Kelly Slater goes on the radio and reveals deep-ish
secrets!
The great Kelly Slater was on Dan Patrick’s
radio show yesterday and gave a wide ranging, very pleasant
interview. Watching Kelly sit in a cute flannel, feet close
together, back straight and answer questions as sincerely as
possible is heart warming and even the crustiest hater would have
to agree.
But wait. Does anyone really hate Kelly Slater? Oh sure we
cajole sometimes, for fun, but also and obviously deeply respect
etc. Does anyone actually hate him though? I have certainly never
encountered such a person.
In any case, the interview is worth a watch but if you are in a
hurry here is a breakdown.
On being competitive…
I’m competitive at sleeping. I had an older brother who beat me up
and told me he’d beat me at anything so…
On the best weather for surf…
Not too strong wind.
On surfing Mavericks…
I’ve only surfed Mavs three times and almost drowned twice.
On drowning…
Super scary until it’s euphoric.
On holding breath…
I can hold for five minutes.
On what he writes down on tax return…
Human. Just kidding, pro surfer and it’s just so weird.
On being a great surfer translating to other
sports…
Ok skater. Ok snowboarder.
On where trophies are kept…
In a pile behind the house and we just got tired of looking at them
so put them out on the road…
On favorite surfboard…
A hollow wooden board from Al Merrick after I won 5th world
title.
On surfing naked…
I do it at night.
On skinny dipping with Dan Patrick…
No.
On where he is most famous…
Brazil and Australia
On strangest reaction from a fan…
I signed a dog one. And had a French stalker. Straight out of some
bunny boiling movie. Sleeping in the lobby and writing all over the
elevator in lipstick. And she had an infant sort of child. Really
bizarre.
On his day rate for giving surf lessons…
How much you got? Just kidding. Free. I’m a soul surfer, man.
On being retired…
No. I’m full time still. There have been rumors that I’ve been
retired since 1998.
On partying…
I’ve done it a couple weeks.
On Baywatch…
Yeah man, I was partying. (Ironically)
On surfing with a hangover…
Yeah. Oh yeah. (Again, ironically)
On being the Michael Jordan of surfing…
I don’t know how to answer these questions. My mom beat it into me
not to talk about myself.
On which is tougher, surfing or golf…
(too golfy for me to understand)
On his who he gets mistaken for…
Christian Slater
Watch in full here!
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Technique Critique: Kelly Slater!
By Michael Ciaramella
Old dog learns unconventional versions of new
tricks!
Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. Derek has tasked me
with critiquing the best ever surfer and I am completely
undergunned. It’s true that all my victims are twice or thrice the
surfer I’ll ever be, but they are not The King. To pick apart his
flaws feels nearly blasphemous. Still, the heavily subjective truth
must prevail.
Like Medina, Kelly hasn’t many recent clips floating around the
ether. I can’t recall a proper video section he’s worked on since
Innersection in 2011.
Another difficult I’ve faced is critiquing someone whose surfing
has changed dramatically over the past three decades. Anything I
say could be easily refuted by citing sources as far back as 1990,
which puts me in a delicate position. For the sake of this piece,
I’ll speak on Kelly’s surfing of the past five-to-ten years, while
cross-referencing more dated techniques when necessary.
Just to whet your palate, here’s a little clip from Slater’s
science moat.
I’ll attempt to explain Kelly’s surfing through three
categories: turns, barrels, and airs.
Turns
At forty-five, Kelly is still producing some of the most
impressive pocket gouges in the world. When he finds a steep
section and decides to let one rip, Slater’s ability to penetrate
the wall and discharge massive amounts of water is right up
there with Mick, Jordy, and John. But it just doesn’t happen as
much as it used to.
Nowadays Slater tends to get off-balance, bog, and fall
through maneuvers that he’d historically do in his sleep. Kelly
once carried a Curren-esque style, but in recent times he’s become
less flexible in the knees, has gotten a bit wild with the arms,
and seems to have changed his footwork on the board. The best
surfers appear preternaturally fixed to their stick and deeply
attuned to the wave, and it’s rare to find Slater in that form
today.
So, what gives?
It’d be easy to blame his age. The man is damn near fifty in a
sport where the last three champs average a mere twenty-five. But
while his body’s slow deterioration has surely taken its toll, I
believe Slater’s boards to be most culpable in the decline of his
turning ability.
I’m no board expert but from what I’ve gathered, Slater’s been
working to create boards that are shorter and more curved than what
he was riding ten years ago. He wants to fit tighter, more powerful
turns in very steep sections of the wave, and his new shapes do
just that. The shortening of the board means there’s less nose to
catch in the transition, and the curvature allows for full usage of
the rail, especially through positions where straighter boards may
flatten out. This concept works really well for one section on any
given wave, but it’s not the key to consistent, fluid surfing.
By riding boards that work for one particular turn on one
particular section, Kelly’s taking half’a step forward and three
steps back. The King’s surfing was best on boards that facilitated
speed through maneuvers, as opposed to being built for the
maneuvers themselves. Kelly’s grandeur came from his ability to
read waves and link turns better than the rest, but his current
stable of boards fights that notion head-on.
Barrels
Perhaps still the greatest barrel rider in the world, it’d be
hard to criticize anything Kelly does in or around the crystal
cathedral. His ability to make late drops, set impossible lines,
and remain on his feet through a gauntlet of chandeliers and
foamballs has resulted in more tens than Al Hunt could ever
correctly count.
While Kelly’s approach to the barrel may seem reactionary and
mindless, his interviews tell a different story.
Slater’s ability to verbalize mid-wave thought processes is a gift
to the surfing world, as it demonstrates how much brain power goes
into technical barrel-riding. Kelly is constantly reading the lip
and adjusting his line, all while maintaining a stable base and
using different techniques to control his speed. He is a virtuoso
of the vortex.
Buuuuut I still think he rides too far back on the board
sometimes. See the wavepool video above? At 2:49, Kelly sets up for
a long tube across the inside section, but for some reason plants
his foot on the tail block, making him appear squirrely and out of
control. If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times — the
more forward you ride on your board, the more ability you have to
control your speed and maintain a steady line. Perhaps it’s
different because the pool doesn’t have a trough, but Slater’s
also done it at Pipe, plus Steph seemed to have it pretty
dialed.
Airs
By simultaneously destroying Kelly’s surfing and proving him to
be more extraterrestrial than ever imagined, airs have certainly
had their effect on the Slater legacy. Once Dane and Gabby and John
came along and started to produce video-level punts in competition,
a switch was flipped in Kelly’s mind. He became obsessed with the
idea of remaining modern in his craft, and that meant matching the
best of the next generation.
As a result we got to see some wild shit from Slater. The
New York air. The Bells air. The Portugal air — the first ever frontside
540(/720) in the history of the sport, performed by a forty-three
year old. That comma is significant.
So Kelly’s proven that he’s able to stick ‘em every now and
then, but are they… good? Aside from the objective positives that
they’re massive and spinny, most of Kelly’s airs are performed in a
non-functional fashion (Bells air excluded). Instead of the
coordinated, tightly wound techniques of John and Filipe, Kelly
throws his airs with a singular focus — to ride away. The man
flings himself off major sections, rotates as quickly possible,
sometimes throws in an accidental grab, and manages to land on his
feet. I’d call it a fluke if he didn’t pull them off so damn
often.
But while Kelly’s airs have brought him praise and the rare heat
win, I’d argue that in his pursuit of “progressive surfing”
he’s forfeited the very techniques that made him so great in the
past. Where Kelly used to be a master blaster with the back foot,
his surfing has become significantly more front-footed with the
aerial transition, leading to a deterioration of his turns and
natural style. He seems too conscious when approaching aerials, as
if trying to remember how to make certain moves instead of allowing
the body to work organically. This has then translated to his
turns and caused, in my opinion, his current trend of unbalance and
falling excessively.
It’s important to note that front-footed surfing isn’t
inherently bad. In fact, all the best progressive surfers are great
at utilizing the front foot — from John to Julian to Jordy — but
this technique is difficult to pick up later in life.
Think of Mick and Joel: two classic, rail-first surfers.
Ever seen them try a nose-pick reverse? They mostly
appear awkward and forced, and the same applies to the best
surfer of all time. So why are three of surfing’s greats unable to
properly perform a twelve-year-old’s throwaway maneuver? Because
they didn’t grow up in an era where that was a widely
utilized technique, and therefore missed the window to
establish the necessary muscle memory to throw a
legit nose-jive. Old dogs new tricks etc.
In sum, if Kelly had stuck to his former technique and
surfboards, he’d probably be surfing better than he does right now.
BUT, and that is a colossal but, he’d be so much
less endearing. Kelly is a dynamic little firecracker
and we wouldn’t want him any other way!
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Watch: Nazaré Irons out French Girl!
By Derek Rielly
Justine Dupont has a swing at world's biggest
shorebreak…
There’s two things we can safely agree on.
First, getting towed into a big wave ain’t hard. If you can stand,
and you got a ski, you can ride twenty-foot waves. Second, getting
towed into a twenty-foot wave when you’re not ready can be an
easy way of getting dissolved.
In this compelling short, we see the French surfer Justin
Dupont, who is rated twelfth on the women’s qualifying series,
towed into thirty-foot waves at the Portuguese shorebreak
called Nazaré. It mightn’t be hollow, but all that juice will tear
your head off and crush your lungs. A few years ago I’d interviewed
Maya Gabeira the day after she’d been brought back to life via CPR
after a wipeout there that also broke her leg.
“It hit me on my chest and it blew out my life jacket and it
really hurt me. I went down, down, down underwater with no air and
seeing black,” said Maya.
When I had talked about Nazaré being all big-wave schmaltz,
Shane Dorian had told me: “It’s super dangerous… it’s
chaotic… the water’s really angry.”
He ain’t lying.
Watch!
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Your-Way-Too-Early 2017 Tour Preview!
By Derek Rielly
A new grand-slam format. Last year for Margs. John
John to own the first half.
Tour fever. It’s practically in the air!
But you won’t be getting any taste of the high life until
mid-March when the tour’s first of 11 events unskirts at Snapper
Rocks. What’s that give us? Almost six weeks of dead time to beat
our tambourines.
Here’s what’s going to be gradually unwrapped over the course of
2017.
Filipe Toledo will surprise no one and win
Snapper: I’m hardly back out on a limb if I posit that
Filipe is unbeatable at Snapper. Three years ago, he secreted his
hot civet musk all over the little rights, rewriting how fast,
high, and tight, a man could surf. If he didn’t blow his hip out in
his semi-final with Matt Wilkinson last year, he would’ve won the
event, surfed at Bells and Margarets, and taken the title down to
Pipe. Pointedly, the Wilko-for-world-champ narrative would never
have been written.
It’ll be the last year the tour will open with Snapper,
Margaret River, Bells, Rio: The world’s best surfers
in the world’s, uh, not best, but pretty good, wait, used to be
desirable, waves. In the upcoming super rationalisation of the
tour, Margarets will disappear and Bells will hang by a
thread.
Kelly Slater will surprise: There’ll be
no experimentation with boards in heats. The turns will be more
ornate. The old aristocrat, in his final orbit of the tour, will
shine. A thank-you note to a life that’s served him well.
John John will swing out of the first half with a
ten-thousand point lead: Now he gets it. Those
outrageously clean pocket-turns score. The world champion
knows he can sleepwalk through to the quarters, dressing up the
harder heats with jumps when necessary. Third, First, Third,
Second. And then? Fiji, Tahiti, Europe.
The rookies will live up expectations: In
other words, be completely overwhelmed by the superiority of the
incumbent surfers.
A new grand slam format will be
floated: It ain’t a secret that the WSL’s four-day
events (seven days if it’s a guy-gal combo) are too cumbersome to
succeed in getting the kick the WSL wants. Even the most consistent
wave in the world isn’t going to gift a week of good surf, and
through all the tides. What’ll be kicked around is a grand-slam
format where the top eight surfers in the world are flown into a
pumping swell. If it happens it’ll redefine the game.
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Update: “Lamest shit I’ve ever seen!”
By Chas Smith
Welcome to @surferfilms!
A previous rumor suggesting that
Surfing magazine’s Instagram had been sold for $3.5
million has come under scrutiny and is now likely discredited.
Jimmy Wilson, the great Surfing photo editor, responded
just moments ago:
This is incorrect. They changed the @surfing account to
@surferfilms (it had more followers than surfer by the way) and
during the switch grabbed the @surfing handle before anyone else
could take it. Lamest shit I’ve ever seen.
Questions remain. Will @surfing’s younger, larger ex-audience
thrill at the slow-mo longboarding videos @surferfilms posts or
will they revolt en masse, smashing expletives into iPhone screens
on their way out? Will the new @surfing be allowed to grow or kept
at 1 follower and private in order to make @surfer feel better
about itself? Will @surferfilms delete all the images of
Surfing‘s staff from the feed and all the images of
progressive surfing? Will Surfer‘s staff look at the
pictures of progressive surfing and wonder, “What’re these darn
kids doing on their surfboards? Why do their surfboards have three
fins in them?”
Most pressing, will Surfer officially change its
tagline from “The Bible of the Sport” to “The Inertia of Print”
next week or the week after that?