How Woody Harrelson Saved Darius Rucker’s Life

It sure pays to have good friends, and Darius Rucker has the best. The singer recently released his new memoir, Life’s Too Short, and, among the many revelations in the book, he reveals that “fantastic actor” Woody Harrelson once saved his life while he was swimming in the ocean while visiting the True Detective alum at his Hawaiian home.

“At Woody’s, if you want to go swimming, you don’t simply slip on your trunks and dive into the pool. Way more complicated than that. We begin our swim by climbing down a jagged cliff – very slowly and carefully, inch by inch,” Rucker, 58, writes in the new book, per Us Weekly. After a “treacherous 25-minute descent” the pair — along with their friend  Kirk —reached a small beach and headed out to swim.

“I’m better than a decent swimmer. I’m a strong, confident swimmer,” Rucker shares, then going on to recall losing sight of his friends and being overcome by the strong Pacific Ocean waters.

“The current is ferocious. I feel as if some horrific giant squid has lashed itself around my body, circling and tightening its tentacles around my legs, dragging me under the water. I gulp and I gasp and I keep fighting,” Rucker harrowingly recalls. “I fight and flail for I have no idea how long – ten minutes, fifteen – and then I hear a voice. Woody. I can’t see him, but I hear him. He’s not far.”

Harrelson soon caught up to Rucker and the two men floated until Rucker felt himself “drifting away.” The Hootie and the Blowfish frontman remembers seeing “a blinding blast of white” along with visions of his late mother, leading him to tell Harrelson to let him go.

“The words leak out of my mouth, one at a time, each syllable a tiny jab of air, causing me to gasp. I blow out a final burst of words. ‘This is it,’” Rucker writes in his book. While he may have felt ready to go, Harrelson was not ready to let him go. Eventually, they found their friend Kirk, who helped Harrelson save the award-winning musician.

Rucker says that the moments between being saved and making it back to shore are “blank,” but adds, “All I know for sure is that somehow Woody pulls me out of the current and he and Kirk drag me back to the beach because here I am, twenty-five years later.”

Life’s Too Short is published by Dey Street Books, and is now available wherever books are sold.