Kelly Slater reveals the fateful real estate decision that cost his family billions but transformed surfing in new tell-all interview

"Our destiny, our fate, was to be at the beach."

Fresh off retiring for the twenty-seventh time, Kelly Slater, who finished the regular season equal last with Deivid Silva, has given a tell-all interview to the 1988 world champ Barton Lynch. 

The stories, the quotes, the anecdotes are as rich as you might imagine when two men who’ve known and trusted each other of thirty-five years meet with loose tongues and time on their hands. 

To know where to begin with faced with the treasure trove which is Kelly Slater’s remarkable life is difficult. 

He is born to a one-eyed fisherman-surfer Dad, an alcoholic, who rode switch on lefts so he could see the face of the wave and a Mom, who’s been married before, who works at NASA. They live at Coco Beach in the shadow of what used to be the world’s greatest space program. 

How the Slaters ended up in Coco Beach, Florida, is the most remarkable of all the stories. His Mama Judy tells him that her and Daddy Stephen Slater were driving through the ski town of Telluride, Colorado, in the late sixties and were…this…close to buying half the town for two hundred gees and setting up a mountain lifestyle. 

These days, Telluride is the home of the rich, the famous, the beautiful. Tom Cruise sold his ranch there for forty mill, and ten, twenty, thirty mill for a house or ranch, don’t surprise anyone in those parts. It’s been described as a “crucible of billionaires and ski bums.”

“My Mom told my Dad, let’s move to the mountains and live in the snow,” says Kelly Slater. “My Dad was, like, no, I want to be at the beach. So, I mean, if we owned half of Telluride we’re probably be billionaires at this point.”

“Well, you’d be a snowboarder,” says Barton. 

“Probably be a skier, you know, back then and maybe I’d understand the snow and the mountains the way I do the ocean. But our destiny, our fate, was to be at the beach. My Dad wanted to camp and fish and hang out at the beach and have a beer with the boys. So we ended up the beach and I wouldn’t change a thing.” 

An essential two hours.