Special to the Star-Bulletin
Kelly Slater is the youngest surfer to capture
the world championship.

The youngster has left his home in Florida way behind to roam the planet as a professional surfer. After a short but meteoric career, he finds himself blessed with fame, fortune and good looks.

Despite Slater's protestations to the contrary, it all seems to have come so easily. He was making a quarter of a million dollars just to surf as a senior in high school, though his mother insisted that he finish school. Classes cut into his competition time, but when he graduated and was finally able to surf the entire world tour, he became the youngest world champion.

Don't bother wasting your envy on Slater. He's way beyond it. Slater is a hero to surfers young and old, and a dream boat to girls of all ages. He is a masterful musician who has just cut a new CD, an intermittent TV actor, the youngest surfer to win four world titles and unable to travel incognito in any nation with a coastline.

He's also good to his mother, well-spoken, and a genuinely nice young man.

When Australia's Mark Richards claimed his fourth world title back in 1982, no one thought the feat would ever be matched. No one but Richards, that is.

"You don't hold on to things forever," he said. "It's just like in the Olympics, you win an event in world-record time, but nobody assumes it will last forever.

"It would be nice if it did," he added wistfully.

But Richards reckons Slater is the perfect champion. "He's a phenomenal surfer, he's good-looking, people are attracted to him. He presents a great image for surfing. No contest, he's the best surfer in the world."

More importantly, Richards credits Slater with breaking the decades-long stranglehold the Aussies had on professional surfing.

"Each country looks to someone to inspire them and show that if they can do it, you can do it, too," Richards said. "Kelly and Sunny Garcia and Derek Ho have inspired a whole generation of young American and Hawaiian surfers to go out on the tour and do well."

During the 1996 season it looked as though Slater could have his way in any contest, under any conditions. He started and ended the season with victories, and won half of the World Championship Tour's 14 events.

By Sept. 3 Slater was crowned world champion even though three events remained in the season, including the most prestigious event on the tour, the Chiemsee Gerry Lopez Pipe Masters.

Everyone at the Pipe Masters was dead set on beating the newly crowned world champion to deny him a last accolade in a perfect season. Slater won the Pipe Masters with maddening ease.

His salary is a closely guarded secret to prevent unbridled envy. Slater won at least $150,000 in contests last season. His travel expenses are paid for by sponsors, who also treat him to fantasy surfaris that are videotaped by the industry's top professionals.

But Slater is doomed. How can he possibly motivate himself to win another world title on a physically and emotionally exhausting world tour?

His surfing appears effortless, and Slater seems immune to contest pressure regardless of the stakes or the opposition. But he swears his success is earned with great difficulty.

Richards walked down the same treacherous trail before Slater was out of elementary school.

"I never lost the competitive edge after the first two titles," Richards says. "I was inspired to set the record. After the fourth one, it was gone. I lost it mentally and physically."

But there was a moment during the Pipe Masters that hinted things might be different for Slater. He and Garcia paddled out to practice in some closed-out sandbar barrels 100 yards up the beach from the contest frenzy at Pipeline.

Slater tucked into a long, deep barrel, one of the few that didn't slam shut, emerged at full speed and launched a kick-tail 360-degree turn to end the ride with a flourish.

He's still a kid, still having fun surfing for the pure pleasure of it. And if he wins a few more world titles along the way, that's OK, too.

When Slater becomes too comfortable gazing down from his pedestal at the admiring hordes looking up at their hero, friends such as Garcia are happy to bring him back down to terra firma. "I'm one of the few who can slap Kelly's head to keep him from taking himself too seriously," Garcia says with a wicked grin.

For a vision of Slater's possible future, examine Richards at home in Australia: happily married with three children, he runs his own surfboard company and surfs for fun in Newcastle.

Although he left the world tour 14 years ago at the height of his career, his competitive fire hasn't cooled.

"Kelly wasn't the first to win four world titles. He can't take that away," Richards says defiantly. "And he hasn't won four consecutively. Yet."

Richards gives the impression that he is aching for someone to arrange a winner-take-all match with Slater. But he realizes this is Slater's moment to bask in the limelight.

"If there is such a thing as the right amount of fame, being a pro surfer is the right amount," Richards continues. "You get to travel, be in movies and magazines, but your freedom is never compromised, the way Michael Jackson's freedom is compromised by his fame."

As Slater emerged from another victorious heat at the Pipe Masters this winter, a reporter raced past the pack of media and admirers for a quiet moment with Slater before the chaos could engulf them.

Asked which of his many accomplishments he is most proud of, Slater paused, his brow furrowed as he considered the many triumphs in a career less than a decade old, in a life just over two decades long.

Finally, he smiled, thinking of his mother's persistence in making him finish high school when he was keen to join the world tour. "I'm proudest that I did well in school."