By PHIL JARRATT
Kelly’s last hurrah?
STOP me if you’ve heard this one before, but it certainly seems like we might be seeing the final play-out of the greatest career in professional surfing history. Eleven-times world champion Kelly Slater has won just one heat in three events so far this year, and is languishing near the bottom of the rankings.
Having won more than twice as many world titles as the next guy, and almost three times as many tour events (54) as the next guy, the question is how much losing can Kelly take before he calls stumps on his illustrious 25-year career? At 44, Kelly is more than twice the age of many of his tour rivals, including Italian teenager Leonardo Fioravanti, who sent him packing in Round 2 at the Drug Aware Margaret River Pro last week.
While the idea of Kelly being beaten by a rookie who learnt to surf on the Mediterranean is a bitter pill to swallow, the facts are that young Leo is a class act who sharpened his talents at some of the best surf breaks in the world with Kelly at his side in Quiksilver team days.
Kelly has moved on from Quik but at Margaret’s they were once again housemates. Must have been an interesting conversation over dinner after Kelly’s exit!
Slater has reached the point in his career where he has absolutely nothing to prove to anyone, and even his mum Judy has suggested it’s time to call it quits. But I’ve watched all of his heats this year, and in my opinion he’s still capable of beating anyone on tour, and let’s not forget that he won the WQS Volcom Pipe Pro two months ago. He just hasn’t been putting good heats together, and he’s been meeting some fired-up rookies in the early rounds, like Lennox’s Stu Kennedy at Snapper Rocks, and Leo in WA. Guys like Stu and Leo know that beating Kelly is a huge stepping stone to fame, and they have nothing to lose, so understandably they go out there and surf like there is no tomorrow, whereas in fact it seems likely that there will be very few tomorrows for Kelly Slater.
Kelly has quit the tour before, of course, most notably after his sixth world title in 1998, when he took a year off and went on the Quiksilver Crossing adventures. He got bored pretty quickly and came back renewed and dangerous, and went on to almost double his trophy tally in the new century. But that was then and this is now, and there are a few major differences. His advanced age, for starters.
No one else has won world tour events in their forties, and generational change is happening all around Slater right now. Mick Fanning has called time out and may not come back, and Taj Burrow announced his retirement at Margaret River last weekend, before going down to the much younger Nat Young. Mick is 34, Taj 37. And how much longer will the injured Bede Durbidge (33) and Joel Parkinson (35) be on tour? Kelly must be wondering if he really wants to be the last man standing.
And there’s another factor – judge fatigue. Slater is still capable of landing a huge punt or carving a critical line or getting deeper in the barrel than almost anyone, but some of his go-to moves are just not getting scored the way they used to. At Margaret River in the two heats he surfed, he was scored down for a top turn cover up tube and his signature foam climb carving 360-degree turn. I thought both those waves were brilliant, but you could almost hear the judges yawning as they punched in their scores.
I think Kelly will pull the pin this year, but I very much doubt that he wants to go out at the bottom of the rankings. I think we can expect some fireworks when the tour hits Cloudbreak, Chopes and J-Bay over the next few months, and then that announcement that we hoped would never come.
Still Crawling
Speaking of veterans who should never retire, we caught James Reyne’s set supporting Chris Isaak as the guests of Sirromet Wines at the Day On The Green at their Mount Cotton winery in Brisbane last Sunday. I can’t remember the last time I heard Jimmy live, but if anything he’s gotten better with age. He doesn’t get much change out of 60 these days, but as he worked through the Australian Crawl catalogue, I was transported back more than 30 years to concerts like the one at Bells Beach the year that Crawl actually co-sponsored the pro event.
The Crawl were way ahead of their time, and not surprisingly, the songs all stand the test of time. But so does Jimmy Reyne. I wonder if he still surfs. Back in the day, he wasn’t bad, but the really keen surfers in the band were guitarists Brad Robinson and Guy McDonagh, both of them sadly dead way too young. I surfed with them a bit in those years, in Sydney and in Victoria, and Peter Crawford and I once did a shoot in the water at Whale Beach for a magazine feature. When their manager looked at the shots on the lightbox, it was decided that Brad and Guy would cover the action, while James looked considerably better walking along the beach.
But hey, the boy could sing! Still can. I really didn’t want his set to end, but then again, Chris Isaak was brilliant, and hilarious to boot. Thanks Sirromet.
