An Excerpt from IN DEEP, The collected Surf Writings of Matt George, Di Angelo Pubishing

On February 5th of 2022, when Kelly Slater won his eighth Pipeline Masters title only six days before his 50th birthday, a full 30 years after his first Pipeline Masters title, I wasn’t surprised at all. At this, our sports most prestigious tournament, I had already seen him do it seven times. But it did make me think about the last time I spent some time with him. It was during his summer sojourn to Bali in 2020. A miraculous visit considering the labyrinth of red tape one had to go through to travel anywhere during the Covid-19 global lockdown. Rumor was he got in on an essential business visa, and that made a lot of sense to me, Bali had the best waves on the planet at the time. And though an immigration agent might have a hard time buying it, waves are his business. And he has monetized them on land as well as sea. Let us not forget that this man manufactured his own Ocean in the middle of California’s central valley that features the most extraordinarily perfect artificial surfing wave in history. The Surf Ranch, now a spectacular playground, literally, for the rich and famous. Yes, Kelly Slater is a businessman.

Thinking back now on his visit to Bali, the fallout from that incendiary visit is still descending on the streets of Kuta. After all, it was akin to a royal mission of reassurance during a murderous global pandemic. And man, did he make the most of it.

It would be hard to find a surfer who loves to go surfing outside the contest arena more than him. Though rumors flew that he was in Bali to seek a healing from a barrage of personal subterfuge in his life, his career, finances, his girl, the vagaries of his anti-vax stance that had enraged fans. Yet I say incendiary visit because his surfing here in Bali was electrifying. And it is so hard not to say “as usual”. Every day, absolutely every day, for long, sunburned hours, he would light up line-ups from Java to Sumbawa. Ripping Keramas, Desert Point, G-Land, Scar reef, Padang Padang, Uluwatu, Kuta Beach and more. Kelly, with the help of local wave whisperer Nick Chong, seemed to be wherever the surf was best during what had been the best season of surf in Bali in the last quarter century. As an island known for its healing properties, perhaps he instinctively chose this environment to explore his introspection as well as to recharge his extroverted approach to every wave he catches. Observers herewitnessed his explosive sessions with a sense of wonder. Kelly quietly went about his days, attending the odd evening gathering and working closely with local shaper Mike Woo on top secret surfboard designs said to be based on the ergonomics of a white shark. That really lit up the rumor mill. Yet just short of his 49th birthday, Kelly Slater was still making his statement in the water as the best surfer the world has ever seen. And nowhere was this more evident than in the simple beachbreaks that front Kuta Beach. “In a way”, said top photographer Pete Frieden, a fellow Floridian who has photographed Kelly since he was a child, “Kelly’s beachbreak surfing in Bali was like a return to Florida. Like Sebastian Inlet on the best day of the century”. Again, rumors flew as to where Kelly would be surfing every day, as they would around any surf celebrity who was tearing around a small island on a scooter with a surfboard in its side rack. But that Kelly spent his last days at Kuta, concentrating on the perfect sandbars that have formed just off the downtown beaches was a fact. Sandbars, phenomena in themselves, the likes of which have not been seen for years. The product of the pandemic actually. With no tourist industry to use and abuse them, all the waterways both above and below ground in Bali had been flowing full and trash free onto the sea. Distributing their sands to their rightful homes, forming a series of humping peaks from the Airport jetties to Canggu. A mid to high tide summer wonderland of playful surf. Not the famed Indonesian barrels, but more like quarter pipes where Kelly could jam his rail work and pop his aerials. And that was one of the more startling revelations. Kelly Slater as a master aerialist. Setting up his airs on his all black secretive twin fin designs, made of entirely new composite compounds, at twice the speed of anyone. Kelly was hitting his airs on these superboards with commitment and an 80% success rate. To say nothing of his other skills. Carving 360’s, massive roundhouse cutbacks, fin humming bottom turns. Though everyone else wanted to be surfing near him, the line-up cleared the runway once he took off.

“Do you think he is doing this as practice for the Title final at Trestles?” Said Arya Subiyakto, one of the most respected surfing figures in Indonesia, “Because if he is, Toledo and Medina are in a shitload of trouble”. By contrast, Kelly had a very quiet presence on land. Sitting alone under his favorite shade tree, semi-concealed from small knots of tourists on the beach, Kelly looked meditative between surf sessions. And it was a quiet goodbye to the island as Kelly left the water for the last time of the summer season in Bali. Walking up the beach a little girl, who had no idea who he was, asked him what was on the deck of his surfboard. Kelly took the time to explain the function of surfboard wax and had her scrape her fingernails across the deck of a surfboard that he would not have let another soul on earth even touch. I met him on the promenade to say goodbye and good luck out there on the pro tour. We chatted a bit and compared notes about the trouble we were having with our women. My wife and his long time girlfriend. Like most men we left it with laughter at how women can just be colossal pains in the ass and there isn’t a goddamn thing we can do about it. Another little kid approached with his beaming Australian family and Kelly took the time to shake his hand. The little kid was catatonic to be standing next to his hero, couldn’t say a word. Kelly asked his parents his name and then crouched down to the kids level and just looked him in the eyes. “You’re gonna make it, Alex”, was all Kelly said with a light squeeze of the shoulder. The kid staggered away with his proud family. Then, sure that our paths would cross again, Kelly and I shook hands and said a simple goodbye and I grabbed my board and paddled out into the surf.

Out beyond the breaking waves I sat on my board and took in a sky that the sunset had set ablaze. And I couldn’t help but think about Kelly. Especially about our ages and how he has refined his to the point that at fifty he still strikes fear into competitors who weren’t even born by the time he won his first world title. How he now had a whole world behind him and and a whole world ahead. Of how surfing is the whole world to him and how that whole world is his. Considering his competitive fervor over his astonishing career, I wondered if there was ever an end of the day for Kelly, or if there was only tomorrow. And I thought of how he is too old to die young, a living legend already an heirloom of surfing’s history. He stands atop Olympus. The master of the only sport on earth that takes place on a dynamic moving surface. And I wondered if it would ever be enough for him. If you can’t ever get enough of what you want, you will always be poor. And I hoped that someday he would be rich in that aspect, finally have enough of winning, I really did. Like a moth that can no longer blame the flame, with a body that must, like an aging fighter jet still in service, be showing signs of metal fatigue, just how much further can this man go? How much further would he need to go? A tiger can only last as long as its teeth. If it wasn’t winning the Pipeline Masters against the best 20 year old surfers in the world at 50 years old, what possible crowning achievement would become his chorale finale of his final symphony? What would it take to distill the torments of a life of ferocious competition into a message in a bottle that he could finally toss into the sea? What would it be that could contain all the creativity and rage and redemption and poetic fury of his life and lay it in clover as a thing of wonder and beauty and vitality laid to rest? What could take all this suffering and this desire and all this winning and set it in a halcyon chalice to be regarded forever as something incandescent, something superhuman?

I surfed a wave to shore then. And as I strolled up the beach I thought of those infamous words that I had written about Kelly over thirty years previous. The final lines of that first profile I wrote about him, about regardless of all that was going on with him at seventeen, that he still slept like an angel. And it stopped me in my tracks. Devil knows they still rang true. The world was still whirling around Kelly like a maelstrom as he lay in the eye of the storm. And it still hadn’t got a hold of him just yet. At fifty, he was still going. And going. No, all the madness that the waning fame and fortunes of retirement could bring would have to wait for Kelly Slater just a little while longer. And right then, right there, I could only pray that he still sleeps like an angel.

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