Kelly Slater threatens retirement for twenty-sixth consecutive year!

Champ talks quitting after his elimination from Sunset Pro by baby-faced surfer with “plumpest and most spankable bottom in surfing”.

The world’s second oldest active pro athlete, Kelly Slater, has threatened to call it quits for the twenty-sixth consecutive year after being eliminated from the Hurley Pro at Sunset Beach. 

The just-turned fifty-two-year-old Kelly Slater, who is four years younger than the still-competing pro soccer player Kazuyoshi Miura, was narrowly beaten by Australia’s golden girl Ethan Ewing, a baby-faced twenty-five-year-old Australian with the “plumpest and most spankable bottom in surfing”.

Following the loss, Kelly Slater said he was “questioning competing to be honest with you… My confidence isn’t super high. I’ve probably surfed four sessions since [the Lexus] Pipe [Pro]. And I haven’t surfed in about something like five or six days. I just haven’t been practiced up. It doesn’t help the confidence. But I felt fine out there.”

The week previous, Kelly Slater referenced his recent hip surgery as reason, perhaps, for his inability to shine in the inconsistent three-foot waves at Pipe

“I’ve got to figure out if this hip’s good enough to compete in waves that I’ve got to do turns and stuff. About eight, 10 days ago, I had a surf and it felt absolutely terrible. I thought, ‘I shouldn’t even be in the water.’ Then I stayed out of the water for about four or five days.”

The first time Kelly Slater retired was in 1998, the then six-time world champ having just-turned twenty-six. He competed sporadically over the next few years, winning Pipe in 1999 and the Eddie in 2002, before re-joining the tour to take on Andy Irons head-on, hinting at retirement every year thereafter.

In 2018, and piggybacking Joel Parkinson’s retirement announcement at J-Bay, he said he’d officially quit by the end of the following year at age forty-seven. 

Other retirement announcements can be found here, here, here and here. 

What happens to pro surfing post-Slater?

It will lose its hub, its fulcrum, its measure of everything good, in and out of the water. There isn’t another surfer, on tour, or off tour for that matter, who can speak with the authority of the entire game behind him.

When Kelly Slater opens his mouth or taps his computer’s keyboard, the surfing world shifts to his whim and his want.

For 33 years, professional surfing has been carried by this one single man.

If he goes, does pro surfing follow?