HER BROTHER'S KEE PER
The bond between Tyler and Owen Wright has always been as thick as blood, and after Owen sustained a brain injury at Pipeline at the end of 2015, Tyler was initially unsure if she’d be able to leave his side to return to competition.
On December 8, 2015, Owen and Tyler Wright ate a late breakfast at Café Haleiwa. The door of the old Hawaiian diner squeaked on its hinges as Tyler walked in like she was stepping onto the set of a situation comedy. Her face was comically loaded and her eyes darted as if the single funniest thing in the history of mankind was going down somewhere in the room. Owen followed, filling the doorway like a spaghetti Western character, long and tall with a bushman’s hat and a pair of dusty Crocs. He sat down and explained he’d bought the Crocs in honor of their late Uncle Mark, who was famous for wearing them into the exclusive country club back home in Australia where he held a $90,000 membership. Owen had been wearing the unfashionable plastic shoes for months and described them as “100 percent contraceptive.”
Owen was coming off a “gap year without the gap.” He’d surfed the Tour, but competition was less the focus and more an interruption to his program of exotic surf trips and good times. He had chased eight swells before July, including two strikes to pumping Tahiti, spending his days getting blown out of cavernous tubes and living just as large once the sun went down. Yet somehow he was still in the world-title race, which would be decided in two days’ time at the Pipe Masters.
Meanwhile, Owen’s younger sister, Tyler, had finished her 2015 season on the women’s Tour rated fifth—a respectable result, but disappointing nonetheless for Tyler. She’d come close to winning world titles in the past, but admitted that she was mortified by the prospect, claiming to be “too young to deal with all the shit.”
The wonder siblings were both at interesting points in their lives. Though they were still so young—Owen 25 and Tyler just 21—they’d been hamster-wheeling on pro surfing for over a decade,
