SURFER's profile of Keala Kennelly ran in 2002, when she was 24. This version has been slightly edited and shortened.

My name is Keala Kennelly and I have a story that no man wants to hear. Because I am a woman in the world of professional surfing. I am supposed to be invisible. And yet I see and feel and love exactly the same things you assholes do. Probably more.

She has to. Because you guys have made it so damn hard for her to love anything. Especially herself. Think about that next time you’re looking down your insecure nose at her. Yeah, I know she doesn’t look and act like some piece doing a pole dance at a strip club. But she knows what it’s like to push herself over a roaring offshore ledge in Sumatra, and earn $25,000 for it. She’s won contests at Teahupoo. She’s ridden deep at Pipeline, just like you—better than you. She’s taken horrible wipeouts. Almost drowned a few times. She’s risked her life, surfing desperately for the money that no one else is ever going to give her. She’s earned her stay here on earth—all 24 years—the hard way. All alone. That’s why she knows what it’s like to win against the longest odds. Because that’s what she’s been doing out there. Trying to win. Trying to be something. Trying to rise up in a man’s world that doesn’t even want her. To rise up and love and laugh and dance through life a winner. Who could possibly hate someone, anyone, for wanting that?

DECEMBER 7, 2001: THE PHAZE CLUB, HONOLULU


There is no hornier crowd on earth than the one inside a Honolulu rave club on Friday at midnight. Sweat pours, reeking of 50 different colognes, onto the dance floor. A snakepit of wet, writhing figures, hands held high, trancing, jumping, silently screaming to chest-heaving beats that pound and climax and release and pound and climax and release and pound and climax and release.

That endless four-on-the-floor beat. The sound, as if God had lost his temper between your temples. Twentieth-century Wagner. Proof that sound waves break too.

Then there’s the smoke. Great drafts of hissing white dragon’s breath, like massive hits off some mammoth spliff, billow into this wet lung, obscuring, urging, transforming, suspending gravity.

Next come the lights, piercing laser beams of unnatural red, blue, yellow and green. Sweeping over, under and through the bacchanal, alternately dilating and constricting bloodshot pupils already swollen from the effects of booze, smoke, Ecstasy, estrogen, testosterone and hypoxia.

Now look at Keala Kennelly up there smiling. Why wouldn't she be? She’s responsible for the whole thing.

Squeezed into the DJ booth, rising throne-like above the dance floor, Keala and some guy called DS95 battle it out on the turntables. Headphones in place, bobbing maniacally, they reach into their Pandora's box of LP and set forth the demon beat. First Keala, then DS95, each one grooved-in and reacting to other's trip, laying it “down and out.” In this space and time, in this center of symbiotic energy that Keala calls “The Vortex,” she is at her absolute happiest. A conductor to an electronic symphony that can either reach for the heavens or pave the road to hell.

Bouncing next to me is Level Em, another freebooting DJ. He’s on in five minutes. His nervous energy is palpable. It hits me that here, in the DJ booth, men once again surround Keala, who is again doing something extraordinary in a male-dominated arena. Not just playing in the boys league, but actually hitting balls out of the park. I have to yell into Level Em's ear to be heard.

“What do you think of female DJ’s?”

“It’s like anything else. As long as they step up to the plate!”

If it was only that easy in surfing, I thought.

“So,” I bellow, “is Keala stepping up to the plate?”

“DJKK?” he yells back. “Are you kidding me? Look at the people!"

I look at them, all right. I look at the people connecting to something. For better or worse, connecting together. Connected by sound and light and pure fucking electricity.

Quest, Keala’s older brother, appears like a specter from out of the smoke and light and bounds into the booth. In tight-capped sleeves and perfectly coiffed hair, he is a beautiful young man. His sexuality is lithe, hungry and ambiguous.

As Keala’s shift comes to an end, brother and sister embrace deeply. Then Quest pulls her toward the dance floor. With a scream that sounds like an exorcism, Keala rips off her headphones and relinquishes her throne at the turntable. At the last instant, just as a green laser flashes across her face, she turns back to me and winks before vanishing into a six-foot ball of rolling smoke.

Keala Kennedy grew up in a spaceship. Or at least that’s what she thought. One of those geodesic domes that her hippie mom designed. A mom that embarrassed the hell out of her by sitting way up on top of the thing and meditating at all hours. Keala got teased a lot for that. She also got teased, and worse, for being a blond chick growing up on Kauai. It was no easy road, especially since she had to raise herself as a boy. Thank God for Andy and Bruce Irons. Like brothers, they were her only peer role models. So she dressed like them and talked like them and tried her best to surf like them; actually beat them both in amateur contests at Pine Trees. Not too many people can say that. So yeah, even though Keala was close to Brian, her dad, who taught her how to surf, she pretty much had to raise herself with no girls in her life.

Keala's mom split, right after Hurricane Iniki, in 1992. A Norfolk Pine karate-chopped the house, and the house was pretty much all Brian Kennelly had. He was gonna have to start over, so Keala’s mom, ever the free spirit, up and split. Keala came home from school one day and there was a letter for her on the bed. She doesn’t remember much from that note, except that it was pretty short.

She toughed it out. Keala, dad, and brothers Gavin and Quest. She wore surf trunks and t-shirts and stayed a boy, and stayed on the honor roll at school, enduring the hell that was Kapaa High on the East Side. Her first fight was with a boy. That opened the floodgate—but Keala never lost a fight. Meanwhile, as long as she maintained a 3.5 GPA she was allowed to surf as much as she liked.

So she did. Aside from surrogate brothers Bruce and Andy, most of the other boys hated her. They said she was “retarded” for surfing. A retard. They made fun of the way she walked. Made fun of her body. The way she dressed. Keala genuinely believed that something was wrong with her. And that’s probably why Sergio happened.

She grabbed her GED and was out of high school at 16. After a falling out with her dad, she took up with a guy named Sergio. He ended up being a psycho. She actually moved to Long Beach, California, to be with him. Keala didn’t know anything. He was the only guy who had ever showed any interest in her at all. She thought it was love. The guy turned out to be a gangster. She finally came up for air two-and-a-half years later and moved home again. Kauai never seemed so beautiful.

That’s when Keala started wishing on the first stars at night that someday she’d win the world championship. That’s when she hit the ground running on the WQS. And that’s when she met Roxanne.


I'm up at dawn. A deep, buttery scent reaches my nose. I sit up in bed, slowly coming to. I’m staying in the guestroom of Keala Kennedy's 16th-floor, two-bedroom apartment overlooking Oahu’s South Shore. The Phaze Club is still seeping out of my pores. I step over to the glass-louvered window and crank it open. Yep, it’s still there: the Pacific Ocean, cobalt-blue in the distance beyond a riot of Waikiki hotel buildings. It's quiet back here on the hill in Kaimuki. Just the lonely wind. Too high for the mourning doves or scratching palms but high enough to see the hospital where Keala was born.

I can hear Keala in the kitchen moving pots and pans around. A blender whirs to life.

I remember Keala telling me that she lived here because she was stuck between two worlds. At once a city mouse and a country mouse, Keala elected to move away from Kauai's “beautiful but career-crushing” isolation. She also deliberately avoided the North Shore to live here in Town, close the nightlife that she’s such an important part of.

“The North Shore?” Keala told me. “You can’t take a shit without someone wanting to know what it looks like.”

I stand there, breathing fresh air off the sea, taking stock of all that had happened in the days and nights I’d spent with Keala.

When I arrived at the Honolulu airport earlier in the week, she was there to pick me up in her funky little Toyota four-door. She had on jeans, a sparkly, sexy top, and a porkpie hat. She looked powerful and beautiful and shapely and comfortable. She hopped out of the car, slung a lei around my neck and kissed my cheek. We'd met before, but just briefly. Right then and there, however, we silently decided to be friends.

I remember first walking into her apartment complex. A tall, round building, cored like an apple. On the 16th floor, when you look down the inside of the thing, an optical illusion occurs, as co-centric circular lines seem to spiral down into the center of the earth. We both leaned over the railing together. Keala dropped a feather she had found in the parking lot. We watched it flit and float into the darkness below. When it disappeared, Keala looked at me. “It's one of the big reasons I moved in here—reminds me of the music.”

I remember driving out to Makaha when Keala had to do some stunt work for some goofy Hollywood movie. She told me the money was cool, but that she preferred the more immediate social glamour of music. “When you're spinning, you only get one take, and even then you’re responsible for every heartbeat in the house.”

She also told me she was a little miffed that she wasn’t invited to the Pipeline Masters. I said that if any woman were to be invited, chances are it would have to be the world champion.

“Layne?" Keala said. “Nah, she’s scared of places like that. That’s why I win at Teahupoo.” I reminded her that I was there when Layne dropped into some of the gnarliest lefts of the 2000 OP Pro Boat Trip Challenge in the Mentawai’s. “Yeah, well, when they finally invited me last year, so did I,” she countered, matter-of-factly. "And at least I won the thing," she added.

I remember sitting in Keala’s bathroom, watching her get ready for another DJ gig in town. She had me to check her make-up at every turn, the sparkly eye shadow especially. It's new to her, this make-up thing, and she trusted my opinion. For the moment, I was just one of the girls, hanging out.

In her bra and panties, Keala was dishing on all sorts of matters. She left at one point and came back with the underwear photo, the one that caused all the trouble at last year's SURFER Poll. Keala had her “Pussy Posse" with her that night and the drink and laughter and attitude were flowing. That’s how they all ended up at the official portrait station hiking up their skirt to expose their panties. Printed in bold on Keala's crotch were the words “BE YOURSELF.” The next day, Bruce and Andy both scolded her for it. Then Laird Hamilton called and told her to “knock that kinda shit off.”

Laird Hamilton? Bruce and Andy I understand, but Laird? What the hell business was that of his?

“Oh, Laird's my godfather. Didn’t you know?”

How on earth did Laird become her godfather, I asked. “Kauai,” she said, as if that explained everything.

I remember counting ten surfboards loaded into a rack by the front door.

I remember all the stuff on Keala's walls in the living room, and up above the dining room table. Mostly crudely-framed magazine cover photos of Keala herself. “I like 'em,” she whispered, almost to herself, as we looked at them one by one. “They remind me that I really am somebody. That I’m strong, and that I’m not retarded. Besides, no one else is gonna put them up.”

And that brought me to the picture of the mysterious Roxanne: the two of them in the back of a limousine, by the looks of it, each wearing a leopard-print bra, Keala waving a bottle of champagne in one hand, while the other drapes around the neck Roxanne, a New York raver, a real knockout with heavy, sensual lips, dark flashing eyes and a fountain of reddish-black hair. Roxanne. Yes, Roxanne. The woman no one really seems to know. The woman most dear to Keala, the woman she calls twice a day, the woman she visits in New York whenever possible. The one Keala gives credit to for “making me who I am." She doesn't talk about how they met. While staring at the picture, however, she nods and says, "Yeah, it took a woman to finally make a woman out of me.”

It was Roxanne who took Keala from the world of surf trunks and t-shirts and introduced her to fashion and nightlife and an uninhibited world where Keala was regarded as beautiful and accomplished. A world beyond the crushing misogyny of Kapaa High and all the assholes who gave her the stink eye in the lineup; beyond all the pros who ever muttered under their breath or uncomfortably shared a winner's podium with her. A world where Keala gains more strength than she spends. A world that orbits her surfing like a radiant moon, a place of bright lights and brighter music—and Roxanne, the brightest of all her friends. A place Keala calls home.

I turn away from the window, pull on a shirt and walk out to the kitchen table. Smiling, Keala serves breakfast, which looks like a spread from some food and wine magazine: fruit, warm rolls, mimosas and eggs benedict for two. I can only raise my eyebrows. Keala responds with a smile. "I used to cook for my brothers and my dad, after mom left."

I smile too, then laugh. Keala also laughs. And as I sit down to breakfast I think of all the wonderful things that people don't know about Keala Kennelly. And may never know. The stuff beyond the craziness and the contest results. Beyond the rumors and the assumptions. Beyond the prejudice. Beyond it all. Here before me is a woman. An accomplished woman, an independent woman; a real woman, whose courage and determination in the face of a lifetime's worth of challenges is beyond question.

How many of us have earned that much, I wonder.

Her name is Keala Kennelly and she knows exactly what you want to hear. But she claims that the day she publicly discusses her sexual preference will be the day you ask the same question of Kelly Slater. That the people who are curious about whom you sleep with can't handle knowing whom you sleep with. Hell, they can't even handle the people 

 sleep with. And that's all you're getting out of her. Because Keala's journey has been long and lonely and trying. And you guys are mostly responsible. So when you judge Keala Kennelly, dismissing her as "chick," or worse, just remember that when she touches the face of a rushing wave, pulls in deep and drives for the light at the end of the tunnel, she's just like you. All she wants to do is rise up, and love and laugh and dance through life like a champion. A surfer.

Who could possibly hate someone, anyone, for wanting that?

"MY NAME IS KEALA KENNELLY," BY MATT GEORGE (2002)

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