Kelly Slater has the thousand-yard-stare you might see in a soldier who's spent a little too much time in a foxhole, or a hunter who's waited years for the right shot. But the quarry in his distant eyes is the perfect wave. Standing on the sand in Huntington Beach last weekend, he watches the water as his team of East Coast surfers takes an East-West contest in this year's L.A. version of the ESPN X Games. There's probably no other man on the beach as well known as he, but it's the water that's his lifeblood. No matter how pop media try to make him into a pretty-boy idol, a robotic actor, or a logo-plastered spokesmodel, Slater is what purists call a waterman - a master of sea going arts. He is also one of the greatest aquatic athletes the world has ever seen.

In the last year, the eyes have grown a little more focused: He came out of an early retirement only to be hammered by the death of his father - a man with whom he'd had a tumultuous, sometimes bitter relationship. On this year's World Championship Tour, surfing's world title contest series, a 31-year-old Slater is suddenly in killer form again: After years of surfing occasional contests and photo trips, Slater is taking contests - making impossible drops, threading unrideable tubes, demonstrating the mastery that made him the best. He's currently in second place in pursuit of an unreal seventh Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) world title. The next closest contender is the legendary Mark Richards, with four. With an autobiography, Pipe Dreams: A Surfer's Journey, released this month and already in its second printing, Slater is also back in the limelight he never really enjoyed.

"At this point, I'm just doing things because I want to do them," he says in Huntington, as throngs of people try to get his attention.

At the U.S. Open of Surfing, held August 3 in Huntington, Slater paddled out for the Jesse Billauer Expression Session, a non-contest benefit for a popular young surfer who still rides waves as a quadriplegic. After somehow finding a barrel in otherwise mushy, overhead surf, the man in the black jersey pulled into a juicy right, banked off the bottom like a motorcycle grand-prix racer, and flew off the lip, spinning into a 360 floater that had him landing in the whitewater. Of course, the weekend crowd of 80,000, part of the largest turnout ever for a surfing event, went wild.

Watching Slater surf and sign autographs in the self-proclaimed Surf City felt like a celebration of his record-shattering career. Here's a guy who singlehandedly made surfing "extreme" (although he insists it's usually not), showed off the sometimes inaccessible sport to millions around the world (with Baywatch), and brought paparazzi to the world tour (by dating Pamela Anderson).

"Obviously, he is to surfing what Tony Hawk is to skateboarding or Michael Jordan is to basketball," says Dick Baker, president of the Surf Industry Manufacturers Association. "He has become an icon and has a global visibility that is unusual for a niche sport like surfing. If there is such a thing as a spokesperson for surfing, he is it."

He's quiet and reserved for a spokesperson, but Slater's talent puts him in the middle of the action. On the beach, former world champ and Boarding House: North Shore star Sunny Garcia stops by to say hi. Soon Slater is crouching against a blue sponsorship banner, posing for the camera. Fans line up at a nearby fence, yelling "Hey Kelly," waving magazines and contest guides in hopes of getting a signature. You'd think Slater would be content to kick back and soak it up. He has a Los Angeles-area home and property in Hawaii just waiting for him to go back into retirement. But he's had a little taste of that already. Now he's got to pack his bags for the rest of the world tour. He's got No. 7 in his sights.

"It will be decided in Hawaii for sure," he says of this year's title competition, which wraps up in the big tubes of Oahu's North Shore in December, and where Slater has been almost unbeatable for a decade. "There's too many people within range of the title now. But this is what I do best. I don't see anyone who I think is out of my reach. If so, I wouldn't be on tour."

More than 10 years after becoming the youngest man in history to take an ASP world title, Slater is still pushing the boundaries of what can be done on waves large and small. Back in the early '90s, he was part of a new school of young surfers (including Rob Machado, Shane Dorian, Ross Williams, and Shane Beschen) that was unseating the older, more powerful heavyweights of the time with skateboarding-inspired moves (aerials, floaters, tail slides). Today, Slater's moves still dominate the line-up: His graceful, flyweight dances still represent the cutting edge. Yet there is a new generation with even lighter feet, higher sights, and smaller boards, represented by current champ Andy Irons along with U.S. Open winner Cory Lopez and other younger riders like Kalani Robb and Mick Fanning.

"There were some circumstances outside of surfing leaning on him heavily last year, so now he's saying, look, this is my last chance to say I'm not going out quietly," says Surfing magazine editor Evan Slater (no relation). "He's more focused than ever. If he does beat Andy Irons, he will succeed in beating three generations of surfers during his career. He bucked the old guys like Gary Elkerton in '92, he dominated his own generation, like all the Shanes, and now he has a whole new contingent like Andy Irons, Mick Fanning, and all the Aussies. If he can upstage them, he will probably be the first surfer to claim the scalps of three different generations in professional surfing."

As his new book attests, Slater's life hasn't always been an easy ride. Despite having been well-traveled on the global surf scene by the time he was a teen, Slater grew up in a working-class and sometimes struggling household in Cocoa Beach, Florida (his mother worked variously as a firefighter, waitress, and bartender), shaken by his father's alcoholism and the subsequent divorce of his parents.

"He opens up the floodgates in certain areas," says Surfing's Evan Slater of the book. "He was really open about his family."

"There were things that were difficult to write about," Kelly Slater says. "It's easy to blame things on other people. You have to be careful with things like that. There are things in my life now that are privileged, but I was a normal kid with exceptional problems."

As a preteen, he slept with a pillow over his head and even once dozed off in the family driveway to escape the noise of his parents' shouting. Riding around Cocoa Beach with his drunk father in a dune buggy - once heading into traffic head-on - was a life-and-death risk. "It's a wonder I lived to see my first sponsorship," he writes in Pipe Dreams. "... The ocean was my refuge." Much to his relief, his mother gave his father the boot in 1983.

The previous year, at age 10, he beat a group of 12-year-olds to win the Eastern Surfing Association's East Coast championship contest for the age group, and he dominated the contest through 1987. Those years were hard for Slater's mother (she also had two other boys to feed), and he wouldn't have made it on the amateur circuit were it not for the kindness of the East Coast surfing community. The late Colin "Doc" Couture used to hit up Slater's sponsors and even throw in his own cash just to make sure the kid could compete out of town.

At the time, Slater writes, "East Coast surfers weren't supposed to succeed," but as a young man he was fascinated by a surfing world outside Florida's tepid, often-flat seas. In 1984, he won a surf-shop-sponsored contest, and the prize was a trip to Hawaii. During his second week there, he won the U.S. Amateur Surfing Championships for his age group. Soon Slater's sponsor was sending him and older brother Sean, also a talented surfer, up and down the East Coast to hand out stickers and surf in events.

Despite Slater's quick rise, it took more time for him to get respect in the line-up at Florida's best surf spot, Sebastian Inlet. It's part of the nature of surfing to protect turf, and even today Slater gets threatened in waters all over the world. "You can't surf Malibu and not get hassled," he says of a recent session at the 'Bu.

The private man whose dating exploits would later become legend talks candidly about his first 1987 sexual encounters in a chapter titled "Minuteman." About the same time, he started beating professional surf stars in pro-am events, and the buzz about the kid from Florida began to grow. Two years later, Surfer magazine hailed him as a future world champ.

Slater was limber (he could bend over backward) and small, not much more than five and a half feet and weighing only a buck-and-change, and his boards were quite small. At the time, bigger guys like Mark Occhilupo had ushered in an era of "power surfing," where large, blazing turns, momentous off-the-lips, and "roundhouse cutbacks" were the norm. Slater and his lighter, younger counterparts were starting to ride on thinner, lighter, smaller boards, enabling them to bust out of the wave and draw their art outside the framework of competitive surfing. His has been called "the aerial generation." Early on, however, Slater was concerned the judges weren't used to seeing surfing go so radically outside the boundaries of tried-and-true top-to-bottom moves. In 1990, he turned pro, only to have a less-than-stellar year on the world circuit. It wasn't until 1992, the year he won his first pro-surfing world title, that Slater even won a top-tier pro contest, the Rip Curl event in Hossegor, France.

The same year, Slater was talked into playing a wannabe pro surfer named Jimmy Slade on Baywatch. To this day, he regrets the season he spent spewing corny lines. (Once he mocked a line during the taping of an octopus-attack scene, saying, "Oh no, it's a Baywatch-topus.")

"I felt like a fish out of water," he says. "I didn't grow up acting; I grew up surfing."

But it was on the set that he met on-again, off-again lover Pam Anderson. He was warned to stay away, and he did, for the first few years. In the meantime, despite ribbing by fellow pros, Slater's year on Baywatch helped surfing cross over into mainstream Americana in a way not seen since the early '60s Gidget movies. Slater, already a graduate of a People magazine "50 Most Beautiful People" issue, was recognized around the globe. Sometimes he was mobbed at contests, and he was even stalked by a woman in France.

The attention distracted him from pro surfing, and in 1993 he failed to repeat his world title win, placing sixth behind many of the older power-surfers he'd unseated the year before. The next year, he began to focus again, and he took the world title. He also ran into Anderson in Hawaii, where she was appearing in a television special. The two hit it off and began dating. Slater saw his picture in the tabloids for the first time.

He won the title in 1995, and that year his ex-girlfriend from Cocoa Beach told him she was pregnant. They decided to raise the child not as a couple, but as friends, and in 1996 Slater's daughter, Taylor, was born. It was a tough season on the circuit, but he turned it around at Huntington Beach when, in a flash of tactical ‰15 know-how, Slater realized his opponent in the final was paddling for his wave. By paddling for the same wave, he triggered an interference call and a penalty that won him the contest. He was booed as he got out of the water, but after that he cruised to the 1996 title.

Perhaps one of the most jolting moments in Slater's tour days was on February 13, 1997, when he found out his Cocoa Beach friend and big wave rider Todd Chesser died while chasing gigantic waves in Oahu. Ironically, Chesser was supposed to be in Maui that day surfing for the camera for the film In God's Hands. (In Huntington Beach, Slater sported a T-shirt that read, "In loving memory of Todd Chesser.") That year, Slater won the world title, tying Mark Richards's previous record of four in a row. He gave his trophy to Chesser's mother.

The next year, the only one standing in Slater's way of an unprecedented sixth world title was his longtime new-school comrade, Cardiff, California's Rob Machado. The showdown in the final of the Pipeline Masters in Oahu went Slater's way as he dropped into the fast-moving tubes of Pipeline's infamous and fickle right break called "Backdoor" - the opposite way that most pros surf Pipeline - and exited the grinders standing.

The next night, Slater announced he was retiring.

He spent his retirement charging bigger and bigger waves, fishing, and dating Anderson again, until she got back with Tommy Lee when he was released from prison in 1999. Slater invented an aerial flip called the "Rodeo Clown" (others have done it, but he has yet to land one), and he took the route of other non-contest pros in embarking on surf expeditions to exotic South Pacific locales - sponsored trips that would turn into hot-selling surf videos. In 2000, Anderson entered his life again, and they got serious, but during a surfing trip to Asia and the South Pacific, he got the bad news via a street-side tabloid that Anderson had found a new lover - a male model .

"The last time we split up I was pretty angry that she was pretty non-communicative," Slater says. "I haven't seen her since we split, but we talk once in a while on the phone."

Last year, he released a videogame, Kelly Slater's ProSurfer, but it didn't do anywhere near as well as its skateboarding counterpart, Tony Hawk's ProSkater. It was a bad year all around for Slates. After announcing he was back on the tour fulltime, he won the prestigious Eddie Aikau big wave event at Waimea Bay, and his friend, Pearl Jam frontman and sometime surfer Eddie Vedder, was there to congratulate him. On the Australian leg of the tour, however, he got a call from home about his ailing father. He went back to Cocoa Beach to spend a last few weeks with his dying dad as cancer took his life. Slater had sprung for experimental therapy for his father in the past, but this time nothing could be done.

"Last year was a difficult year in my life," Slater says. "But I also got close to a lot of people in my life. I got much closer to my family."

His 2002 tour was a shambles, but this year he's come back in a big way - to No. 2 in the world behind Andy Irons - and few are betting against him for a seventh world title.

"If you look at it like a horse race, he's certainly gaining momentum," says Surfing magazine's Slater. "Everybody said he surfed 20 percent better than anyone else at Jeffrey's Bay [South Africa, a contest Slater won last month]."

"He's one of those rare athletes who have performed well later in his career," adds Baker of the Surf Industry Manufacturers Association.

Slater hopes another title will give him a bully pulpit to help change the ASP contest system, which works in a single-elimination fashion and leaves much to be desired for crossover television coverage in the U.S. He said he was intrigued by the X Games format, a four-quarter, team-versus-team event pitting East Coast pros against those from the west, which Slater helped the east win this week.

"We've offered up a lot of different options for changing contest formats," Slater says. "They should have more statistical information, like a leader board, so people can follow the contests."

He's also concerned about the state of the pro tour, in which Australians make up a majority of the contestants and Americans are becoming few and far between. Baker agrees: "The system hasn't been conducive to building Kelly Slaters over the last 10 years." Slater would like to see a national amateur system to foster future American stars.

A seventh title would re-establish him at the top, but it's not the last of the surprises we'll be getting from Kelly Slater. Now, there's another Slater threat waiting in the wings. His daughter, Taylor, is 7, and, he says modestly, "She can get out there and catch a few waves now."