Kelly Slater hand-painted his own boards, told reporters that Noam Chomsky was his favorite writer, and occasionally pulled a world-tour no-show. In other words, he did just enough to be thought of as independent and mildly quirky. Yet Slater was never less than a model surfer-citizen: likable and well-mannered and always acting—in the hoary but still-popular phrase—for “the good of the sport.”
He was useless, in other words, to those who still needed surfing to be a conspicuous act of rebell...
