Kelly Slater isn’t going to stop surfing. Ever. Photo: CBS//Screenshot
Kelly Slater is 53 years old. He’s a new dad. He’s an 11-time world champion. He’s won just about every surfing award there is to win, and many of them he’s won multiple times. He’s the youngest and oldest (male) surfer to win a world championship.
His first came at the age of 20 in 1992 and his most recent at 39 in 2011. He’s been doing it for a long time, and although his winning streak has waned in recent years, he’s still the G.O.A.T. and he’s still doing G.O.A.T. things. Things like getting a wildcard into the Trestles event. While he was there, he sat down for a few minutes with Sports Central‘s Chris Hayre to talk about a pro surfing career that spans a whole lot of years.
Back in 1990, as an 18-year-old up-and-coming rookie, Slater won the Body Glove Surf Bout III held at Lower Trestles. Even then, two years before his first world title, it was obvious that big things were to come. “You get the feeling this is the first of many checks to come for this young man out of Florida,” the announcer said while Kelly celebrated on the podium after that win.
Now, 35 years later, he found himself back at Trestles yet again. Hayre asked Kelly if, when he was that teenager, he could have foreseen the career ahead of him.
“I couldn’t have then,” Kelly chuckled. “But as the years wore on, yeah, I think so. I love surfing, and that keeps me motivated to keep my levels up and keep my body in shape and work on everything that goes into it. But it’s daunting to think back at 18, going ’35 more years… in my 50s I’ll be surfing this.'”
Over the years, Slater has won, as mentioned, just about everything there is to win. But Trestles has a special place in his heart, and he has a real connection with the wave. It was the location of his first professional win, and in the following years — most notably an eight-year heater between 2005 and 2012 — he would go on to win a record six Championship Tour victories there. But that first one still stands out.
“Winning the first time in 1990,” he recalled, “I was starting my senior year of high school… I won this event and I had just signed with Quiksilver, which was really exciting. They were the company I wanted to be with. They gave me a nice contract at the time, so still being in high school, signing that contract, winning this contest, and I was filming a movie called Kelly Slater in Black and White. You know, a lot of people still quote lines from that movie back to me in the surf world. All that was happening right then.”
Over the years, Slater’s approach to competition has evolved. He’s a different person and a different surfer at 53 than he was at 18, and priorities change.
“It just depends on what you’re trying to do,” he explained. “For most of those years, I was trying to win world titles and I was right in the mix. I was very hyper-focussed and obsessed about the competition and not making mistakes. At this point, it’d be fun to win a contest, but it’s not make-or-break for my life. When I first started out, every heat was like, more money than I’d ever had. I was trying to make a living and put money in the bank and maybe buy a house and everything, you know?”
One thing that has remained constant, however, is his absolute, undying love for riding waves.
“I hope I die in the ocean one day,” he said with a grin. “That’d be peaceful for me. Maybe at a 100 years old or something. Maybe I’ll just send it on a 60-footer when I’m 100 years old… a 100-footer when I’m 100!”
