Surfing champ Kelly Slater has been putting like a demon this week at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am.
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PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. – To hear Patrick Cantlay tell it, Kelly Slater might be leading the field – pros included – in Strokes Gained: Putting, if there were accurate stats being recorded at all three courses at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am.
“He’s made the most feet of putts of anyone I’ve ever seen,” Cantlay said.
Indeed, Slater, 47, the World Surf League champion a record 11 times, confirmed he took just 22 putts on Thursday at Spyglass Hills and 25 on Friday at Monterey Peninsula Country Club’s Shore Course and on Saturday at Pebble Beach Golf Links, he padded his stats with two chip-ins.
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Slater and Cantlay teamed for a best-ball 9-under 63 at Pebble Beach Golf Links on Saturday and improved to 25-under 190 through three rounds at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. That’s good for a share of third place at was is a stacked leaderboard of sporting stars.
Arizona Cardinals wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald and pro partner Kevin Streelman, who won the title in a romp in 2018, hold a one-stroke lead at 27 under over NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young and Phil Mickelson with Slater’s team a shot farther back and tied with Houston Astros ace pitcher Justin Verlander and Viktor Hovland.
Slater has been competing here since 2005 — he missed a few years so it is his 12th appearance — and has been in the trophy hunt before. His goal? To beat Mickelson.
“We do a couple of dinners together every year and it would be good to have bragging rights,” he said. “There’s a funny little story, we were at a dinner last year and everyone at the dinner decided we were going to leave the pin in all week. Phil said, ‘Not me.’ Then he won the tournament and he kind of laughed at us and said, ‘You should’ve pulled the flag.’ ”
Flag or no flag, Slater, a 2 handicap, can flat out putt. Last year, Slater partnered with his pal Adam Scott, a surfing aficionado, at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, where the poa annua greens can be unpredictable, as Scott put it kindly.
“He rolled the ball better than anyone in our group and probably as well as anyone in the field that week,” Scott said after last year’s event. “I thought, ‘It’s Kelly Slater. He’s a really good surfer but he’s not that good of a golfer. It must be the putter.'”
The very next week Scott switched to Slater’s model: a L.A.B. Golf Directed Force arm-lock mallet putter.
Slater began playing golf at 23 and averages more than 150 rounds a year (He says he doesn’t have a home course, but plays most of his golf at Turtle Bay on Oahu). In past trips to Pebble, he’s even found time to surf at Ghost Tree, a famed big wave surfing location off the 18th hole of Pebble where the waves break off the rock-strewn shoreline of Pescadero Point.
But don’t expect to see Slater’s partner this week catching 10.
“I have surfed. I try everything once, twice if you like it. But I wasn’t very good at it and for me to keep doing things that I’m not very good at takes a lot of will power,” Cantlay said. “And surfing-wise, just the whole process of it, you got to buy the board, find somebody that knows how to surf, go out there, the California water’s really cold, put your wet suit on, wax your surf board up, go out there, maybe you don’t catch any waves, for me I could try to catch as many waves as possible, I’ll keep falling over, maybe not even get up. So I never got into it. My dad played golf, he never surfed.”
Slater, however, is a man of many talents and he takes a pragmatic approach to Sunday’s final round at Pebble Beach.
“I understand that high level of competition and when you get stress you never do things as good as if you relax,” he said.
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