Pipe Dreams: A Surfer's Journey

Pipe Dreams: A Surfer's Journey 

Borte, J (2003), 'Pipe Dreams: A Surfer's Journey,' Kelly Slater with Jason Borte, HarperCollins Publishers Inc, New York, USA  

Softcover = 338 pages. 
Condition = Ok secondhand, creased corners 

I thought, Pfft, come on. People from Australia are world champions.... But a world champion from Florida? Fuhgeddaboudit. 

With its tiny waves, Cocoa Beach, Florida isn't exactly a breeding ground for future world-champion surfers. When Kelly Slater was a grommet growing up there, his biggest goal was to one day make it out far enough to catch the two-foot waves his dad and brother were riding. Life in the Slater household wasn't perfect, and as his parents' marriage fell apart and his dad battled alcoholism, Slater escaped to the beach and found peace on a surfboard. Within a few years, his insatiable thirst for competition and an uncanny-almost innate-understanding of the physics of surfing would soon catapult him into the ranks of the very gods of the sport he'd worshipped, and into the thundering walls of water they faced along the North Shore of Hawaii and around the world. 

In Pipe Dreams, Slater offers a breathtaking, adrenaline-soaked ride through a churning Pipeline tube. He pays tribute to close friends who lost their lives surfing and tells what life on the World Tour is really like, from schmoozing with celebrities to running from stalker fans to the competition and hanging out with the world's most famous surfers-including Tom Curren, Tom Carroll, Gary Elkerton, Mark Occhilupo, Rob Machado, and Shane Dorian. Slater also describes his experiences in and out of the public eye, from his stint as a regular on Baywatch to his romance with Pamela Anderson to briefly retiring from surfing and then heading back out into the glory and danger of the waves. 

Pipe Dreams offers unprecedented access to the globetrotting lifestyle and the rarely seen private life of the man who destroyed every record in the sport. Slater holds nothing back, because after six world titles, he has nothing left to prove-not to himself or to anyone else.