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Outside magazine, May 1999

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The Workaday Adventures of a Barefoot Boy Millionaire and His Girl Next Door (cont.)

WE'RE LATE GETTING STARTED THIS morning, but only about three hours. Slater slept in, and somehow his phone was turned off, and then his directions to Woodley, a public golf course just north of Los Angeles, were a little vague. And Slater's friend Willem doesn't show up until we're on the third hole and already paired with two old guys, Bob and Pat. Bob complains, "A fivesome? I dunno—the marshals don't allow it."

"We'll alternate, so only four of us are playing on each hole," Slater says, giving him a little eye twinkle. Bob grumbles some more, and then we hit our drives—all five of us. Slater explodes on the ball, his arms wheeling with the speed and force of a centrifuge. The ball takes off in a low whoosh and seems to accelerate, on a Tiger Woods trajectory, until it comes to rest 290 yards down the fairway. He eyes it nonchalantly and rubs a little sunblock on his nose.

When we reach our second shots on the par five, Slater whips out his Rangefinder binoculars, a birthday gift from his girlfriend, former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson. "How far do you think my ball is from the flag?" he asks. "One hundred fifty-one yards," I guess. "I'll say one-forty-five," he says and looks through the Rangefinders. "One-fifty-three," he announces, giving me a measured look. "Not bad."

After his ineffectual protest, Bob keeps quiet. But now, by the ninth hole, he's begun to wonder about Slater: his wedge-shaped upper body; his arms, which are as long and thickly muscled as legs; how he seems to have a hinge in his torso, some sort of bonus thorax (Slater's friends call him Camelback); his buffed-fawn good looks and charisma. "Where you from?" Bob asks now, after Slater makes an easy birdie.

"Cocoa Beach, Florida," Slater says.

"So, are you an actor?"

"No," Slater says politely.

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After nine holes we go pound balls on the range with Willem, whose name turns out to be Bill or Billy, but who does resemble the actor Willem Dafoe. As he strokes a few seven irons, posing stylishly, Willem mentions acting in a movie he got cut out of, managing various rock groups, and flying to Tucson to give putting tips to the PGA golfer Tommy Armour III. "What does Willem do, exactly?" I whisper to Slater.

"I have zero idea," he says. "I asked him, but I forget." Slater begins hitting five irons, producing one gorgeous shot after another. Like many surfers, he loves golf; he's only been playing for three years but has a single-digit handicap. "Watching Tiger and Ernie Els really improved my swing," he says, "because I can watch them and know how it would feel to hit it that way, and then try to reproduce it. Just like I can watch a wave and surf it in my mind, know precisely how it feels. I can even feel the little foot movements I would do"—he demonstrates, waving his foot in the air and making little jigs and jags, diagonal darts—"to stall or get more speed. It would take a whole paragraph to describe just one move..." He breaks off, laughing. "I don't even like to think about it."

He scoops another ball into place: same exact motion, same exact result, the ball dropping softly 180 yards out.

"Sometimes I hit the ball so straight, I think, 'You know what, I could do this,'" Slater says, trying on the idea. "Like, 'Fuck you, Tiger, I'm taking you down.'"

IN 1986, BRYAN TAYLOR, THEN A YOUNG agent, met the 14-year-old Kelly Slater after a surf contest at Huntington Beach. He'd seen Slater's fresh, unjaded face in a surf magazine ad and offered to take him out for a power dinner at a Sizzler steakhouse. "We practically had to get Kelly a booster seat," Taylor says, "and the business conversation was basically, 'Would you like more cheese toast?'"

Taylor became Slater's manager, and for years, when Slater was in Los Angeles, he would stay at Taylor's house in Coldwater Canyon. Now Slater is visiting for the afternoon, and the two men are bantering about time zones. "What would it be like if you were standing exactly on the North Pole?" Slater asks.

"Cold," Taylor says.

An upbeat guy with considerable hair gel, Taylor has produced TV shows such as American Gladiators and Beach Clash—"volleyball on an air mattress," he says to clarify the latter, "with the girls jumping in the air for the visuals."

His house, which used to be Keith Moon's party pad, is tidy and entertainment-oriented. A faux-leopard-skin recliner faces a huge television, beside which stands an award Slater won from Surfer magazine: a chunk of surfboard floating over the bust of a Hawaiian woman. Bowls of grapes and carrots sit on the coffee table, but the kitchen doesn't appear to have been involved in their production. "We once had pasta salad somewhere," Slater tells me, grinning, "and Bryan was like, 'Hey, this is great—where do you get it?' He didn't know that you could make it."

Taylor is heading out, and as he leaves he tells Slater, "Remember, on Wednesday Extra is going to film you skateboarding."

"Right," Slater says abstractedly. He's stretched out like an odalisque on Taylor's gray couch. A few minutes later, he says, "The thing with Extra or Hard Copy or some crap—I don't support that kind of tabloidy media. The other day Pam and I were flipping channels and a show on E! said 'Pamela Anderson is cutting her hair and donating it to her boyfriend, who's thinning and in need of a hair weave.' We just looked at each other and started cracking up."

He sinks even farther into the pillows. "So I'm not going to do Extra. I'll tell Bryan I'm going on a surf day—'Waves came up, dude.'"

"Why don't you just tell him the truth now?"

"Well, the shoot's not tomorrow, it's the day after. So there's time."

Though Slater has made by far the most prize money of anyone on the pro surf tour in the last eight years ($708,230), the real money lies in promotion. He just signed a second straight lucrative five-year endorsement deal with the apparel manufacturer Quiksilver, and he's wearing the company's tan jersey and denim jeans now, the cuffs rolled up at least four inches in a sock-hop look.

And Taylor has bigger plans. "There's a definite strategy I've had since 1986 of what direction Slater's life is going to take," Taylor told me. "Other media, obviously. As soon as Slater stops surfing so much and can commit to shoot 30 weeks a year, we've got him packaged as the costar of a detective show called Heat Wave alongside a Tiger Woods mixed-blood kind of guy—kind of a younger, cutting-edge, Honolulu version of Miami Vice. Small roles in films. And music, that's not a dead end yet."

Slater's band, The Surfers—originally called Fear of Hair—put out Songs from the Pipe last year. The lyrics pondered the vicissitudes of the beach life:

One day I'll smile
Next day I'm sad
Thoughts come and go
Like a grain of sand

"We sold at least four copies," Slater says, "but I haven't really checked. I love to play music," he continues, "but I just don't think there's much that's admirable in doing publicity to try to sell something. I know you have to—but it's a catch-22."

"Kelly did a promo in a surf shop in a mall in Australia," Judy Slater says, "and he told me, 'Mom, there were like 3,000 screaming girls there. Honest to God, I had to put my hands over my ears.' He can't stand to be adored."

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