Pulling Together : Dangerous Sport of Speed Water Skiing Engenders Unity in Kahn Family of Oxnard

Bill Kahn’s hands are locked onto the steering wheel of his 1,100-horsepower, twin-turbocharged racing boat, which is streaking across the water at 85 miles per hour. At the end of a rope some 200 feet behind him, his 12-year-old daughter, Tami, fights to maintain her balance on a single water ski, well aware that even a momentary lapse of concentration could result in major bodily trauma.

Speed water skiing, a family sport?

Yes, indeed, say Bill and Connie Kahn of Oxnard. Although the sport is risky and unforgiving, the Kahns have embraced it as a way to promote family togetherness and keep their children away from drugs.

“Speed skiing enhances the team image of a family,” says Bill Kahn, owner of a West Los Angeles travel agency. “The kids rely on me to drive. They rely on their mom to keep the equipment going. We work together for a common goal.”

And who needs artificial stimulants, he says, when you can get such a rush by water skiing faster than a speeding torpedo?

Addicted to speed skiing, the Kahns will take Tami and her 15-year-old brother, Alex, to more than a dozen races this year. Both are top juniors, but Tami is the star, nearly the equal of the best women in the country and better than a lot of men. In August, she finished 42nd among 112 entries in the 44th Catalina Ski Race, the granddaddy of speed-skiing competitions.

A whippet-thin 90 pounds, Tami is a fearless skier. Her parents always knew she loved to water ski--even as a tyke she stayed out longer than anybody else in the family--but they didn’t realize the depths of her courage until she tried the high-voltage sport of speed skiing about three years ago.

In response to a dare by her father, she entered the 1989 Catalina race, a 63-mile marathon from Long Beach to Catalina and back. “We weren’t out for speed, just to see if she could do it,” Bill says. The youngest to compete in the race, Tami, then 4-foot-3 and 58 pounds, knew virtually nothing about speed skiing and it showed. In Long Beach Harbor, she hit a wave, flew nearly 10 feet and “came down on my face,” she says.

But she refused to give up, even after more adversity. “She fell three times and let go (of the rope) three times,” her father recalls. The strain on her back and arms made her cry. “I said to her (after a spill), ‘Honey, you’ve got nothing more to prove, why don’t you get back in the boat?’ ” Bill says. “She yelled, ‘I hate quitters. Gimme the rope.’ ”

Tami gamely finished the race in 3 hours 9 minutes 3 seconds. By the next year, she had cut nearly an hour off her time. This year, she whipped over the course in 1:23:06, beating all but three other women.

Some of the best skiers can exceed 100 m.p.h. but even speeds of 50 or 60 m.p.h. can negate reaction time. In an instant, the ski can suddenly jerk out of the water, whacking the skier in the head. Sometimes, a skier taking a sudden tumble is not able to release the rope before being slammed into the water, resulting in a severely dislocated shoulder that can lead to permanent nerve damage.

Tami has tumbled a few times but was protected from shoulder injury by a steel restraint built into her wet suit. How does it feel to hit the water at freeway speeds? “You’re going too fast to know,” says Tami, an eighth-grader at Cornerstone Christian School in Camarillo. “It knocks the wind out of you and then you say, ‘What just happened?’ ”

Even though Tami has gone faster than 85 m.p.h. on skis and Alex has done about 77, their parents are otherwise cautious and protective. They don’t allow Tami or Alex to take public buses or ride their bikes alone to certain places. The dangers in the outside world are random and serendipitous, Bill says, “but on the water, the kids can control it.”

Competing in speed skiing takes a serious cash investment: helmet, wet suit, hard-rubber boots and a seven-foot cedar ski cost nearly $1,500. The Kahns’ custom-made 21-foot Schiada racing boat--capable of hitting 106 m.p.h. over a quarter-mile--runs $50,000.

Although dedicated to speed skiing--she runs as many as 50 miles a week to train--Tami also takes gymnastics 20 hours a week and is proficient in karate. There is a strange juxtaposition of stuffed animals and sports trophies in her room, as well as regulation uneven bars. It’s the room of a little girl who lives to compete.

“And win,” she says, brown eyes twinkling.