Hot and Bothered : The Pop-Idol Publicity Wave May Be the Toughest That Surfing King Kelly Slater Has Ever Ridden

Kelly Slater ducks into a pinball arcade on the boardwalk. The place is dimly lit, raucous with buzzes and bells. It seems like a good spot to hide from autograph hounds and reporters. And the girls who squeal his name.

All surfers on the professional tour put up with some adulation, but it’s different for Slater. Barely 21, this slender kid in baggy shorts is being groomed as the sport’s first pop idol.

He’s regarded as the best surfer in the world, perhaps even a revolutionary, but that seems incidental. So does last year’s pro championship. He already had a talent agent and a big-money clothing endorsement. People magazine had already named him one of the 50 most beautiful people in the world. And there was his role as Jimmy Slade on the syndicated TV hit “Baywatch.”

“Kelly has charisma,” says Michael Berk, one of the show’s executive producers. “He’s absolutely right for the ‘90s.”

Or, as Slater’s agent puts it: “He’s the perfect marketing commodity.”

Bright hazel eyes. A boyish grin. Doesn’t drink or smoke. More important, in a sport awash with renegades and loners, Slater gives interviews and arrives at photo shoots on time.

“There have been other surfers who were just as talented,” says Steve Hawk, editor of Surfer magazine. “But Kelly is willing to take the next step. He is willing to do the dance you have to do to become a mainstream personality.”

Why then, on the opening day of a contest here, is Kelly Slater hiding?

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He hears the whispers, the rumblings: “A lot of surfers don’t like what I’m doing. There are a lot of mixed emotions.”

The tempest centers on what surfing wants to be when it grows up.

Perhaps Slater can lead the sport into an era of national TV and big-money contests. But traditionalists--the soul surfers--cling to a legacy of individualism. They don’t want networks and corporations defiling what they regard as nothing less than a spiritual pursuit.

Consider the troubled history between corporate America and Surf City: When the California craze struck in the late 1950s, it became apparent that money could be made from these odd beach dwellers who rode the waves. Swimwear companies could market the surfing look. Beer companies could advertise by sponsoring contests.

Surfers, however, didn’t quite fit the prepackaged mold.

Mickey Dora, a sleek and powerful man who ruled Malibu through the 1960s, surfed for the “Gidget” movies. When those films turned surfing into a fad, he escaped into a shadowlike existence. As a parting shot, Dora rode across the point at the 1965 Malibu Classic and dropped his shorts for the judges.

Many top surfers who followed--the revolutionary Nat Young, Tom Carroll and Barton Lynch--were Australians and unwelcome to the American star-making machine. Corky Carroll did a few beer commercials, cutting a slightly cartoonish figure. Tom Curren showed up with the right credentials--talent and citizenship. But after winning a string of world championships, he fled to Europe.

Then came Slater.

As calculated as his career now seems, he swears that he never dreamed of stardom while growing up in Cocoa Beach, Fla..

Day after day, he practiced moves that would become flashy tailslides and floaters. Every part of the wave was open territory. He learned to bounce off the lip and spin through foam.

It wasn’t just water that fascinated him. He would launch himself and his board off the tops of waves, airborne, to see how it felt. These experiments led to the “aquabatics” for which he is now lauded. They added a joy and recklessness to his style, bursts of wanton disregard to punctuate an otherwise fluid kinship with the wave.

“Glue foot,” surfers say--the ability to stay on the board in situations that defy the laws of physics. Slater had that knack from the beginning and it earned him an armful of amateur trophies during the mid-1980s.

It also got him noticed far from the beach.

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In 1986, Bryan Taylor was a junior agent at the William Morris Agency and looking for fresh faces. He saw Slater’s photograph in a surfing magazine.

“Kelly had something unique,” Taylor says. “I could picture his face on the screen.”

A couple months later, Slater came to Los Angeles for an amateur contest. Taylor took him to “a power dinner at the Sizzler.” The kid, only 14, had anything but stardom on his mind.

Several years passed before Taylor became his agent. Then things moved quickly. Slater signed a reported $1-million deal with Quiksilver, a Costa Mesa surfwear company, before he had entered a single pro contest.

All that money--and his amateur success--created tremendous pressure when Slater joined the Assn. of Surfing Professionals World Tour in 1992.

“Someone’s put on a pedestal at a very young age and it sticks,” says Martin Potter, who won the 1989 championship. “There was a bit of jealousy for sure.”

To make matters worse, halfway through the surfing season Slater was invited to audition for “Baywatch.” The show about Los Angeles lifeguards, skimpy on both plot and bathing suits, is not well-regarded among surfers.

“I was real hesitant,” Slater recalls. He feared being labeled a sellout.

When the young man talks about the marketing of his career, he speaks softly. It’s as if he slipped into this role unwittingly. The posters and calendars--they are things he did because they were laid before him. And the decision to do “Baywatch”?

“I had some free time,” he says.

The people at the show weren’t nearly so ambivalent. They knew they had a good thing the moment Slater walked in.

“The women in our office just followed him everywhere,” says Berk.

Slater agreed to a handful of episodes--as many as could be squeezed between contests.

“There must be a fearlessness you develop as a surfer because he displayed that on the set,” Berk says. “He is a natural talent.”

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Jimmy Slade has run afoul of the punks who rule Tequila Bay. Sporting a wet suit with the Quiksilver logo, he gets into a surfing duel with the leader of the pack. After a few nifty maneuvers, Slade ends up tangled in underwater barbed wire and the “Baywatch” lifeguards come to his rescue.

“I wanted to get the real feeling of surfing on a TV show,” Slater frets. “That’s very hard to do.”

And much of what he feared--the sarcastic remarks, the nasty letters in surf magazines--has come true.

“It’s really hard, emotionally, to look in a magazine and see people writing you off,” he says. “You try to find a happy medium between surfing and the other things but you never can do that. It makes you think twice.”

So does the pressure from contest organizers, who count on him to draw fans, and from beachwear companies who hope he’ll persuade kids in Nebraska and Indiana to dress like surfers. In June, 1992, these pressures clashed when Slater threatened to pull out of a contest in order to fly to the Fiji Islands for a publicity shoot. Again, he was accused of selling out.

Taylor has been willing to deflect some of the flak. In fact, many magazine letters are directed at “that Hollywood agent.”

Says Taylor: “I’ve been taking criticism since the day I came out of the womb. You have to have thick skin.”

You also have to fire back occasionally, he says: “If they’re happy with their soul surfing and working at the corner Burger King the rest of their lives, that’s fine.”

Hawk provides a more balanced perspective. There’s enough room for both soul surfing and corporate-sponsored contests, he says. As for the television show: “If any surfer is going to be on ‘Baywatch,’ thank God it’s Kelly. Because when it shows him surfing, it shows how exciting surfing can be.”

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Al Hunt, general manager of the Assn. of Surfing Professionals tour, says many old-guard pro surfers will be retiring in the next couple years. “There’s a big shift to young guys,” he says, “and they all set their goals by what Kelly’s done.”

The new breed knows how to mug for photographers and act courteous with sponsors. They know that when the television camera turns on, they’re supposed to hold their surfboards close so the sponsor’s decal shows on screen.

Old-timers shake their heads.

“I just hope the exposure is positive,” says Lynch, a tour veteran who’ll be 30 in August. “Maybe people will take the sport seriously and we can get rid of that hangover from ‘Gidget.’ ”

As for Slater, he more than survived his first year on the tour. After winning the championship, he got engaged to Bree Pontorno, a fetching young model given to tight dresses.

And for all the cynicism that swirls about him, Slater has clung to some of surfing’s basic pleasures. He talks about great waves and the people he has met: “Australia, France, South Africa, Hawaii--anywhere I go, I’ve got a friend to hang out with.”

So maybe it’s a small price to pay when three young girls track him down in the pinball arcade. They’ve never seen him surf, but they’ve watched him on TV, and his posters hang in their bedrooms.

Slater turns away from his game to sign autographs. Pontorno nudges him and points to a young boy across the room whose T-shirt reads: “Don’t Bother Me.”

“You need one of those,” she says.

Slater shrugs and smiles. For now, he’s willing to do the dance.