“Wanted to Kill You”: Kelly Slater’s Surfing Retirement Unearths Mick Fanning Speaking on Sport’s Greatest Rivalry

Kelly Slater has fooled the world many times by hinting at retiring; the question is, will this time be any different? Though the buzz could be settled if he rides the waves during the WSL Tour in Fiji, but that is not happening until August.  Media headlines are highlighting his 32 years of dedication, while fellow athletes are dwelling into never heard before rivalries through their podcasts.

It all started after 11-time WSL champion Kelly Slater, 52, lost to current champion Griffin Colapinto in Western Australia in Margaret River Pro on Tuesday. Having a reputation for winning makes experiencing a loss emotionally challenging, often leading to a jump to retirement plans, which is quite typical for Slater. Now, Mick Fanning entered the chat with his fresh take on Kelly Slaters’ rivalry with the late Andy Irons.

Kelly Slater’s mainstream feud takes center stage

Since the rivalry between Kelly Slater and the late Andy Irons in the last decade, there hasn’t quite been a feud that matched its intensity. Before Irons passed away in Nov 2010, he beat the surfing shining star Slater in the Oahu’s Banzai Pipeline. Now, after sharing a hearty post about Kelly Slater’s alleged retirement news going around, 3x World Champion surfer, Mick Fanning, appeared on GYPSY TALES’ YouTube and made Kelly Slater vs. Andy Irons’ arguments. He was brutally honest about Irons and said, “Andy surfed on all emotion. You’d be his best mate, then you’d put on that wet shirt, and he would bring something up where you might’ve beaten him in Scrabble or this or that, and he wanted to kill you…like, proper kill you.’ …I’d always do my best not to piss Andy off before a heat,” Mick added.

In the podcast, he then discussed Slater’s surfing attitude and said, “Whereas Kelly would just go really deep within himself. He’s got this competitor in his own brain that he’s trying to beat the whole time. He would not only want to beat the person he was against, but he’d wanna beat himself. He would just embarrass everyone else because he was so good.” Slater was so engrossed in the sport in his prime years that all he wanted to do was beat Irons back in the day. So after limping through his next season, he evened out with his seventh world title victory in 2005. But was there ever really bad blood between them?

Were Slater-Irons ever truly rivals?

Kelly Slater and Andy Irons had the most publicized rivalry of the decade. Their fierce battle for the world title gained attention outside of the sport and made it to mainstream publications like The New York Times’s headlines. Later, cameras panned at the duo during their TransWorld SURF’s April 2004 issue, which perfectly summed up their mental battle and revealed the intensity of their hostility. Slater, commenting on the situation said, “Hype creates great situations in sports. It definitely gets overdone, but it’s also not without merit. There’s a reality to feelings and situations in those places, but it gets fed by the media in a negative way—most often that doesn’t really help you as a person but does help you as a competitor to focus.”

Slater and Irons both accept the importance that media hype plays in escalating competition, but Irons downplayed the hype and spoke about their natural aggressiveness. Though the rivalry is long over, it still remains one of the most hotly debated topics in sporting circles.