure for you, is like that's why I wrote this book.

SPEAKER_00: That's that's my win.

I don't need the podium position with the medal.

In fact, you know, I tried out for the Olympics.

I was winning the hundred back with 20 meters to go in 1968 in Long Beach at the Olympic trials, and uh and the roof started spinning right in the middle of my race.

I I went into an atrial fib and flutter and barely finished, and I lost seven places in the last 20 meters.

You know, it's kind of like you're watching the Olympic, you know, it's just I just faded.

And I just said, Well, that's okay.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: What can we do today to make this better?

And I I talked to a friend into driving down.

There's a bodysurfing place called the Wedge nearby, uh, Newport Harbor, and I went down with my speedos and I didn't have fins, but I just dove into the water thinking I was gonna go bodysurf these waves, and they were tremendous.

And first wave lands right in front of me.

Well, I just after I dove in, and it actually threw me back up on the beach to where I stood up and had to walk back down to the water.

I never had that happen.

And I said, Well, that's I guess that's far for the course.

I just got thrown out of the pool, now I get thrown out of the ocean.

Went back in and rode some big fun body surfing waves without fins and made the most of my day that day.

I I'm not gonna wallow in my self-pity, and that's what I don't want people to do.

Look at what you can do, not at what you didn't do.

Just look at what you can do to change your life at any moment, you know, and take a new course.

So hopefully this book will inspire children to move forward through their life, you know, without regret.

We all often have so many things pressuring us to be successful or to win this or to be the best pianist or the best student, and it's a lot of peer pressure.

Well, if you just try to do the best you can be until it's not working anymore, then move on to something else you think you want to be the best in.

You know, just try to be the best at whatever you're doing.

And once it's you can't quite figure it out or get it done or it's not working, then move on to something else.

Reminds me of a story in the book.

I called my dad after the first two weeks of Stanford and I said, Dad, I think I want to come home.

He said, What do you mean?

Like quit?

I go, No, it's gonna take a break.

Dad, I just flunked my first math test, and my English teacher called only me to have a meeting after class because my English paper was so poorly written.

And I was I was trying my best.

I had my thesaurus out and I was putting in some big words, but no experience, you know.

I said, I'm trying hard.

He goes, Well, you'll have the rest of your life to decide to quit.

Why don't you just give it two weeks and call me back?

That was great.

You know, I think I was just looking for some compassion, someone to listen to my pity party, and dad was kind of hard on me, but not really.

He just said, Give it two weeks and call me back and see if things improve.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: That was all I needed.

I didn't have this burden on my shoulders of having flunked and been, you know, a poor paper, and all of this stuff was on my shoulders.

It it just alleviated it, and I just went back and I started studying more because I had some poor study habits.

Yeah, I overcame.

But you know, I went all the way down into my rabbit hole and self-pity and told dad I wanted to quit.

Thank God he said, give it two weeks and call me back.

And so I think the struggles I went through, people will be able to identify with and whatever in their own lives.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: I wanted to share the aloha, you know, and the books about racing and whatnot.

So racing with aloha just seemed appropriate.

And in the climate of the times, uh, we are uh you know searching for aloha in all parts of the world.

We have to be better people.

There's you know too much negativity out there.

SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.

Well, well, Fred, I just want to tell you that I've enjoyed our conversation today, but but even more so, man, I just want to tell you that the stories that you share, the wisdom, the the little pieces of of insight and gold.

Everything you talk about is so thought-provoking, and and I can only hope that that anyone listening to our podcast today, our conversation together, you know, is thinking the same thing.

And I I can say that I'm so hoping that that anyone anyone listening, you know, would definitely, you know, go to your website, visit your your website and and get a copy of your book.

SPEAKER_00: By the way, you know, if you've got some troubled kids or some people sitting with adversity, why don't you get my book and share it with them?

Share the aloha and how to handle.

You just can't imagine.

You remember I I had this have this meeting with this teacher on the paper that I wrote.

Well, I got a ghostwriter to help me write this book, and she did a great job and put it together in sequence, so it's pretty enticing when you read it.

So I'm excited to share it with anybody who wants to find the stoke in their life.

SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.

Well, well, man, awesome.

And Fred, man, from the stories of of growing up on Maui to the swimming champion, to the wind surfing, to to you know, real estate, to surfing in just your overall spirit.

I want to tell you that it has been an absolute pleasure getting to meet you.

And I really thank you so much for for being a guest on my podcast.

SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much, Kevin, and I admire you too.

I I think you've got a heart of gold and a wisdom of infinite expression.

You have an ability to see things well, even though you can't see.

And look at you, you're just uplifting, brilliant, and in the scope.

All of us just want to have a really fulfilling life.

So that's what we're talking about.

SPEAKER_04: That's right.

Awesome, man.

And you know, for for you listening to my conversation with another just incredible guest on the podcast.

As always, I hope that that today's conversation has provided you with something that can in some way benefit your life today, and hope that it can make your life tomorrow even better.

And that's the lowdown with Evan Love.

I hope today's episode inspired you, motivated you, and decided you to get out and enjoy life, no matter what obstacles that may be standing in the way.