Kelly Slater still brings the heat in the surfing world. Photo: WSL
Editor’s Note: One of our most trusted contributing writers, Ben Mondy, has released a new tome, The Breitling Book Of Surfing, through Rizzoli Publishing. It’s available at all online booksellers. He writes about his interview with Kelly Slater, below.
“I’ve made no qualms about it,” Kelly Slater told me. “That candle is burning out. I designed my life to be the greatest competitor I can be. I’ll soon design my life to fit my new priorities like my family, friends, free surfing and my businesses.”
That was the GOAT being interviewed for the just-released Breitling Book of Surfing, a 256 coffee-table book that aims to show what connects surfers around the world and keeps them rooted to the places where they carved their first waves. The Kelly interview was held during the Portugal CT event in late 2023.
That was before Kelly had new hips. Before he was given the wildcard for 2024. Before the announcement that his partner was pregnant. Before he elected not to go Peniche this year and surf Kirra instead. And before he dropped the latest of many official retirement statements, saying this was his last Bells, “unless I win at Margarets.” As ever with Kelly and retirement there was always a caveat.
And it was before a roundhouse cutback he performed at Kirra did the internet rounds this week (18 second mark, below). It was, arguably, the best roundhouse ever seen. It was certainly the best single moment of surfing we’ve seen from Kelly in ages. The collective surf world sighed in relief; the GOAT has still got it!
And yet, even 12 months ago, when he was reflecting on the amount of wax and wick he had left, he was dropping serious hints that he was, at the age of 52, readying for a new phase of his life. In his chapter of the book, a reflective Kelly describes a difficult and sometimes traumatic childhood, and how his father’s alcoholism led to his parent’s separation and financial hardship for his single-parent mum. That drove him to want to compete and provided a focus for all of his energy. He believes the relentless drive of elite competition also provided space to overcome the trauma and time to heal.
“I have different priorities in my life now. And I’ve always said that the reason I did so well was because I didn’t go start a traditional family, get married, have kids, have a job and a home base,” Kelly said. “That meant I didn’t have that same pressure or distraction or whatever of some others on tour. It’s not a negative thing or one way is better than the other. I just didn’t have it the same way as other people. And that was by design. I had a lot of ambition to compete and try to be the greatest competitor I could possibly be.”
It’s fair to say that Kelly achieved his dream, be it in a relatively unorthodox manner. The book investigates the surf communities that are the heart of surfer’s life stories from all over the world. While Kelly is joined by heavy hitters like Steph Gilmore, Sally Fitzgibbons, Johanne Defay and Mikey February, other surfers from Greece, Italy, Uruguay, France and Sweden discuss the influential figures, places, and waves that have shaped their lives.
Yet as interesting, and original, as some of the surfers’ lives are, it can be argued that it is Kelly Slater that still generates the most heat in global surfing, even as the candle dims. He has cultivated his communities in his travels from Floridian grom to GOAT. He has a defacto family (that often comes with a room, a set of golf clubs and a car) at every stop on tour. Each winter he posts up in Hawaii, and shares waves with the local North Shore community that took him in as a teenager.
“I learned from Sebastian Inlet, that you need to earn your keep in any lineup. Surfing has a way of humbling you and putting you in the right place,” he said in the Breitling Book Of Surf. “But that means when you do get that priority, it’s earned through years of friendships, time in the water and paying your dues with other people. That’s how community works.”
The exact retirement date of Kelly’s competitive career remains, well, as ever, vague. In a way, it’s not really important. Harking back to those early days in Sebastian Inlet, he would peer at surfing magazines and dream about glassy, perfect peeling tubes. “Something about the ocean captured me. I had an urge to see if I could fit into those patterns in the water.”
No one has made that fit look better.
