The Best Surfing I’ve Ever Seen: Taylor Steele
Featuring Kelly Slater in Barbados, weeks before the WCT season that would begin his second wave of Titles.
“Who’s the greatest surf filmmaker of all time?” we asked John Florence in a soon-to-drop interview.
“In the modern day, it’s hard to look past Taylor Steele,” he replied.
Which was convenient, since we’d recently asked Steele, “What’s the best surfing you’ve ever seen?” He hemmed, hawed, scrubbed the files of his memory bank and landed on, you guessed it, the greatest surfer of all time — Kelly Slater.
It went down in Barbados in 2005. Competing and freesurfing were not mutually exclusive 17 years ago. The footage you see above was shot in February. By the start of March, Kelly was on the Gold Coast commencing what would become the season of his seventh World Title — which was after a seven year drought, the longest of his career (so far).
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Click the vid above to get a glimpse of what it took for Taylor to witness this surfing, from bailing on another project to five last-minute flights (with a six-month-old child), and how Kelly was the “the most present I’ve ever seen him.”
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