What's Next For Kelly Slater?
Oct 24 2006 / Los Angeles, CA
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Jeff Spicoli’s dream is Kelly Slater’s reality. He very often is surrounded by more than two hot chicks in bikinis and he is always being interviewed by sports announcers and journalists from Surfer Magazine to the New York Times. In October, Slater was interviewed by BBC Sports and they asked that question, Slater had just claimed his 8th World Title and was sounding a little over it. He talked of retirement: “It's just an idea at the moment. It's (surfing) not quite as exciting as when I was younger," he told BBC Sport "The love of performing in front of people is what drives me on, it's not about the money now. Surfing is not what gets me up in the morning anymore. I'm thinking seriously about the pro tour next year and possibly only doing the events and places I really love to be in and only when the swell is right. I've been on the tour for the past 12 years and when it becomes a real possibility about not doing it anymore it isn't that difficult a choice to make."
The BBC story said Slater would not make a real decision until the final event of the year at Pipeline in Hawaii: "I tend to make last-minute decisions about everything I do, but occasionally those choices become clear. I nearly didn't compete in the second event of this season. At Bells Beach, in Australia, I was going to retire, stop right there, but I went and won it. It all happened at a weird stage of my life and staying on the tour helped me to focus on some other things in my life. I was in quite a funk about everything back then. It's a balancing act between surfing and what else is going on in your life. I now know that should my family need me, I would drop everything and be back home tomorrow."
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Born in 1972, Slater’s life paralleled the ascent of the modern surf industrial complex, as the major companies like Billabong, Quiksilver and Rip Curl were all born around that time. He grew up along the beaches of Cocoa Beach, Florida, a place known more for rockets and genies than great waves. In retrospect, Slater wouldn’t have had it any other way: “If I had the choice of learning in Florida or Hawaii, I'd choose Florida,” Slater said to Jason Borte on www.surfline.com. “You don't try to run before you can walk.”
Slater came from a family that struggled a bit. His first board was a Styrofoam thing that he rejected for a boogie board. As a boy Slater hung out with his older brother Sean at a burger joint called The Islander Hut. The #1 song in 1977 was Queen’s We Are the Champions, and apparently that song imprinted on Kelly’s brain. Slater was also inspired by the 70s surfing of Hawaiian hotdog surfers like Larry Bertlemann, whose motto was “Anything is Possible!”
Slater entered his first contest in 1980, still on his bodyboard but he blew everyone away, doing standup, backside 360s. At eight years old, Slater’s first board was five-feet exactly and airbrushed with the logo from Jaws – a weird choice considering the history of shark attacks in Florida. Riding Jaws, Kelly took his first surf trip to Cape Hatteras to compete in the Menehune Division of the 1981 Eastern Surfing Association Championships. The hard beachbreaks of Cape Hatteras were a new world to Slater, who couldn’t make it out of the beachbreak and finished 7th out of 7.
By 1982, Slater was winning everything, touring with a Grom Team sponsored by Dick Catri and at a Florida trade show he met future hero Tom Curren, and also Danny Kwock and Jeff Hakman from Quiksilver, who gave Slater a pair of trunks with stars on them.
In 1982, Kelly Slater won the Menehune Division of the Eastern Surfing Association Championships, but car problems and family problems and homesickness forced 10-year-old Kelly to give up his slot in the United States Amateur Championships.
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In 1984, Slater beat an older kid in The Sundek Classic held during Spring Break, then traveled to California that summer but got overwhelmed by Salt Creek and didn’t win a slot on the US Team heading for the World Amateur Championships in Huntington Beach.
In December of 1984, Slater won a plane ticket for his first trip to Hawaii. He got beat hard by Pipeline, and then beat the likes of Shane Dorian and Keoni Watson in the United States Amateur Surfing Championships at Makaha. Slater was as shocked as anyone to find himself the US Menehune Champion.
Kelly and his brother Sean began appearing in ads for Sundek from 1985 to 1986 and Sundek sold a Kelly Slater Signature Model that allowed Slater to pocket $105 a week without threatening his amateur status. Slater was now competing in every event school allowed him to make, including a wave pool event at New Braunfels, Texas. In 1986, Kelly traveled to Newquay, England where he was the second-youngest competitor in the World Amateur Surfing Championships. Despite the cold water and the bigger waves, Slater made it to the Junior final and came up against pretty fearsome competition in the form of Nicky Wood, Tahitian Vetea “Poto” David and Hawaiian John Shimooka. Slater fell on two waves and finished third in the world. An accomplishment for most, but for Slater, it felt like failure.
Slater won a wavepool event in Irvine in 1987, and his reality mirrored the fiction of North Shore: The Movie when he returned to Hawaii and fell under the wing of North Shore surfer/shaper/guru/mentor Ken Bradshaw. By now, the buzz around Slater was getting loud: “The magazines started calling me the future world champion,” Slater said in Pipe Dreams. “Since I had won six East Coast Titles, four U.S. Championships, and two NSSA Nationals, all eyes were focused on me. While the attention and faith in me was nice, I still had to prove I could do it. Before I could even think of turning pro, I had to win as an amateur at the highest level.”
The year 1988 spelled failure to Slater personally, but it was a failure that the world seemed to ignore. Determined to win all there was left for him to win-the World Amateur Title-which would be held on familiar turf in Puerto Rico-Kelly went to the qualifying team trials at South Padre Island, and bombed out. The water was cold, the surf was bad, Slater was wearing a thick wetsuit and he couldn’t get his freak on, and ended up as the second alternate to the US Team that went to Puerto Rico.
Despite his World Amateur Title jinx Slater continued to buzz buzz buzz. In 1989, SURFER Magazine did a nine-page feature called The Seduction of Kelly Slater and everyone was calling him the Next Big Thing, the Successor to Tom, the Great American Hope. Like the T-1000 in Terminator II, Slater wanted to morph all he saw into his own style: “There were two surfers who styles impacted me the most,” Slater wrote in Pipe Dreams. “Tom Curren and Martin Potter. Seeing Martin Potter blasting an aerial on the cover of Surfing Magazine in 1984 when I was 12 changed my life… He was someone I could relate to, and right away, I wanted to fly.” But Slater also admired the smooth, powerful flowing style of Tom Curren: “…he had the ideal mix of flow, radical moves, and a perfect style honed on long, California pointbreaks. I wanted to combine Potter’s flair with Curren’s flow.”
In 1989, Slater met Rob Machado in the final of the Op Junior at Huntington Beach and despite a bad hip and not knowing how to use the priority buoy, Slater won. That year, Slater began working with a talent agent named Bryan Taylor, who made deals for Kelly to surf for Rip Curl wetsuits and Ocean Pacific Clothing. This gave Slater the juice to buy his family a house in Cocoa Beach, and for the first time in a long time, the Slater family had a permanent base. In 1989, Slater spent some time in France living with Tom Curren and learning the secrets of his sensei. Back at Cocoa Beach High Slater resumed the fairly normal life of a high school teenager, but as soon as the bell rung for winter break, he was off to Hawaii, determined to make his way farther outside and deeper into the lineup of those giant waves.
By 1992, the buzz about Slater was nearly deafening. A bidding war among the biggest companies broke out, and Slater bailed to Mexico, surfing with a sign on his trunks that read “I really don’t care.” At the Bud Tour Contest at Lower Trestles in the fall of 1992, Slater unveiled his act to the surfing media, putting on a stellar performance in perfect surf at Lowers, winning the event and letting everyone know that they should believe the hype.
Slater signed with Quiksilver that year, who featured him in a video called Kelly Slater in Black and White that told the world in no uncertain terms that Slater was golden.
By 1992, the surf companies like Quiksilver and Billabong were making hundreds of millions of dollars with no upper limit in sight. Slater went on the pro tour at 21 in 1993 and won the World Title – the youngest surfer ever to do so. Like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods and Shaq, Slater dominated pro surfing through the 90s, winning five more World Titles in 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997 and 1998. With six World Titles on his mantelpiece, Slater retired in 1998. He competed in events that interested him in 1999, and won the Pipe Masters, slaying again the dragon that had kicked his okole back in the 1980s. Slater was off the radar for a few years as a Newer New School began to emerge. Slater was now the dragon that others wanted to slay, and the Sleeping Dragon came back in 2003 when Andy Irons began crooning “Goodbye Old School” under Kelly’s balcony. Slater took two years to get back to speed and in 2005 he won his seventh World Title and became both the youngest and oldest.
He claimed his eighth title with two events left in the 2006 season and now the question is: What’s next for Kelly Slater?
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