"I feel like I can improve my surfing without even
going in the water.“
The sports journalist Will Swanton, a winner of multiple
writing trophies, has released an archived interview with Kelly
Slater on the occasion of Kelly’s fiftieth
birthday.
The scene is the outside verandah of the Rainbow Bay Surf Club
during the now defunct Quiksilver Pro event at Snapper
Rocks.
Kelly sucks a spoon he’s been using to eat his yoghurt “like
he’s smoking a pipe.”
“I can practise in my mind,” he tells Swanton. “I
can look at a wave and I imagine myself on that wave. I literally
get the feeling in my body and in my muscles of how it’s going to
be when I ride that wave. I didn’t surf a wave for three weeks
before I got here. I went out and it felt like I’d been surfing
every day. It’s a spiritual thing for me. It’s just ingrained in my
muscles and connected to my mind. Somehow, I feel like I can
improve my surfing without even going in the water.“
Talk turns to Snapper’s crowds.
“Two days ago, I had someone‘s leash wrapped around my neck out
there. I hit a kid yesterday. I fell on him because I was trying to
avoid a different kid. You get out of the way of one kid and run
into another one. It’s frustrating for all of us as surfers and
humans.”
And Snapper’s hierarchical void.
“Pipeline has a tight takeoff zone. It’s a dangerous wave and
you ignore the pecking order there at your peril. You know who the
locals are at Pipe, you know who the good guys are, you know who’s
going to get the sets, you know who’s going to get the best waves.
You know the guys who are going to utilise the waves in the best
way.
“That’s nowhere near what happens here at Snapper, unless it’s
behind the rock or you’re at Kirra on those rare special days. On
the normal days here, you just constantly get run over. You run
into people yourself. It’s the same for me, it’s the same for you,
it’s the same for everyone. It makes me think a pecking order is a
good thing.
“There’s some weird stuff that goes with pecking orders but it
does create a sense of order, for better or worse. And whatever you
think about localism, a pecking order allows people to fit in where
they should. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to have a pecking order
at a place where the wave breaks for a mile. I actually got a few
waves at Snapper yesterday but nearly every single wave, there was
someone in my way. You want to be Zen but you feel yourself
tightening up.
“A friend of mine was out there and we were laughing because I
was losing it a bit. I said, you know what? I think I need to go to
the beach and dry off. Press the reset button and paddle back out
because I really am losing it here.
“You just have to get out of there sometimes. You see people
paddling in and they’re just … defeated. It’s kind of hilarious
because you know it’s probably going to happen to you. You don’t
want it to happen to you. You do everything you can to make sure it
doesn‘t happen to you. And then it happens to you.“
Slater, then, pivots to human’s base needs.
“We’re so pre-programmed, for some reason, on the caveman level.
We’re pre-programmed for survival. The most basic levels are: I
need to eat, I need to kill an animal, I need to prove myself, I
need to get the girl so I can procreate – all those weird genetics
and encodings that are built into us. They’re present in all of
us.”
Impale yourself on the rest of the
interview here!
