Kelly Slater: How world’s greatest surfer came from a dud Florida beach

It’s always been a bit of a mystery: how did an ordinary surf beach in Florida produce the greatest boardrider in history?

Kelly Slater during the Gold Coast Quiksilver Pro which this year moves to Sydney. Picture: Nigel Hallett

Kelly Slater will be in NSW soon enough. The Bells Beach Easter contest is being held down the road from Mark Richards’ joint in Newcastle. The Snapper Rocks event has been shifted to Sydney. It’s still the surf tour, dudes, just not as we know it.

One thing has always confounded me about Slater. How did Cocoa Beach in Florida, with its rotten waves, invariably small and windswept like Bondi on a bad day, which is just about as bad as it gets … how did that daft spot produce the greatest surfer who’s ever lived?

I’ve interviewed Slater a hundred times and always forgotten to ask him. He goes off on a thousand tangents and it’s too tempting to throw away the notebook and go with him. Thankfully Mark Howard, whose Howie Games podcasts are as good as it gets, has been organised and professional enough to broach the subject with the 11-time world champion in an episode to be released on Thursday.

Kelly Slater signs autographs at the Rip Curl Pro at Bells Beach. The event has been moved to Newcastle this year

Slater is a great interviewee when he’s in the mood. Thoughtful and honest and intriguingly deep. He’s in the mood with Howard. He talks candidly about his thunderous yet spiteful rivalry with the late Andy Irons and how he’s still on tour despite having sufficient years to wear an ‘Old Blokes Rule’ T-shirt in between gentle surfs on a nine-foot mal. And he touches on his early days around Cocoa Beach, just about the least likely place on the planet to produce an 11-time world champion. Coolangatta it ain’t.

“I didn‘t have one of those soccer mums or dads,” Slater says. “It was like, you’ve got to get out there, work hard … if we got to talking, it was more like don’t do drugs and don’t drink or something like that. My mum really hammered that home for me, although my dad liked to drink a bit. They just saw that I loved it … I don’t know, I just loved surfing more than anything … I feel that we’re all here for a purpose, whether it’s for ourselves or for other people. And I feel like I fit into this world. I feel like I was meant to do the things I do. ”

He says: “My friends at school, none of them surfed, to be honest with you. I hung out with my surf buddies, and during the week, I hung out with my friends who liked to play tennis and football and basketball and baseball at school. My three best friends I grew up with did not surf at all. So I kind of had these two lives. I had this kind of school life and then I had this surf life.”

Florida is more your production line of NFL, NBA, MLB and pro tennis players. Slater says: “I really liked football when I was a kid. I liked baseball. I wasn’t especially good at basketball. I didn’t understand basketball like I did baseball and football, which I understood very well. You grew up with those games.

“I didn’t play much soccer. I didn’t really have the cardio for soccer … too much running. As a teenager, I started to like tennis quite a lot. And actually for a period of time I wanted to try out for our team at school. I was playing more tennis than I was surfing for about six months when I was 16 or 17. I made myself stop because I was like, look, I’m not that good.

“Let’s be honest here. I just think I found the thing I’m best at. I understood what surfing was. I understood what made it tick. I felt like I knew something special about surfing that no one else did.”

Slater recalls his famous “I love you, man” to Irons on the day the Hawaiian won the world title at the Pipe Masters in 2003. Slater gets accused of only saying it as a psychological tactic but he reveals it was more of an admission of defeat when his personal life was spiralling out of control.

“I was kind of waving the white flag,” he says. “I felt like I had lost already. I was kind of a broken man. I was in a really painful, bad relationship. I didn’t sleep even one hour the night before that final day.

“I basically had a girlfriend who was fighting with my mum and screaming and cussing at her the whole night and yelling at me. I was in a huge fight. I was just in this really sort of bad, painful position that was symbolic of the way that day was going to go for me.”

Slater says: “I was kind of hoping Andy would just be nice to me, to be honest with you. I could feel everyone was hating on me and wanting him to win. Thousands of people on the beach, most of them felt like they were in his camp. It was a really hard moment for me personally, not just because I was a competitive person. Like personally, it was a really difficult time for me.”

There’s timeless footage of Slater under the shower at Pipe looking like a broken man. He says: “The first thing I did (after losing) was … I was out in my yard with my brother and two friends crying. I had such a horrible night. I had no energy. I didn’t want to eat because I felt kind of sick. And it was just a bad day in my life, you know. But it was all right … I’m philosophical about these things. I look back on them and that was what caused me to win in 2005, and to win in sort of a magnificent manner.”