“I Almost Died!” Kelly Slater’s Sleepwalking Stair Plunge Shocks Surf Community

"I'm so lucky!"

Only three days after announcing the imminent arrival of his third child and one day after his tremendous ass was hailed as the secret to his surfing greatness, Kelly Slater has revealed he almost died after falling down stairs at his holiday accommo in Queenstown, New Zealand.

The 54-year-old Slater, one of several high-profile ambassadors competing in the pro-am event that begins Tuesday in Arrowtown on New Zealand’s South Island, described the incident to the Otago Daily Times.

Exhausted after travel, Slater fell asleep in one bedroom of his accommodation while his Chinese girlfriend Kalani Miller settled their lil boy Tao.

Dazed, and a little confused, Slater sleepwalked toward the other room, eyes closed, hands groping along the wall until he tumbled down a staircase.

The fall came less than four months after Slater underwent hip replacement surgery, making the tumble particularly unwelcome.

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Fortunately, he caught himself after only two of the 15 steps, jolting awake with a surge of adrenaline.

“I was like, ‘Oh, I almost died,’” he said. “I’m so lucky.”

Despite lingering back pain from the incident, Slater was back on the course the next day, testing Millbrook’s greens for the first time.

He played much of his round with borrowed clubs.

New to the South Island, Slater said he planned to sample a few holes at the nearby Hills course later in the week.

Slater, who holds the distinction of being both the youngest (at 20) and oldest (at 39) world surfing champion across his record 11 titles, is no stranger to golf.

He plays off a 2.0 handicap and logs around 150 rounds a year, often at exclusive venues like Te Arai Links on New Zealand’s Northland coast. He is paired in the pro-am with German professional Dominic Foos of the Asian Tour.

You might remember an interview from a few years back when Slater revealed it was Ben Hogan’s seminal golf technique book from 1985, “Ben Hogan’s Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf”, that gave him the impetus to re-examine his approach to riding waves.

“I read Ben Hogan’s Five Lessons and it got me visualising the plane of the swing and I started thinking, well, there’s mechanics in surfing, the body has to work with the board and the wave in a certain way and so I started to relate where my shoulders were and my stance was and the sequencing of my body as I rotated or compressed or pushed with my legs. And I started to envision it in a different way and so I came up with some theories of how the body relates to the board and the wave.

“I could always find what I call a neutral position no matter what part of the wave I was on, and from there I could go right or left really easily or I could stall and increase my speed. I really got it down to the basics. There was a really basic move that I used to get myself in the right position. Basically, I trained myself by grabbing the rail of my board when I turned to the left…”

“And what that did was drop my back shoulder, push my hip, forward and compress me down its the board and kept me in a really stable position. A lot of surfers will turn and drop their front shoulders and put their weight on their front heel and it’s easy to fall. So it really centred my weight to my feet. It became my neutral stance. I’d relate to golf, a strong grip, a neutral grip, a weak grip.”

So, not just great ass!