Kelly Slater has risen to the top of the surfing world, attaining near zeuslike status over his 25+ year career. Throughout his decades of domination Slater has kept most of his personal life very private.

It this rare in-depth interview Slater opens up to sports journalist Graham Bensinger, revealing a look into the life of the greatest surfer to have ever lived.

One of the shockers in the interview is when Slater reveals that at 21-years-old, having just won his first world championship and with career earnings of more than $1 million, Slater found out he was flat broke.

“I think my mom raised the three [Slater brothers] on $2,000 a month, and not much help from my dad … so we didn’t have much money. It’s not a sob story, it’s just the way it was in my family,” Slater told Bensinger. “When you are raised that way you don’t have a lot of intelligence around money, so by the time I was 21 or 22 I tried to buy a house with my then-fiancee and found out I was broke.”

Slater also opens up about the death of his alcoholic father and the man it forced him to become.

“When your parent dies, it’s an awful feeling but there’s also this sort of sense of, you have to grow up and you got to learn things … there’s no direction to go except for to kind of answer things on your own,” Slater told Bensinger.

“There was always that sense that, ‘I would ask my dad this’ or ‘One day he’ll tell me this’ or ‘I’ll learn this from my dad.’ Most people think back on their dad and say, ‘My dad taught me this.’ My dad never really sat us down and said you need to do this with your lives.”

Staying on the parenting theme, Slater talks about raising his teenage daughter Taylor, and admitted he feels some “guilt” that he was not always around to see her grow up.

“The whole time my daughter has been raised by her mother almost 100 percent in physical time and I’ve been traveling,” Slater told Bensinger. “The hardest part, I think for me, is my daughter feeling like she doesn’t have a dad there all the time. And that’s hard for her. I know it was especially hard for her when she was younger.”

You can watch all 13 clips from Bensinger interview with Kelly Slater on here.

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