Ford Is Recovering From Horrific Ordeal : Boat racing: Powerboat champion unsure of future in sport after severe injuries in catamaran theft.
Offshore boat racing--streaking across choppy waves and treacherous swells at more than 100 m.p.h.--is one of the most dangerous sports. Insurance adjusters rate offshore racers only slightly below astronauts on the danger scale.
Rique Ford, who has won world and national championships since coming to California from Jamaica in 1979, has been racing ocean-going boats for five years, and the worst things that have happened to him on the water were getting drenched when his boat flipped and getting lost at sea when he missed a buoy.
In the driveway of his home in Norco, however, one of the most horrifying accidents in history involving an offshore boat occurred on the morning of Oct. 1.
Rique Ford, 33, was run over by his own truck and trailer loaded with Ragamuffin, Ford’s 32-foot catamaran, when a thief tried to speed off with one of the most visible boats in America. Three wheels carrying the 12,000-pound load rolled over Ford’s lower abdomen, virtually cutting him in half.
His pelvis was crushed, his spleen and colon ruptured, his stomach squeezed outside his body. Bones were broken in both hands, and he had cuts, bruises, and scratches all over his body after having been dragged along underneath the trailer.
Ford, at home now but still in bed after an 8 1/2-hour operation and more than a month in Riverside General Hospital--and facing many more months of rehabilitation while doctors reconstruct his innards--recalled his experience:
“I got up about 5:45 to take the boat to Newport Beach, where I was going to meet Eric Colby (editor of Powerboat magazine) at 10 o’clock to take some pictures of the boat and then take it out to test it.
“After I had the trailer hooked up, I was ready to go when I decided to get out of the cab and walk around the trailer and check the wires to make sure everything was working. I had to crawl under the boat, between the boat and trailer, to check them.
“All of a sudden, the boat started moving. I grabbed the trailer to keep from getting run over and when I realized the boat was pulling out of the driveway, I jumped, or sort of fell, off on the pavement. I was clear of the wheels but whoever was in the cab made a turn and the trailer--three wheels--ran right over me. If he had stayed in the normal lane out of the driveway, I’d have been OK, but he turned.
“The whole thing lasted 20, maybe 30 seconds.”
Ford never lost consciousness, but in the early morning hours on a Saturday, no one was around to see him, or hear him. His wife, Shelly, was still asleep in the house.
“I yelled as loud as I could, which probably wasn’t very loud,” Ford said. “I tried to move my feet to get up, but they wouldn’t move. The pain in my back was killing me and when I looked down, I saw my stomach on the ground beside me. I picked it up and held it to my chest.
“I remember I kept yelling.
“One car pulled up, looked at me and went on down the street. Finally, after about 10 minutes, a neighbor (Mark Camarillo) heard me and came out to see what was wrong. As soon as he saw me, he ran back in the house and called the paramedics. If he hadn’t come out, I’d probably never have lived.”
The thief abandoned the truck, trailer and boat a few miles away, among the dairy farms south of Chino. No one has been charged.
“While I was loading up, about 10 minutes before I checked the wires, a guy walked up to the trailer, looked at it for a minute, then turned and walked away,” Ford said. “He didn’t say anything. At the time, I remember thinking it was kind of strange for a guy to be out at that time of the day, but I was busy and forgot about it.”
It was the only time the boat had been at Ford’s home all year. He had kept it docked at the Archer Marine yard in Costa Mesa.
“For some reason, I towed it home Thursday night and it sat in the driveway all day Friday,” Ford said. “Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time it’s in Costa Mesa or at a race. Just one day and that guy spotted it and was waiting for his chance. I still don’t believe it.”
Ragamuffin was built by Douglas Marine in Douglas, Mich., for about $250,000. It has two engines from Teague Custom Marine of Valencia, worth about $75,000 each.
It won the world Class C championship last year at Ft. Myers, Fla., with Ford the throttle man and Paul Whittier of Seattle the driver. Whittier and Kirk Drueteman, whom Rique asked to handle the throttle in his absence, successfully defended the championship last month in Key West, Fla.
Ford also won the American Power Boat Assn.’s national championship in a series of races across the country, winning at South Padre Island, Tex.; Jacksonville, Fla., and Galveston, Tex. He also finished second in Sarasota, Fla.
“Is this crazy or what?” he said. “In five years, I’ve never been hurt in a boat, except for maybe my ego, and here I am, lying in a bed flat on my back from something that happened 25 miles from the ocean.”
After Ford left the hospital, he took out an ad in “The Racer’s Edge,” an offshore boating publication, thanking the hospital, doctors, medical students and nursing staff for “putting Rique back together again.”
Ford still is in constant discomfort and has made a couple of return visits to the hospital because of complications but sees better days ahead.
“They tell me that with the proper therapy, I’ll probably be 90% in six months,” he said.
Ford is one of the most popular figures in offshore racing. Friends love to recall the day he got lost in a race off Galveston and was headed across the Gulf of Mexico before he got turned around.
“It was a new race, all foreign territory to all of us,” recalled George Ryon, a fellow competitor. “Rique grabbed the lead and we were right behind him, heading away from the harbor when Rique missed a buoy. We turned right and he went straight on out in the gulf.
“He’d gone about 20 miles (off course) when he sighted an oil derrick and stopped to yell at a worker and asked how to get to Galveston. The guy on the derrick said, ‘Turn around and go right back where you came from.’
“Well, we all had a laugh at that, and someone faxed the story all over the country. It became one of the sport’s great jokes. And no one enjoyed it more than Rique. He’s the kind of a guy who can laugh at himself. He’s gregarious, but in a race he’s as tough a competitor as you’ll find. When it’s over, he’s buddies with everyone.”
Doctors, nurses and therapists had to work around the many friends who crowded his hospital room, whose walls were covered with pictures of boats, checkered flags autographed by racers and friends and cards from well-wishers.
“Rique was still in intensive care when I first went to see him,” Ryon said. “When I walked past a nurse, she said, ‘I suppose you’re one of his brothers.’ I said yes and she said, ‘I never saw a man who had so many relatives. We’ve had three or four wives, three or four mothers, a couple of fathers and 25 or so brothers come in here. Funny, him being black and most of them white. Must be quite a family.’ ”
Ford also competed in the Pacific Offshore Power Boat Racing Assn., a West Coast organization formed by the late Bob Nordskog. He has won the last three POPBRA championships in his class.
“I got interested in boats when my dad raced in Jamaica when I was young,” Ford said. “We moved to West Covina in 1979, but I was busy going to school at Cal Poly (Pomona) before I bought a runabout and went racing.
“I used to watch the big guys, like Bob Nordskog and Vic Edelbrock and Tom Gentry, and I dreamed of racing a big boat some day. Nordskog was my idea of a real boat racer. He was still racing, and winning, when he was 78.
“My first big boat was named Empty Pockets, and it proved to be well named. Then I got my first Ragamuffin and then last year the one that ran over me.”
Ford said his most memorable races this year were against Bruce Penhall and Dennis Sigalos, the former world speedway motorcycle champions who got into powerboating this season.
“We had four races,” Ford said. “We won two and they won two. We were going to decide our little private championship at Ventura the week after I got hurt. Bruce and Dennis beat my boat at Ventura, but I told them it didn’t count because I wasn’t in it.”
In the world championships at Key West, Penhall and Sigalos raced in a different class and both teams won--the Penhall boat in modified and Rique’s boat in Class C.
Will Rique Ford return to racing when he is able?
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I really don’t know.”