Kelly Slater is listed at 5'9" but that seem generous. He's got long arms, broad shoulders, short legs, massive feet and hands. The perfect build for a pro surfer. But I expected him to be bigger, folk hero-sized. Because his achievements are not the achievements of a slight man. I expected him to be larger because of the way he has, over the course of his 22 year career, so thoroughly dismantled his opponents mentally and physically. By that measure, Kelly Slater is a mountain.
I've been watching professional surfing now for seven years, mostly the webcasts of the Association of Professional Surfing's World Tour. In the beginning I rooted against Slater because rooting for him is like cheering for oxygen. He won all of the time and it usually wasn't close. He dated super models and Hollywood starlets. He's good looking and filthy rich. Over time, he won me over with his skills and daring. Sometimes he'd win his heats with pure creativity and physics-defying turns; other times he relied on toughness and the sheer force of his own will. Then I started reading interviews he did and discovered that he's smart and a fundamentally good human being. Rooting against Slater started to feel wrong because Kelly Slater is something to aspire to, a person to be thankful for. He is the full realization of human potential. Fuck underdogs.
Or is it fuck the favorites? In his own way, Slater was the ultimate underdog. He can't claim any of the prerequisites to pro surf tour greatness. He didn't grow up in Tahiti or the Gold Coast of Australia or Newport Beach, CA. His father didn't compete on the World Tour. His childhood bedroom didn't overlook some world class break like Trestles or Pipeline. He was not a child of privilege. Instead, he came of age in Coco Beach, Florida a place once known as "the Small Wave Capital of the World." He was raised by working class people who struggled. But Slater, now 42 years old and (at the time of this writing, as the tour's seventh stop of the season is about to kick off) the sixth ranked surfer on the Association of Professional Surfing's World Tour, is the most dominant athlete in the history of his sport and arguably any other sport. I cannot think of another athlete who has matched Slater's genius for such a long period of time. Not Kareem or Wilt or Russell. Not Schumaker. Not Gretzky or Nicholas or Bolt. Not Tyson or Ali or LT or Manning. Not Koufax or Babe Ruth. Not Magic or Bird or the Pistol. One might go so far as to say that Michael Jordan, and Roger Federer were Kelly Slaters of their respective sports and yet each of them would have had to sustain the artistry their prime years for a quarter century to match Slater. To find the proper analogy you need to look outside of sports: Slater is to surfing what Sinatra was to crooning.
Since joining the pro tour in 1991, Slater has 54 world tour victories—surfing's rough equivalent to a golf or tennis 'major.' There are currently a handful of guys on the tour who have never won a WCT event. In 1992, Slater became the youngest surfer to win a world title and in 2010 he became the oldest. He has captured 11 world titles despite taking a three year retirement to chase big swells and play in a band. He has finished runner up to the title three times. He has won contests in tiny waves at Huntington Beach and massive swells at Waimea Bay. Pro surfing is a young man's game and yet, Slater has managed to beat back generation after generation of young hot shots. Along the way he's made incredible stylistic and technical contributions to his sport. Simply, without Kelly Slater, surfing wouldn't be surfing; it would be something else.
This week, pro surfing's elite converged on the North Shore of Hawaii for the final stop of the World Tour. Slater is in third place with an outside chance at taking the title. I wouldn't bet against him.
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My five year old son caught his first wave last week.
Keep that board. I always wish I had my first board. I would pay literally anything to have that board back. Some local guys made for me. It had a picture of Jaws swimming up to a naked lady on the bottom. I've heard rumors that it's surf shop in Singapore.
What was your first memory of the ocean, of surfing?
Playing in the white water. I was at the beach every day from the time I was born. My mom wasn't worried about sun. My dad surfed for years and years before I was around.
What was your dad like?
He was cool. He was a beach guy. He loved to fish and dive and camp. He liked to play video games and listen to the juke box. We owned a bait and tackle shop with a live shrimp tank. Me and my brothers would always get excited when the guy would come and deliver shrimp. We'd try to catch them and see who got the most. One time somebody calls my mom at about 1:30 in the morning and asks, "Is the shop open? Is Steve there? Because there are people walking around inside and the lights are on." My dad just left the shop open and bailed for the night and went drinking. He liked to drink beer a lot and it wasn't necessarily the best for our family. My parents split up when I was 11 but my dad just lived three or four blocks away. He took me to all of my surf contests.
You're from Coco Beach, Florida. It's a surfing backwater.
Coco Beach was considered the Small Wave Capitol of the World and there were a lot of good pros that came out of the area. I grew up surfing at Third Street North. There was a restaurant called Islander Hut. Burgers and fries. A juke box. An Asteroids machine. There was a real sort of vibe. It's where all of the surfers hung out. My mother had a job there. In the 70s, Coco Beach was a pretty happening spot because of the Space Center. There was a real mesh between the astronauts and the surfers. We watched all of the shuttle and satellite launches. The shuttle that exploded, the Challenger, was the 25th launch and I had seen every one, most of them at Third Street Beach.
What kind of student were you?
Our high school had one of the highest rated GPAs in the country. All of the space center engineers sent their kids to our schools. Things turned when the space center moved to Houston. I graduated with a class of 105. We had a 20 percent dropout rate. I graduated fourth in my class or something. I was in honors classes and found school to be pretty easy. I didn't study much. I had a goal of not studying at all my senior year when I was actually not physically in the school. So I had to do my homework at school. [laughs]
What was your first job?
When I was 12 or 14 I had a job picking weeds but I got fired the same day. I took too long. I was too meticulous, pulling every tiny weed. The woman was like, 'I'm paying you guys too much to sit here and play in the dirt.' She paid us $20 to go home. Later my mom worked for SunDek clothing, which has lately been reinvograted out of Italy. They were based in Central Florida. In the 70s they were a strong surf brand. They made trunks with a rainbow on the butt. My mom worked for them and the owner, Bill, wanted to give us a little bit of money so he started a little surfboard line through the company for us. We sold boards for him.
I read in the Encyclopedia of Surfing that by 1984, at the age of 11, you were an unstoppable competitor. Where did the drive come from that early?
My parents didn't push me at all. I want to thank them for that. As I started to get good my mom would make sure that I was keeping myself on track. Surfing had no money then, so it wasn't like they were relying on me to have a good career. I didn't like to lose. I had to win at everything. I was that way at school in baseball and track. My older brother, Sean, and I competed over everything. We fought. We'd play one-on-one football in the hallway of the house. We competed for shotgun in the car. We competed for food. At some point I started having more success in surfing. I was always the little brother and he could beat me up and put me in my place but I felt like if I could surf better than him then I was holding my own. So I became obsessive about surfing.
Tell me about the moment when you realized, 'surfing makes sense to me on a level that nothing else does?'
When I was ten my dad coached my football team. One day I skipped practice to go surfing because the waves were good. I remember at that point thinking, this is sort of heavy. Surfing is just my hobby and football is the biggest sport in school. My dad was fine with it. I got to practice as it was finishing and my friends were like, 'Where were you? What were you doing?' To them it was foreign, but to me, at that age I felt like I saw the wave differently. I could see the lines that other people drew and then I'd look at and feel what I was doing and I could see that it was different and unique. I felt like I had an ability to push that into something that hadn't been seen before.
What do you feel when you're surfing at your absolute best?
Complete and total control. I had that feeling really clearly a couple times last year. In Fiji and then again in Hawaii at Pipeline. I felt really in tune with the waves and no matter what, I'm winning. Today is my day.
You've narrowly lost the world title now three times. How do you deal with that sort of disappointment?
If I didn't have a world title and that happened it would be a lot tougher. I narrowly beat some good friends for world titles. Some of them never won a title. For a long time I was so competitive that it was hard to sit back and understand how that would feel. I have taken some time to really dig into that emotionally and try to understand for them, because they're my buddies. But then I've been on the other side of it, too. I was on both sides of that with Andy Irons. I beat him for the title by a heat. He beat me for a world title by one heat. at least once, maybe twice.
I feel like I should maybe ask you about Baywatch.
Get it out, man. Go ahead.
Maybe I should start with 'Why?' But then again, maybe your answer will be 'Why not?'
For years it was the bane of my existence. My manager at the time truly believed that one day people would look back and say, 'Wow! That guy Kelly Slater used to surf?' He thought I was going to be an actor and he had this plan for me by the time I was 14. He was on a mission to get me into TV or film. I was 19 or 20 and on my way to Australia when he told me that I had to go to the casting session. I was so reluctant to go to the casting; I didn't really put in any sort of special performance, I just wanted to get out of there. Later I got a call from my manager and he said, 'You got the job!'
I did five shows in my first year. Each time I'd get to the set and see the script and I'd be like, 'What!? There's an octopus that's stealing surfboards and hiding them in a secret cove and I'm going to fight him in the next fucking show!? Who writes this shit?' I fought with the writer all of the time. I'd say, 'What kind of shit are you writing. You've already got really hot girls on this show, it doesn't have to be terrible.' THe end for me came in '93. I was in South Africa, the waves were pumping. I was surfing with my buddy Shane [Dorian] and I had to leave a perfect swell to go to the airport. I flew back and told them, 'Whatever you have to do to write me off the show, do it. Because it's killing me. It's so far from who I am and what I want to be doing with my life.' The next show Nicole Eggert's character was being held hostage in a life guard tower. I rushed the tower and got shot. My character didn't die, though. My character just moved to Hawaii.
In April you cut ties with Quiksilver after 23 years and announced that you were starting your own clothing line with the French luxury brand Kering. There's been a lot of speculation that the cause of the break was Quiksilver's use of Indian cotton grown with Monsanto seeds. What really happened?
There were a number of things that I was unhappy with at Quiksilver. This was one of them.I would ask about the sourcing of cottons and they couldn't answer questions about where the material came from or why or how. They'd say, 'Oh, it's just a whole bunch of cotton that gets bunched together in India, we don't really know... " That was frustrating for me. I had been with the brand for so long, I'd think that they could easily tell me what it is. I'd expect that they'd be transparent with me.
Also, it just wasn't that I wasn't unhappy. I had an opportunity with Kering that I couldn't do with Quiksilver. For the last few years I'd wanted to do a high end surf wear line and [Quiksilver] told me that they didn't want to back what I wanted to do. The aspiration was to make clothing out of organic cottons and I wanted to be in control in production, so that if we couldn't produce in the States we'd at least be able to ensure that production was done in a sustainable way and that the people who are making the clothing are being paid enough. It was going to be impossible to do it with Quiksilver.
Tell me about the new line.
We're keeping a lot of things under wraps. But we're doing men's and women's and we'll be launching probably simultaneously next spring. We're doing a lot of recycled stuff—old fishing nets pulled out of the ocean recycled into clothing fabric. The design element will come first, but I want it to be seen as a responsibly produced product.
Does surfing ever get boring?
Surfing in Florida does. Competitive surfing gets monotonous for me. There is zero chance I will ever be bored of finding and surfing good waves. There's a constant excitement. There are so many different kinds of waves—reefs, big waves, small waves, hollow waves, point waves, warm water, cold water. Unlocking a surf break can take years—finding the right size, the right wind, the right tide, all of those elements coming together. It can be a lifelong project, trying to master a single wave. There are thousands of waves around the world that I love. I'm never going to figure them out. I'm going to try, though.