By Phil Jarratt
THE weather has been beautiful these past few days, but as per usual I have succumbed to a bout of man flu that always seems to hit me when I leave the tropics for the vicious Noosa winter.
Anyway, in the midst of the coughing and hacking (most unpleasant for all around me) I have been trying to get on with the workload while skipping marginal surf sessions in the hope that I can kick this sucker quick time. (On my last return a couple of months ago I was sidelined for three weeks, and I ain’t going there again.)
So if this column feels a little scattered it is only because it is following the pattern of a clogged brain, and please save the smart remarks for when I’m feeling better. Meanwhile, as I remember it, the last time we spoke the Billabong Pro Tahiti had just begun with desperate flat days in sight. Well, as we all now know, it finally picked up enough to run and in fact finals day was pretty substantial Chopes, although definitely code green.
In the normal course of events, you’d say what happened that day was a one-off, never to be repeated, freakish occurrence in surfing history.
A 44-year-old man who hadn’t been in a final for three years beat a 23-year-old who is generally considered to be the best surfer in the world today. To add to the scenario, the older man had been the younger man’s mentor since his first forays into the forbidding waves of Pipeline.
The older man was, of course, Kelly Slater, the younger John Florence. I watched the final stages of the Billabong Pro Tahiti that morning, and from the very beginning, I knew that Kelly was going to prevail. For starters, he knocked out Tahitian Bruno Santos in the quarters with two perfect 10s, which is a good start to anyone’s day, but it was not that. I could see it in the champ’s body-English. When Kelly is on, he’s really on, and there are few people in any sport who could match that combination of instinct and determination.
I know of what I speak because I’ve known Kelly for 20 years and almost a decade ago I tracked him around the world, bidding for his attention in a world full of distractions while we worked on a book. We taped sessions in Hawaii, Fiji, France, all over Australia and up and down the California coast. He provided access to dozens of high-flying friends, including Eddie Vedder and Pamela Anderson, who was utterly charming over a home-cooked breakfast at her Malibu home. But at times he was the most frustrating, infuriating working partner.
I titled my introduction, “Waiting For Kelly”. When he read the manuscript Kelly said, “Wow, that’s giving it to me straight!”
One of his closest friends later told me, “When Kelly keeps you waiting a long time, it’s not that he’s being rude to you, it’s just that he’s being super nice to the person before you.”
The book, Kelly Slater: For The Love, was a success in most markets, and I think that together we succeeded in depicting a champion in the prime of life, a man of many talents and even more interests, a man who would have succeeded in whatever he decided to pursue. Kelly could be a flake at times, but the man I discovered underneath that was one I feel privileged to know, a man of ideas as well as action, a man of warmth as well as steely determination.
One of my fondest memories of the long interview process is of a night at the Tantina de la Playa, in Bidart, France, a favourite restaurant of both of us. The Billabong Pro Mundaka had finished that afternoon, and after the long drive back to France, Kelly was in a relaxed and expansive mood. Over several bottles of good red wine, we covered everything, from the existence and nature of God to an insider’s view (Kelly is of Syrian extraction) of the Palestine situation. Suddenly it was two in the morning and we had been the only customers for several hours. The waiters stood by discreetly, smiling when we looked at them. When I switched off the recorder and called it a night, Kelly signed memorabilia for the staff and then we had to sit back down and drink rounds of manzana with them before staggering into the morning.
My most embarrassing memory is of a surf session at Cloudbreak in Fiji, when I showed my intent by paddling hard for a set wave. Slater and his pal Shane Dorian paddled aside and let me have it. I took the drop and turned hard before hearing a piercing whistle. The young free-surfing prodigy Clay Marzo had been lurking up the line and whistling at anyone who started to take off on him. I presumed he was somewhere in this pit behind me and turned the board harder to push through the lip and off the back. Slater and Dorian were shaking their heads and thumping their boards in frustration. “You just don’t frickin’ do that!” an exasperated Slater shouted at me. I looked up the reef and saw Clay Marzo, still sitting on his board.
I learned later that a lot better surfers than me had been yelled at in the line-up by Kelly Slater, who is human after all. His rage, however, was momentary and the incident was never mentioned again. But it still haunts me.
But it isn’t the staggering weight of his achievements that make me such a huge Kelly Slater fan. It is the fact that surfing is not the man. By being so much more than just a surfer, he has elevated our sport, our culture, more than anyone else since Duke Kahanamoku, and I have the deepest respect for him for that.
