Every now and then I'll try to post something vaguely journalistic from the cutting room floor.

In 2008 I interviewed Kelly Slater for Water Magazine. Suffice to say, the year proved to be more successful for Slater than Water.

The following conversation didn't make the final edit.

Lewis Samuels: Style is one of the few things where one can look at your career and say “What Slater brought to the table with style, compared to past champions, wasn’t as noteworthy.”

Kelly Slater: Style, like… what do you mean in terms of style? Surfing style, personal style, clothes? (laughs)

Kelly Slater. Photo: Karen/CoveredImages

Surfing style...  I think when you can look at the way you approach waves, it’s a distillation of correct body positioning, to achieve a high level of performance.  Are you concerned with how that looks to the viewer, or are you primarily concerned with what you’re achieving on the wave?

I don’t know… I guess for me, I’m more Dane Reynolds than Tom Curren. Or I should say more Martin Potter.  I think style is kind of… I could take a lot of heat for saying something… but someone who has a very deliberate style, it’s almost pretentious.  If you look a certain way just for the sake of looking that way, I think that’s false.  I think that style for me has always been a sort of secondary thing to function.  Is it functional? But they’re equally important really, because if you have the right form the function will happen naturally, and vice versa…  If you put the weight in the right place, the style is going to look good.  It can almost be a moot point…

Martin Potter: Photo: Jeff Hornbaker

Some surfers actively think about how their surfing looks.  From Peter Townend’s soul arches to what Joel Tudor is doing now… they know they look like that. It’s not like Shane Dorian’s hands – I doubt Shane sat around thinking about how to hold his hands – but those other guys, I’m not so sure.

Yeah, that’s what important to them.  What’s important to me, or like you said, Shane, quite a few guys from our generation, was more about getting ourselves in the quickest, most radical spot where the most power is, being able to use all our strength, that kind of thing.  And obviously, to some people that’s not the most stylish sort of surfing.  But someone like Rob, for instance, especially when he’s riding alternative craft, and doing slow deliberate turns… just fitting them in the right place at the right time… Rob’s a much more stylish surfer than me, or Ross Williams, or Shane Dorian, or Conan, Pat, that whole kind of crew.  In our era, Rob was the Gerry Lopez…  He wasn’t always trying to do the biggest airs, he was pretty much surfing the face of the wave, in the pocket, real crafty, real smoothly.  But if you look back, at some guys, like Terry Fitzgerald for instance, I don’t like it, because it looks like he was trying to look a certain way.  I don’t know – maybe he wasn’t, maybe that was just the way he put his body to go as fast as he could.  But to me it looks like a deliberate attempt at looking a certain way.

Terry Fitzgerald. Photo: Dan Merkel

You could make the same argument in terms of Donavon Frankenreiter now, with his layback cutbacks and soul arch bottom turns.

Well, I mean, look, Donovan doesn’t think he looks like the guy that took off on the wave before him.  He knows that he looks different than everyone else riding a wave.  But for him that’s maybe what’s fun -- it probably is.

Donovan. Photo: Jack English

There was an interview with Curren in Water a few years back, and he said style is just technique.  “When there’s nothing that’s gonna hinder someone from pushing their performance further.”

Over the last twenty years, if you take the best surf shots, the most classic  shots of Curren or Occy, the really good guys doing the best turns captured in their prime moments, and you look, their body is not in some weird tweaked position, it’s not in some difficult place to be,  it’s in a controlled, natural position.  It’s in a really stable, comfortable place where it makes everything look real easy.

Tom Curren. Photo: Tom Servais

I think that’s a really Zen, Bruce Lee way of surfing.  His whole idea was efficiency of movement.  You don’t have to do a lot to get the most power out of something.  You don’t have to be the biggest, thickest leg, strongest guy to throw a lot of spray.  You have to set yourself up right, be in the right place…  But if you have your body is in the right place, the style is gonna look good.