Kelly Slater knows that a round of a golf and a surf session is the best way to spend a day. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
Golf and surfing are, for some strange reason, bedfellows. They don’t, at first anyway, appear to share many similarities, but strangely, many surfers like to golf. Kelly Slater included.
Slater is currently in Scotland for his beloved Alfred Dunhill Links Championship. It’s not his first time there, and Scotland might not be the first place you think of when you think of surfing, but as the old saying goes, “if you can see it, you can surf it.” Kelly Slater could see waves, so Kelly Slater surfed them.
“Surfing legend Kelly Slater surprised local surfers by joining them for a sunset session at St. Andrews East Sands,” Alfred Dunhill Links Championship wrote. “Not your average preparation for a round of golf, as the 11-time world champion swaps the fairways for the waves before teeing it up at the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship.”
Slater’s love affair with golfing has been a long one. He’s got the talent to back it up too, and once told the PGA Tour that he plays around 150 rounds a year (if my wife were to see me golfing, she’d surely think I had a second family that I’d been spending all my time with, because there’s no way I can have been golfing for as long as I have and still be as bad). He played to a 3-handicap in the 2015 AT&T tournament, and it’s well known around the links that he’s not just a celebrity golfer making it by on his celebrity status.
“I like the challenge. It’s such a simple thing,” Slater said in 2020. “Hit this ball over there. But all these things have to align. You have to get your mind clear and calm and your technique has to be right. It’s kind of problem-solving, you know? Golf’s really problem-solving. Golf and surfing are kind of ultimate challenges. They’re almost opposite to each other. Surfing is all movement; energy, nature, whatever. The golf course is kind of just sitting there waiting for you to make yourself look bad.”
For the surfers in the water at St. Andrew’s East Sands, seeing the 11-time world champion in the lineup with them was a surprise, to say the least.
“We were just surfing a peak down there and he just paddled up next to us,” one of them said after a session he’ll be talking about for a long time. “Being able to chat to Kelly Slater in the lineup; being able to share some waves… it’s unbelievable. I can’t believe it.”
