Waves Are Kelly Slater’s Haven From the Limelight : Surfing: Many regard 19-year-old, with his breathtaking aquabatics, as the successor to world champion Tom Curren.

Wearing wetsuits and armed with waterproof cameras, the surfing paparazzi swarmed into the clear waters of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, last year.

They were in search of more than just a photo of Kelly Slater. They wanted an answer.

What surfwear company was he going to sign with?

The photographer who bagged this shot would have the surfing magazines begging for it.

Slater was the hottest commodity to hit the industry since the surfboard leash, and some of the biggest powers--Op, Quiksilver and Gotcha--were standing in line with endorsement offers.

And that made Slater, an 18-year-old from Cocoa Beach, Fla., a marked man in the days before he turned professional.

“The photographers were everywhere,” he said. “Every time I would walk down the beach, there would be four or five of them there. They followed me home. One guy was getting shots of me eating a sandwich. I told them all to get lost.”

So Slater knew he wouldn’t be alone when he went surfing in Mexico that day. The photographers spotted him and clicked away.

There, emblazoned on the bottom of his black surf trunks, was his answer:

I don’t even care.

Fast forward to 1991.

Slater Scandal Update: The mail is flooding in concerning last month’s article on the shocking appearance of Kelly Slater’s underwear showing in a Sports Illustrated photo. Surprisingly, or maybe not, the letters are overwhelmingly in support of the grom phenom’s choice of, well, support. Keep ‘em coming. We’ll publish the juicier letters next issue. --Surfing magazine,

September issue.

One year later and Slater, 19, is still hounded.

Teen-age girls from San Clemente to New Jersey call him late at night, giggling into the phone. Kids swarm him at the beach, asking him to autograph T-shirts, magazines and photos.

TV and movie producers are chomping at the bit to get him in their next flick. People Magazine named him one of the “50 Most Beautiful People in the World.”

Even his choice of underwear is being scrutinized.

Is it any wonder the guy is camera shy?

“I don’t like the limelight,” he said. “Sometimes I get sick of it, but I’m obligated to my sponsor.”

His sponsor is Quiksilver, the Costa Mesa-based surfwear company. Quiksilver signed Slater to a contract in the vicinity of $1.5 million over the next three years, the largest endorsement deal in surfing history.

Bryan Taylor of Santa Monica, Slater’s agent, said his client could become the first surfer to test the endorsement waters outside the surfing industry.

Slater certainly has the clean-cut image to go with his movie-star looks. He earned straight A’s in high school, including college-prep calculus, stays out of trouble and says no to drugs and alcohol.

“So many surfers get pulled into drugs so easily,” Slater said. “A lot of these guys on the tour want me to go smoke pot with them and I tell them no. They have to respect that.

“If guys want to go out, party and get all run down and not do well in their contests, that’s fine with me. But I want the competition to get better.”

Many in the surfing community regard Slater as the successor to Tom Curren, the reigning world champion. They say Slater could revolutionize the sport with his breathtaking aquabatics.

“I like to take chances when I surf,” Slater said. “I like to control fear. It’s boring to go through life doing the same thing.

“I’ve gone bungie diving, and I plan to go parachuting and hang gliding. There are a bunch of things I want to do.”

His girlfriend, Cindy Freund of Costa Mesa, listens and shakes her head.

“He’s been talking about walking on hot coals, too,” she said.

It’s a warm, clear day at 54th Street in Newport Beach, and Slater is carving his way through the surf at a local contest.

He and other surfers use the smaller contests in preparation for big events such as the Op Pro championships, which begin Monday at the Huntington Beach Pier.

Slater has lived and trained in the Orange County area the past seven summers.

A lack of waves leaves the Atlantic Ocean looking like a lake in the summer, so he and his older brother, Sean, 22, seek bigger surf out west. They usually stay with friends in Huntington Beach.

Slater called his first trip to Southern California “mind blowing.”

“I would go out at (Lower) Trestles and get intimidated and not catch anything,” he said. “I had seen pictures in all the surf magazines of all the great surf spots, but now I was here, (surfing them) every day.”

He grew up in Cocoa Beach, a town of 12,000 nestled on a strip of barrier island just south of Cape Canaveral on Florida’s east coast.

Although best known for the aerospace industry, the town has some good surfers, including defending Op Pro champion Todd Holland.

Judy Slater (now Rivers) moved to Cocoa Beach in 1966. She loved the beach, and took her boys, Sean and Kelly, there every day.

By age 5, Kelly was playing on Styrofoam boards. At 8, he was riding fiberglass boards.

Kelly also entered his first contest when he was 8, winning a regional meet in Florida.

“That was the first time Kelly rode a hard board,” Judy said. “He was afraid the fiberglass boards would hurt him. He won with it, and then he tore through it from there.”

He also was a talented Little League pitcher. His mom remembers another team protesting a game because her son “threw too hard.”

Said Sean: “Surfing was something we did for fun. We played all sports--football, basketball and baseball. But we surfed every day.”

It was on those small, mushy waves that Slater began developing some of his favorite moves--aerials, tailslides and 360-degree cutbacks.

“He was constantly surfing against himself,” Judy said. “He would work on one move for hours until he got it right.

“I remember he would just be a teeny little boy, and he’d be out there doing flips off his bodyboard. It was like there was no one else in the world but him.”

Slater has surfed through some tough times. His parents were divorced in 1982. His father, Steve, sold real estate, and is now a commercial fisherman. His mother is married to a yacht repairman.

Slater talks little about his relationship with his father.

“His father drank a lot, and I think that’s why Kelly is so anti-drug and alcohol,” Judy said. “Sometimes a negative experience can have a positive effect on you. Kelly drives himself to succeed, and I think he can thank his father for that.”

To make ends meet, Judy worked a variety of jobs, including ones as a firefighter and bartender.

“We’ve all had to hang together,” she said. “But it was hard. We had some rough times. I remember having to count their lunch money out of my change, not knowing if I had enough. But it has helped us be much closer.”

Just after turning pro, Slater bought a bungalow for his family in Cocoa Beach and helped them remodel it.

“Kelly bought it,” Judy said, “because he didn’t want to see us worry about (paying for) it.”

Kelly began taking surfing seriously at age 10, and won six East Coast amateur titles, four U.S. amateur championships and several other contests. Sean surfs on the ASP East Coast tour, where he finished 11th last year.

Kelly burst on the international scene in 1986. As a 14-year-old, he finished third against older, more experienced surfers at the world amateur championships in England.

In August, 1989, he dominated the inaugural Op Junior amateur competition at the Huntington Beach Pier. Having mastered the amateurs, he was ready to move on to the pro ranks.

“I was riding with Op as an amateur and Curren wanted me to turn pro right after the (1989) Op Junior,” Slater said. “He wanted me to join the ASP tour and go to France for a couple contests. He figured it would be good for me.

“But I decided to wait until after the 1990 World amateurs (he finished fifth) to go.”

He turned professional at the end of his junior year of high school. His biggest victory as a pro came last September, when he won $30,000 at the Body Glove Surf Bout.

The contest was at Lower Trestles, the same site that intimidated him six years earlier.

Slater has just finished his heat at the Newport Beach contest. He complains of a sore knee, which he hurt when he jumped off a mini-trampoline at school.

“I asked him why he did something so silly,” Judy said, “and he told me, ‘Because I would have won $6, Mom. These guys dared me to do it.’ ”

Even with a million-dollar endorsement contract, Slater will still risk his neck on a $6 bet.

Taylor said Slater’s appeal to advertisers will bring in even more money.

Taylor said top surfers have no problem finding endorsements in the close-knit, laid-back beach industry. But try landing these guys on a Wheaties box? Forget it.

“On Madison Avenue, where the money is, it’s tough to promote a guy who’s wearing a nose ring,” Taylor said. “They (advertisers) think of surfers as a bunch of yahoos.”

But Slater is taken seriously.

His half-hour surfing video is the top-selling video in Australia. An East Coast company chose him, along with Michael Jordan, as the first to appear in a series of life-size wall posters.

“Curren is huge within the surfing industry, but he hasn’t touched the outside (promotions) like Kelly has,” Taylor said. “Kelly is going to make more money outside surfing than within.

“Years from now, people will be saying, ‘Did you know Kelly Slater once surfed, too?’ ”

Then there’s the movies.

NBC has contacted Taylor, asking if Slater was free for a movie shoot in January.

Producers at Paramount Pictures spotted Slater in a national sports magazine last winter. A few weeks later, he was doing a screen test.

Many other movie offers are on the table, Taylor said.

Slater merely shrugs it off.

“I think you have to have an ego problem to be in the movies,” Slater said. “You have to be real showy, flashy, outgoing. I’m not into that. It’s just not me.”

After all, he’s camera shy.

WHIZ KID With a three-year endorsement contract in the vicinity of $1.5 million, and offers from Hollywood and Madison Avenue, 19-year old Kelly Slater of Cocoa Beach, Fla., proves his moves in the water are worth their weight in gold.

Tailslide 1. Slater drops down the face of the wave and does a bottom turn to set up his tailslide maneuver.

2. He then hits the lip of the wave and starts to place his weight on his back foot, beginning the rotation of the tail of the board.

3. Using his momentum after hitting the lip, he throws the tail end of the board out of the water and in front of his body.

4. Slater then slides down the wave with the fins of his board in front of him until the breaking wave catches up. He uses the white water to help bring his board back around to continue surfing the wave.

Aerial 1. After setting up the maneuver with a deep bottom turn, Slater then shoots up the face of the wave and off the lip, propelling himself and his surfboard into the air.

2. once in the air he grabs the rails of the surfboard, like a skate-boarder, and tries to hang in midair as long as possible. After landing, he continues surfing the wave.

360 cutback 1. Again Slater sets up this maneuver with a deep bottom turn and races up the face of the wave. When he reaches the lip of the wave, he spins his surfboard around (clockwise) and back into the breaking wave.

2. At this time, he is halfway through the maneuver. Slater then uses the breaking wave to help him complete the 360-degree turn. He then continues on riding the wave.