“Kelly Slater, even as a kid, was legendary…”
My world in the 1980s was a roughly 100 mile Atlantic oceanfront strip, stretching from Stuart Rocks in the south to Cocoa Beach in the north, with a few discrete landing points in between, spots like Tiger Shores (named for the shark, not the mammal), Power Plant, Ft. Pierce North Jetty, Sebastian Inlet, Spanish House, First and Second Light, and, most importantly, the beach breaks in Indialantic down the street from my buddy Steve’s house (for those unfamiliar with Florida geography, Indialantic is a little hovel situated a few miles south of Cocoa Beach and a bit north of Sebastian). I lived at the southern end of this strip, in Stuart, about an hour and a half south down I-95 from Steve’s house.
Steve and I met at a church summer camp in Ocala, which is a seemingly picturesque central Florida town dotted by freshwater lakes, the picturesque part masking the fact that alligators outnumbered humans by a factor of about 5 to 1. Ocala was located about 60-70 miles straight inland from Ormond Beach, which itself had a fun little beach break where I rode my first ever real wave, a clean waist high runner on a borrowed 6-8 red G&S single fin.
But I digress. Back to Steve. Steve was cool, but even he admitted that he wasn’t as cool as his friend Danny. Steve and Danny spent time at a small Christian school together, which in that part of Florida in the 80s basically meant you were co-members of the same tiny cult. And since I also attended a tiny Florida Christian school, I kind of felt like I was in their cult too.
Every once in a while a cult member would break through and make a name for themselves in the outside world. And the reason Danny was so cool is that he was one such break out star. His last name was Melhado, and he was a terror in the ESA menehune contests.
Just being good buddies with Steve, who knew Danny, was like being one step removed from Florida surf royalty. I don’t even remember ever being introduced to Danny, but in the internet / social media deprived world of the 80s, one degree of separation was practically inside the club, or at least that’s what I told my grom self.
But actually that summary skips an important fact – Melhado was indeed an ESA contest terror who genuinely ripped. But like Soliari, fate cursed him. Because while Melhado would have ruled the ESA in any other era, in the era in which he lived there was a real life surf Mozart, the one grom king of the entire global surf universe, and unfortunately for Melhado that kid also happened to live in Central Florida, in fact right there in Cocoa Beach, and that kid was also cutting his competitive teeth in the ESA.
Kelly Slater, even as a kid, was legendary. He absolutely, undeniably, fucking ripped. And that wasn’t all. He surfed Kechele’s boards, and Kechele himself was one of the most progressive surfers on earth, routinely pulling big punts off the wedgy peaks at Sebastian Inlet. And Kelly was sponsored by Sundek, which in the 80s made incredibly cool trunks. Or maybe they sucked, but Kelly wore them so who cared.
At the time, Sebastian Inlet was a scintillating surf amphitheater. This was back before First Peak was ruined by the Army Corps of Engineers, back when there was a miraculous wedge that would refract off the jetty and form a wave at least a couple of feet bigger than anywhere else on the Florida coast at the moment.
You can walk on the Sebastian Inlet jetty, so you could stand right up above the action and watch as the local crew shredded the peaks below. Standing on the jetty in the mid to late 80s on a sunny Florida day with a decent little swell running and watching Kechele and Kelly and John Futch and the rest blister every inch of breaking water – that was a grom surfer’s dream (right behind actually getting in the water and trying to score a couple waves at Second Peak, or more likely at Spanish House a bit north of the inlet where the waves were not quite as good but the lineup far less packed). I’ll never forget those moments.
But back to Danny and Steve. Danny got some results, Kelly didn’t get him every time. In our little crew we held out hope that Danny would be the next one, that Steve’s buddy would one day grace all the mag covers, be featured in full page ads wearing tweaked out boardies, that Steve would get invited to cool ASP parties – and most importantly that Steve would invite a couple of us, and maybe just a little surf fairy dust would fall from the stars and land on our sunburnt shoulders.
But really we knew the truth. Because even then, Kelly was faster, more creative, threw more spray, did more everything – he was him, as the kids say.
The years passed. Kelly became Kelly. Danny moved to San Clemente for his senior year of high school, and as far as I can tell continued to shred. Steve and I went on surf trips together. The two of us helped hoist board bags up to Rabbit Kekai on the second floor balcony of Rabbit’s hotel. Steve stood next to the table and watched as I was annihilated by Miki Dora in ping pong. He was sitting next to me in a Pacific lineup when I paddled into a set wave big enough that a guy on the beach later described it to me as watching an ant go up and down a hill.
Then in the 90s, Steve moved to a landlocked town for a better job and met a girl. I moved away from our Florida roots too, still surfing, but almost always alone. Steve eventually married the girl. He got an even better job as a sales rep for a well-known farm equipment manufacturer. He wasn’t surfing but he was happy, or so I heard, because we didn’t really talk anymore after about 1996 or 97. I even missed Steve’s wedding, because in the late 90s I was often a selfish douchebag who let other things take priority over shit that matters.
So missing Steve’s wedding was the first thing I thought of when I got the call a couple years ago from a mutual friend telling me that Steve had passed away. Came home from work one day, sat down in his recliner, and never opened his eyes again.
When I got that call, all the memories with Steve flashed through. How he seemed to secretly enjoy skimboarding more than surfing. How he kept a throwaway tire from a 24 Hours of Daytona race in his bedroom because he loved cars. How we paddled out together in the dark one night when an overhead swell was running off the central Florida coast, but we couldn’t see much of anything other than the phosphorescent lines of whitewater pounding us – and it was still a blast.
Then my mind drifted to Danny. I wondered if he had heard about Steve passing. I thought about trips to Sebastian with Steve and watching Kelly and Steve always hyping Danny over Kelly. I wondered whether Danny still wonders what might have been if he weren’t born at the same time and in the same place as surf Mozart. (Things worked out ok for Danny, he was even inducted into the East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame in 2022, in the same induction class as CJ Hobgood. But still.) And then, of course, I thought about Kelly.
That was a couple years ago. Fast forward to this past week. I sat on my couch, in the same living room where I got the call that Steve was gone, and I watched Kelly being chaired up the beach at Margaret River. I thought about Danny, wondered if he was watching the moment too, wondered if he could have predicted this future back when he was bashing lips in ESA menehunes with Kelly.
And then I thought about Steve. And wished I had made it to the damn wedding.
