“It always comes home to roost…and there’s a lot of that for me right now with an impending birth.”
Earlier today, an online sleuth screenshot a comment from Kelly Slater’s daughter Taylor below an interview her daddy made with his long-time pal Tom Carroll.
Although it was subsequently deleted, whether by Surfline or by Taylor isn’t clear and we ain’t gonna run the screenshot out of a, yeah, surprising respect for the Champ, it revealed a window into the life of a man facing the consequences of decisions he made when he was still a kid.
Three weeks ago, Kelly Slater and his Chinese-American girlfriend Kalani Miller, revealed Miller’s pregnancy in a poignant black-and-white short shared to both their social media channels. Set to the moving sounds of the old Ben Harper tune The Three of Us, we see Slater, fifty-two, and thirty-six-year-old Kalani strolling the Hawaiian sands, embracing, Slater’s hands wrapped protectively around Kalani’s pregnant stomach.
The interview with Tom, filmed on the stairs overlooking Winkipop and created by surf forecaster Surfline, is Kelly Slater at his vulnerable best. Slater chokes back tears as he lists, one by one, the cavalcade of dead friends, Shmoo, Mikala, Dozer Dave, Jimmy Buffett, Derek Ho, as well as the living hell of old sparring partner Sunny Garcia.
“Fuck, it’s been heartbreaking, man,” says Kelly Slater. “Getting old sucks, man.”
“My heart was made of stone,” he says.
It’s this comment that provoked the reaction from his daughter Taylor.
To Tom Carroll, he admits the impending birth of his second kid has kicked open a door that’s been shut for decades: “There’s a lot of deep stuff there for me that I’m trying to unwind myself with my own daughter who’s twenty-seven now and married. And when she was born I was just starting, the thick of my career and I had these lofty goals and dreams and ambitions. And, to be perfectly honest, that caused some suffering for her and for me as well. But for her, it was unbeknownst to me at the time because my sights were set on this thing.”
Poignantly, “It always comes home to roost at some point and there’s a lot of that for me right now with an impending birth. There’s a lot of excitement but also some heartache in there, lessons to look at.
