Kelly Slater on his Best One Ever

We had to chase him around for a few weeks, but we got him. On a pleasant Sunday morning in Hawaii we got Kelly to sit down and walk us through the wave at Pipe that he considers to be his “Best One Ever.”

Turns out it was this haunting backwash riddled monster from the quarterfinals at the 1991 Pipe Masters — which funny enough appeared in Taylor Steele’s VHS only film The Last Decade — a video yearbook of the Momentum Gen’s 1990s parts, but never appeared in any of his real parts despite being one of the heaviest Pipe waves Kelly ever caught.

Why was that?

We asked Taylor Steele, who filmed the wave.

“Because he had a jersey on,” he said.

A stern Momentum Generation policy of no jerseys nearly kept this wave out of view for decades. Appreciate Taylor sticking to his guns, and now this wave feels even more special.

Watch Kelly walk through it below.—Travis