Kelly Slater is drawing a map in the sand with his toe to explain the poor wave conditions. It shows the prevailing direction of the winter swells, the topography of the coastline, and the light southern winds of this late afternoon. A black-and-white mutt trots by and Slater snaps his fingers and whistles, much more engaged by the dog—who comes wagging over—than by the attentions of a photographer and his three assistants, who are busily prepping him for a portrait shoot.
We're at Malibu's Paradise Cove, a beautiful sweep of deserted beach. Slater keeps shading his eyes and squinting to the north to see how the waves are breaking at Zuma, a popular surf spot. His fidgeting is eager and boyish; the ratty blue and white beach towel he's holding looks like a security blanket. As one of the assistants changes a lens, Slater grins over at him: “You're a lot cooler than people say you are.”
Then he suddenly says, “Hey,” and strikes a mock brooding pose, stroking his chin like Joey on Friends in an acting class. The photographer laughs and moves in to snap a few shots.
“That's the one they'll use,” Slater says.
“Nah,” says the photographer. “If you look bad, I look bad.”
“If I look bad,” Slater says, warily, “you look…not so bad. Artsy.”
KELLY SLATER IS, OF COURSE, THE WORLD'S best surfer. In December he won his fifth consecutive Association of Surfing Professionals world title, and his sixth overall, both records. He has almost single-handedly taken the sport to a new level of marketing cool. Old-school surfers carved elegant lines on long boards and prided themselves on shunning the marketplace to do manly battle with the sea. Slater is the millionaire poster boy of the new school, which cuts skate-rat maneuvers on the lip of the wave with potato-chip boards and busts air out of a sea of froth in magazine ads to demonstrate the superiority of a particular line of apparel. For a rock video, Slater once surfed on a door.
“Kelly's The Natural,” says Slater's surfing and martial-arts buddy Peter Maguire. “He can do anything. He grew up in Florida, with tiny waves, but some of my real crusty big-wave Waimea pals are now finally acknowledging him as someone who can handle the 20-footers.”
“Slater perceives the wave with a different sense of time than the rest of us,” says his board shaper, Al Merrick. “It's like it's breaking at half-speed. Pretty big advantage.”
But Slater, who just turned 27, will appear in only five of this year's 14 tour events. “Now that I've exceeded every goal I ever set,” he says, “I'm basically taking this year off to look for a new fuel source. I was winning on anger, but I used all the angry energy up. I used to be able to fire up for anyone who'd beaten me in a heat, anyone who said anything negative in a magazine. I tried not just to win heats, but to dominate them, smother the other guys, kill them.
“I kept a log of every heat I lost, and I would write at the bottom what I did wrong—'Impatience,' or 'Catching too many waves.' I would get mad at myself for missing a turn and I'd bang my head and fists against the board, head-butt it, cursing, 'You stupid fuck!' Only no one saw that, because I was out on the water.”
“From almost the age of five we knew that Kelly was going to be the champ, that he had to win,” says Slater's mother, Judy. “His brother Sean was three years older, and they'd compete. Sean was very fluid, had a lot of style, but Kelly was really exciting to watch, all balls. I tried to teach my kids that doing your best is what matters, tried not to pass on the killer instinct I had—when I was little I'd stay up at night to figure out strategy to win at Greek dodgeball. But I couldn't weed it out of Kelly.”
“Surfing was good to me for a long time,” Slater says. “It took me away from my parents fighting constantly and getting divorced when I was 11. And from my anger at my dad. He drank a lot—I've seen him almost kill me in a car. I was always scared, when I was younger, to talk to him about the…drinking.” His eyes go wide. “He knows that I'm thinking about it, because I bring it up in interviews. And it's probably a cop-out for me to tell you instead of calling him. But when I think about asking him directly…I get a cold sweat.” He laughs, shakily. “What's he going to do, beat me up? I could beat him up!
“But I'm grateful,” he says after a minute, “because my dad did teach me to surf. Even though he didn't have great depth perception, because he was blind in his right eye.”
How did that happen?
“Maybe an accident? I've asked my mom like five times, but I keep forgetting.”
Slater shrugs. “I was lucky—a lot of people get addicted to pills, but I got addicted to surfing. Both are escapes. And now I equate my feelings about surfing with a certain kind of relationship, one where you've been abused and a girl comes along and heals the scars and puts you back on your feet. And suddenly you wake up and think, 'Do I really love this person who healed me? Why am I even with her?' Surfing is like that girl, and now I want to see if I even like her.”
WE'RE LATE GETTING STARTED THIS morning, but only about three hours. Slater slept in, and somehow his phone was turned off, and then his directions to Woodley, a public golf course just north of Los Angeles, were a little vague. And Slater's friend Willem doesn't show up until we're on the third hole and already paired with two old guys, Bob and Pat. Bob complains, “A fivesome? I dunno—the marshals don't allow it.”
“We'll alternate, so only four of us are playing on each hole,” Slater says, giving him a little eye twinkle. Bob grumbles some more, and then we hit our drives—all five of us. Slater explodes on the ball, his arms wheeling with the speed and force of a centrifuge. The ball takes off in a low whoosh and seems to accelerate, on a Tiger Woods trajectory, until it comes to rest 290 yards down the fairway. He eyes it nonchalantly and rubs a little sunblock on his nose.
When we reach our second shots on the par five, Slater whips out his Rangefinder binoculars, a birthday gift from his girlfriend, former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson. “How far do you think my ball is from the flag?” he asks. “One hundred fifty-one yards,” I guess. “I'll say one-forty-five,” he says and looks through the Rangefinders. “One-fifty-three,” he announces, giving me a measured look. “Not bad.”
After his ineffectual protest, Bob keeps quiet. But now, by the ninth hole, he's begun to wonder about Slater: his wedge-shaped upper body; his arms, which are as long and thickly muscled as legs; how he seems to have a hinge in his torso, some sort of bonus thorax (Slater's friends call him Camelback); his buffed-fawn good looks and charisma. “Where you from?” Bob asks now, after Slater makes an easy birdie.
“Cocoa Beach, Florida,” Slater says.
“So, are you an actor?”
“No,” Slater says politely.
After nine holes we go pound balls on the range with Willem, whose name turns out to be Bill or Billy, but who does resemble the actor Willem Dafoe. As he strokes a few seven irons, posing stylishly, Willem mentions acting in a movie he got cut out of, managing various rock groups, and flying to Tucson to give putting tips to the PGA golfer Tommy Armour III. “What does Willem do, exactly?” I whisper to Slater.
“I have zero idea,” he says. “I asked him, but I forget.” Slater begins hitting five irons, producing one gorgeous shot after another. Like many surfers, he loves golf; he's only been playing for three years but has a single-digit handicap. “Watching Tiger and Ernie Els really improved my swing,” he says, “because I can watch them and know how it would feel to hit it that way, and then try to reproduce it. Just like I can watch a wave and surf it in my mind, know precisely how it feels. I can even feel the little foot movements I would do”—he demonstrates, waving his foot in the air and making little jigs and jags, diagonal darts—”to stall or get more speed. It would take a whole paragraph to describe just one move…” He breaks off, laughing. “I don't even like to think about it.”
He scoops another ball into place: same exact motion, same exact result, the ball dropping softly 180 yards out.
“Sometimes I hit the ball so straight, I think, 'You know what, I could do this,'” Slater says, trying on the idea. “Like, 'Fuck you, Tiger, I'm taking you down.'”
IN 1986, BRYAN TAYLOR, THEN A YOUNG agent, met the 14-year-old Kelly Slater after a surf contest at Huntington Beach. He'd seen Slater's fresh, unjaded face in a surf magazine ad and offered to take him out for a power dinner at a Sizzler steakhouse. “We practically had to get Kelly a booster seat,” Taylor says, “and the business conversation was basically, 'Would you like more cheese toast?'”
Taylor became Slater's manager, and for years, when Slater was in Los Angeles, he would stay at Taylor's house in Coldwater Canyon. Now Slater is visiting for the afternoon, and the two men are bantering about time zones. “What would it be like if you were standing exactly on the North Pole?” Slater asks.
“Cold,” Taylor says.
An upbeat