Surfing
Rare insights into the successful pro surfer of all time.
For decades, Kelly Slater lived in the surfing world without giving away too much – he kept his personal life very private, and we didn’t really know much about him. But over the past year or two, he’s started opening up. And just recently, he took it to a whole new level – he agreed to go on a popular TV show, The Undeniable Show, with host Joe Buck.
Joe spent 45 minutes chatting with Kelly on life, love, history and the future, and the results were pretty spectacular. We’ve sifted through and compiled a list of the 10 most interesting things Kelly brings up.
1. He learned to make bullets at eight years old.
“I grew up in a house with an older brother Sean and younger brother Steven. My dad, who was actually a really fun dad, who took us to the beach and fishing and camping, and even taught us how to shoot and make bullets. It was a different time. My dad was from the south, and it would seem strange to me now to have a rack of guns in my house – but back then it was normal.”
2. He wanted to be a ventriloquist.
“Yup, I actually wanted to be a ventriloquist. All I wanted for Christmas this one year was a dummy. Then after that I wanted to be an actor, or a comedian, because I thought Steve Martin was so funny.”
3. He got his competitive edge from his mom.
“My mom moved from Maryland to Florida when she was 18 and she worked for NASA, then, by the time I was eight, she had become an EMT and firefighter. She was the first female firefighter in our county. All the guys were trying to tell her she couldn’t do it, but she was determined. She had this crazy fighting spirit. I think I get my competitiveness from her.
“She played tennis and there was this one friend of mine who’s mom no one liked, and my mom said, ‘You know what, I’ll join her’, and they made a team. And they beat everyone. My mom wasn’t a country club woman at all – she was sort of rough around the edges. My parents split up when I was about 10 years old, and my mom raised us on her own with about $500 a week. She kept a roof over our heads and gave us lunch money and got us to surf contests.”
4. His older brother Sean drove him to be the best surfer in the world.
“I was really competitive with my brother Sean. From things like playing football in the hallway to calling shotgun to who got to sit in the deep part of the bathtub. And that’s what drove me to say, you know what, I’m going to be better at him in surfing – I’m going to be the best. So I got really crazy obsessive about it.”
5. He knew he was going to be a surfer at eight years old.
“I was surfing every day by the time I was seven or eight years old, and it was that time when I was trying to define myself – I would think, you know what, I’m a surfer! I think I’m a surfer. And so I realised I had this identity with something I loved.”
6. He cried when he won his first ticket to Hawaii.
“When I won that spot for the ticket to Hawaii, it was such a turning point in my life. We didn’t have the money, I didn’t have the money, to ever get there. And it changed everything at the age of 12.”
7. He chose to finish high school rather than go pro.
“This one quote from a guy who influenced me, Mike Stewart, he’s a really smart guy who’s into math and inventions – he said ‘high school is easy – if you can’t finish high school, you can’t finish anything’. So I finished high school and graduated with a 4.6 GPA.”
8. He knew he wanted more than one World Title.
“I didn’t want to win the World Title one time and be done with it. My goal was to win multiple World Titles. Tom Curren was my hero, he had won three. Mark Richards won four straight. So I wanted to win five.”
9. Baywatch was a concern for Kelly.
“1992 was a weird year for me because I was also on Baywatch. As a kid I said I wanted to be an actor, but at that point, I didn’t want to at all. I was dreading being on that show. What I was doing in my career, surfing wise, I was taking very seriously – and I didn’t want to be seen as a joke. I think with Baywatch I equated scenarios where they gave CPR to someone on the beach and they were fine, to my life – you know, I’d had friends that had drowned… So I was worried about it doing a disservice to what I considered my profession.”
10. He almost didn’t requalify after he won his first World Title.
“Yeah. I almost didn’t requalify that first year after I won. I was in debt, literally broke… it was just one of those years. Everything was a bummer. I was almost suicidal at one point for a couple of weeks, in early ’94. I was so sad and so depressed and I didn’t know what to do with myself. And that’s when I focused everything back into my surfing – my goals and where I wanted to go, not just that week or month, but in five years. I went on a mission at that point.”
