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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
Small child grows up, learns to surf better than anyone ever, finds fame, gathers wealth, forms a band, lands on television, dates starlets, grows bored, moves on. Just another success story, peculiar to America.

By Tad Friend


	Kelly Slater (Andrew Eccles)

Kelly Slater is drawing a map in the sand with his toe to explain the poor wave conditions. It shows the prevailing direction of the winter swells, the topography of the coastline, and the light southern winds of this late afternoon. A black-and-white mutt trots by and Slater snaps his fingers and whistles, much more engaged by the dog—who comes wagging over—than by the attentions of a photographer and his three assistants, who are busily prepping him for a portrait shoot.

We're at Malibu's Paradise Cove, a beautiful sweep of deserted beach. Slater keeps shading his eyes and squinting to the north to see how the waves are breaking at Zuma, a popular surf spot. His fidgeting is eager and boyish; the ratty blue and white beach towel he's holding looks like a security blanket. As one of the assistants changes a lens, Slater grins over at him: "You're a lot cooler than people say you are."

Then he suddenly says, "Hey," and strikes a mock brooding pose, stroking his chin like Joey on Friends in an acting class. The photographer laughs and moves in to snap a few shots.

"That's the one they'll use," Slater says.

"Nah," says the photographer. "If you look bad, I look bad."

"If I look bad," Slater says, warily, "you look...not so bad. Artsy."

KELLY SLATER IS, OF COURSE, THE WORLD'S best surfer. In December he won his fifth consecutive Association of Surfing Professionals world title, and his sixth overall, both records. He has almost single-handedly taken the sport to a new level of marketing cool. Old-school surfers carved elegant lines on long boards and prided themselves on shunning the marketplace to do manly battle with the sea. Slater is the millionaire poster boy of the new school, which cuts skate-rat maneuvers on the lip of the wave with potato-chip boards and busts air out of a sea of froth in magazine ads to demonstrate the superiority of a particular line of apparel. For a rock video, Slater once surfed on a door.

"Kelly's The Natural," says Slater's surfing and martial-arts buddy Peter Maguire. "He can do anything. He grew up in Florida, with tiny waves, but some of my real crusty big-wave Waimea pals are now finally acknowledging him as someone who can handle the 20-footers."

"Slater perceives the wave with a different sense of time than the rest of us," says his board shaper, Al Merrick. "It's like it's breaking at half-speed. Pretty big advantage."

But Slater, who just turned 27, will appear in only five of this year's 14 tour events. "Now that I've exceeded every goal I ever set," he says, "I'm basically taking this year off to look for a new fuel source. I was winning on anger, but I used all the angry energy up. I used to be able to fire up for anyone who'd beaten me in a heat, anyone who said anything negative in a magazine. I tried not just to win heats, but to dominate them, smother the other guys, kill them.

"I kept a log of every heat I lost, and I would write at the bottom what I did wrong—'Impatience,' or 'Catching too many waves.' I would get mad at myself for missing a turn and I'd bang my head and fists against the board, head-butt it, cursing, 'You stupid fuck!' Only no one saw that, because I was out on the water."

"From almost the age of five we knew that Kelly was going to be the champ, that he had to win," says Slater's mother, Judy. "His brother Sean was three years older, and they'd compete. Sean was very fluid, had a lot of style, but Kelly was really exciting to watch, all balls. I tried to teach my kids that doing your best is what matters, tried not to pass on the killer instinct I had—when I was little I'd stay up at night to figure out strategy to win at Greek dodgeball. But I couldn't weed it out of Kelly."

"Surfing was good to me for a long time," Slater says. "It took me away from my parents fighting constantly and getting divorced when I was 11. And from my anger at my dad. He drank a lot—I've seen him almost kill me in a car. I was always scared, when I was younger, to talk to him about the...drinking." His eyes go wide. "He knows that I'm thinking about it, because I bring it up in interviews. And it's probably a cop-out for me to tell you instead of calling him. But when I think about asking him directly...I get a cold sweat." He laughs, shakily. "What's he going to do, beat me up? I could beat him up!

"But I'm grateful," he says after a minute, "because my dad did teach me to surf. Even though he didn't have great depth perception, because he was blind in his right eye."

How did that happen?

"Maybe an accident? I've asked my mom like five times, but I keep forgetting."

Slater shrugs. "I was lucky—a lot of people get addicted to pills, but I got addicted to surfing. Both are escapes. And now I equate my feelings about surfing with a certain kind of relationship, one where you've been abused and a girl comes along and heals the scars and puts you back on your feet. And suddenly you wake up and think, 'Do I really love this person who healed me? Why am I even with her?' Surfing is like that girl, and now I want to see if I even like her."

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