What Is Kelly Slater’s Greatest Success?

“I was in debt at 22 years old, winning felt like life and death for me at the time,” says Kelly Slater, as he remembers not being able to pay for his two week tenancy at Mark Foos Hawaiian homestead. 

The quote is pulled from a typically articulate Kelly memory, crystallized in the amber of a story dripping with nostalgia for surfing’s bygone era — and it’s just one of the many gems found in the third of Nate Fletcher’s four part interview with the GOAT.

The interview, done in the groundbreaking low-budget high-authenticity format of FaceTime + Greenscreen + Apple Voice Memo is a terrific display of Slades storytelling abilities, and lays the groundwork for what promises to be a continuation of engaging installments from Mr. Fletcher.

“We’re doing it every week and each person will have four weeks,” Nate tells me. “So Slater has four and then Mason has four and then Tom Carroll. We’re doing weekly releases of 10 minutes, but it’s a 40 or 50 minute interview total. We’re checking multiple boxes of instead of doing 56 different fucking interviews. Just stringing it along a little bit. It’s going to consist of a lot of archival footage because the guys at Nalu are helping out. I got them all my dad’s archives, but they also own Sonny Miller, Larry Haynes, and Don King’s stuff.

“Their archives are pretty deep, and we’ll have a lot of stories to tell the history.”

See ya next week.