Pipe Dreams: A Surfer's Journey

by Kelly Slater Narrated by Todd Haberkorn

Overview

Soon to be an ABC reality series entitled Ultimate Surfer, starring 11-time World Surf League champion Kelly Slater

Eleven-time world surfing champion, actor, and American heartthrob Kelly Slater tells his inspiring story of triumph over adversity

From Beach Blanket Bingo to Baywatch to Blue Crush, surfing has fascinated people for years, and Kelly Slater is the sport's hottest star. He has won more world championships than any other competitor, and he continues to change peoples' minds about what can and can't be done on a surfboard. His wild ride has included fame, fortune, a stint on Baywatch, and a high-profile relationship with Pamela Anderson. Not bad for a skinny kid from a broken home in Cocoa Beach, Florida.

In Pipe Dreams, Kelly takes the reader into oceans around the world to take on thunderous walls of water and shares the outrageous stories, solemn moments, and undeniable spirit that have made him a superstar.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Because six-time world champion surfer Slater has been perhaps the dominant figure in the sport since the 1990s-combining "freakish freesurfing and a vision for bringing his act on the pro tour without toning it down"-it is surprising that his autobiography is so pedestrian. Slater recounts growing up with a turbulent home life in the fading Florida surf community of Cocoa Beach, winning his first world championship in 1992 at age 20 as the youngest men's champ in history, retiring in 1998 after winning his sixth world title and his recent comeback. Slater has many lively stories to tell, about his friendships with the many great surfers at the famous "Pipeline" area of Oahu, his run-ins with surfing groupies and his ill-fated role in the TV series Baywatch. He has plainspoken insights into his world, such as the egos found on the world tour circuit, the change in style from long boards to the "new school" of short boards and how many great surfers "fail to grasp the system" of professional competitions well enough to reach their full potential. Unfortunately, this is a relentlessly detailed book, written in a fairly simple and direct style, describing almost every surfing competition Slater has been in since his first one when he was six years old. While Slater's many fans will enjoy reading that "[I] surfed one of the best heats of my life in the quarterfinals of the Marui Pro at Hebara Beach" in 1992, the average reader looking for insights into the world of surfing will find this book tougher going. (Aug.) Forecast: Slater is still an extremely popular surfer whose fans will love this book, while his involvement with the popular surfer-turned-singer Jack Johnson has brought his name to a new audience. But this book will be too detailed to capture the interest of a wider audience. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177265988
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	07/28/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Cocoa Beach

Leaving Orlando International Airport, the Beeline Expressway runs due east toward Brevard County. There's not much to see on the hourlong drive, except 3-D billboards covered with giant apes, extraterrestrials, and twisters, which lure tourists to Universal Studios and less expensive beachy versions of Ron-Jon's Surf Shop, the world's only twenty-four-hour stop for people who don't surf but want to take a T-shirt back home that says otherwise. Other than that, it's a straight road cut through the middle of dense clumps of palmetto and pine forests.

Entering Brevard County, also known as the Space Coast, the Beeline is nice enough to bypass the city of Cocoa, which in 1925 lent its name, originating from the native coconut palms, to Cocoa Beach, its new coastal neighbor. The Beeline also navigates around Cape Canaveral, the place that put Brevard on the map. Prior to 1961, the local economy was still juiced by the production of citrus products. The beach was nothing but a skinny twelve-mile strip of white sand, shoe box houses, and tiny rattrap motels sandwiched between the Atlantic Ocean and the Banana River. The Cape -- flat, undeveloped, and close to water, with a climate that allows for year-round activity -- was the perfect place to launch space shuttles. The sleepy scrubland was transformed into a major launch base, and because of the importance of beating Russia into orbit, astronauts were as valued in American culture as any movie stars. They brought a happening aura to a place that needed some life. For one glorious decade, when NASA embarked on the Apollo project, Cocoa Beach was a nonstop celebration, attracting young people from all over the nation.

Just past Canaveral, the road skirts south and morphs into Astronaut Boulevard, and eventually into the coastal highway known as A1A. Whenever I go home, I can't help but chuckle at the sign I see when I enter Cocoa Beach. "World Famous," it claims, but I can't figure out why. I guess it's because the 1960s sitcom I Dream of Jeannie was set there, although it wasn't filmed there. You can tell because there are mountains in the background on the show, when in reality the only mountain in Florida is the Space Mountain ride at Disney World. Ask any local what's so special about Cocoa Beach, and you're likely to hear that the most endearing customs are bikini contests, beer drinking, and stabbings at the pier.

Don't get me wrong. I love my hometown, but until now it certainly hadn't been a big surfing supporter. In all my years of flying the Cocoa Beach flag around the world, the city didn't so much as give me a phone call of congratulations until I started dating Pamela Anderson. Then they asked me to come to a town meeting. I did get a street named after me and a key to the city but that wasn't until November 2002, ten years after I won my first world title. Even though there have always been a lot of surfers around town, I guess the sport wasn't mainstream enough to warrant much attention.

A Match Made In Partyville

Steve Slater, my dad, was born in Ocala, Florida, but grew up in Daytona Beach, Florida. He claimed to be a descendant of Samuel Slater, a guy who became known as "the Father of the American Industrial Revolution" when he came over from England in 1789 and built a cloth factory in Rhode Island, but I haven't yet done the research to find out if it's true. In high school, my dad played football, basketball, and ran track, but his real interest was water sports. He loved to swim and fish, and by the end of the 1950s had become a lifeguard and surfer.

Surfing in the late 1950s was experiencing a population explosion thanks to Gidget and other beachy Hollywood films, as well as the innovation from wood to lighter and easier-to-maneuver foam surfboards. Boards were still around ten feet in length, clunky compared to today's standards, and relatively dangerous. They had the potential to inflict a lot of damage on someone. (In the late 1960s, surfboards would undergo a revolution, shrinking to nearly half as long as the overriding philosophy went from stylishly walking up and down the board to making radical direction changes.) During a hurricane swell, my dad paddled out on his longboard and wiped out on a pretty big wave. The board came straight up and hit him between the legs, which caused them to turn black and blue from his waist to his knees. He claimed that if there hadn't been another guy in the water to drag him out, and a really cute girl on the beach to drive him home, he would have drowned.

After my dad finished high school, his parents moved two hours south to Cocoa Beach. My dad stayed in Daytona. When he was nineteen, his mother died from throat cancer. After her death, my grandfather decided to remain in Cocoa Beach and live on his own. A few years later he was in a pretty serious car accident, and my dad went down from Daytona to take care of him for a while. My grandfather recovered pretty quickly, but by that point, my dad had fallen in love with Cocoa Beach -- the area had a way of sucking people in and keeping them there. He got a job as a construction worker, and once he got in the swing of the surf scene, he couldn't leave. Cocoa Beach was Partyville, U.S.A., and the waves were tailormade for the boards of the day. (The local contingent, made up of Claude Codgen, Mike Tabeling, Gary Propper, and Dick Catri, was the best on the East Coast.) But since alcoholism ran in the family, Partyville was the last place my dad needed to be ...

Pipe Dreams. Copyright © by Kelly Slater. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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