Slater Rides Endorsement Wave to Riches : Surfing: He overcomes shyness and gives up privacy as one of the sport’s most sought-after young competitors.

Wearing wetsuits and armed with waterproof cameras, the surfing paparazzi swarmed into the clear waters of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, last year.

They were in search of more than just a photo of Kelly Slater. They wanted an answer.

What surfwear company was he going to sign with?

Slater was the hottest commodity to hit the industry since the surfboard leash, and some of the biggest powers--Op, Quiksilver and Gotcha--were standing in line with endorsement offers.

And that made Slater, then an 18-year-old from Cocoa Beach, Fla., a marked man before he turned professional.

“The photographers were everywhere,” he said. “Every time I would walk down the beach, there would be four or five of them there. They followed me home. One guy was getting shots of me eating a sandwich. I told them all to get lost.”

So Slater knew he wouldn’t be alone when he went surfing in Mexico that day. The photographers spotted him and clicked away.

There, emblazoned on the bottom of his black surf trunks, was his answer:

I don’t even care.

It is one year later and Slater is still hounded.

Teen-age girls from San Clemente to New Jersey call him late at night, giggling into the phone. Kids swarm him at the beach, asking him to autograph T-shirts, magazines and photos.

People Magazine named him one of the “50 Most Beautiful People in the World.”

Even his choice of underwear is being scrutinized.

Is it any wonder the guy is camera shy?

“I don’t like the limelight,” he said. “Sometimes I get sick of it, but I’m obligated to my sponsor.”

His sponsor is Quiksilver, the Costa Mesa-based surfwear company. Quiksilver signed Slater to a contract worth about $1.5 million over the next three years, the largest endorsement deal in surfing history.

Bryan Taylor of Santa Monica, Slater’s agent, said his client could become the first surfer to try endorsements outside the surfing industry.

Slater certainly has the clean-cut image to go with his movie-star looks. He earned straight A’s in high school, including college-prep calculus, stays out of trouble and says no to drugs and alcohol.

“So many surfers get pulled into drugs so easily,” Slater said. “A lot of these guys on the tour want me to go smoke pot with them, and I tell them no. They have to respect that.

“If guys want to go out, party and get all run down and not do well in their contests, that’s fine with me. But I want the competition to get better.”

Many in the surfing community regard Slater as the successor to Tom Curren, the reigning world champion. They say Slater could revolutionize the sport with his breathtaking “aquabatics.”

“I like to take chances when I surf,” Slater said. “I like to control fear. It’s boring to go through life doing the same thing.

“I’ve gone bungie diving, and I plan to go parachuting and hang gliding. There are a bunch of things I want to do.”

His girlfriend, Cindy Freund of Costa Mesa, listens and shakes her head.

“He’s been talking about walking on hot coals, too,” she said.

It is a warm, clear day at 54th Street in Newport Beach, and Slater is carving his way through the surf at a local contest.

He and other surfers use the smaller contests in preparation for big events such as the Op Pro championships, which began Monday at the Huntington Beach Pier.

Slater has lived and trained in the Orange County area the past seven summers.

A lack of waves leaves the Atlantic Ocean looking like a lake in the summer, so he and his older brother Sean, 22, seek bigger surf out west. They usually stay with friends in Huntington Beach.

Slater grew up in Cocoa Beach, a city of 12,000 nestled on a strip of barrier island south of Cape Canaveral on Florida’s east coast.

Best known for the aerospace industry, the area has produced good surfers, including defending Op Pro champion Todd Holland.

Judy Slater (now Rivers) moved to Cocoa Beach in 1966. She loved the beach and took her boys, Sean and Kelly, there every day.

By age 5, Kelly was playing on Styrofoam boards. At 8, he was riding fiberglass boards.

Kelly also entered his first contest when he was 8, winning a regional meet in Florida.

“That was the first time Kelly rode a hard board,” Judy said. “He was afraid the fiberglass boards would hurt him. He won with it, and then he tore through it from there.”

He also was a talented Little League pitcher. His mom remembers one team protesting a game because her son “threw too hard.”

Said Sean: “Surfing was something we did for fun. We played all sports--football, basketball and baseball. But we surfed every day.”

It was on those small waves that Slater began developing some of his favorite moves--aerials, tailslides and 360-degree cutbacks.

“He was constantly surfing against himself,” Judy said. “He would work on one move for hours until he got it right.

“I remember he would just be a teeny little boy, and he’d be out there doing flips off his bodyboard. It was like there was no one else in the world but him.”

Slater has had some tough times. His parents were divorced in 1982. His father, Steve, sold real estate and is now a commercial fisherman. His mother is married to a yacht repairman.

After turning pro, Slater bought a bungalow in Cocoa Beach for his mother and helped her remodel it.

“Kelly bought it,” Judy said, “because he didn’t want to see us worry about (paying for) it.”

Kelly began taking surfing seriously at age 10 and won six East Coast amateur titles, four U.S. amateur championships and several other contests. Sean surfs on the ASP East Coast tour and finished 11th last year.

Kelly came onto the international scene in 1986. As a 14-year-old, he finished third against older, more experienced surfers at the world amateur championships in England.

In August, 1989, he dominated the inaugural Op Junior amateur competition at the Huntington Beach Pier.

Slater turned professional at the end of his junior year of high school. His biggest victory came last September, when he won $30,000 at the Body Glove Surf Bout.

The contest was at Lower Trestles, the site that intimidated him six years earlier.

Slater has just finished his heat at the Newport Beach contest. He complains of a sore knee, which he hurt when he jumped off a mini-trampoline at school.

“I asked him why he did something so silly,” Judy said, “and he told me, ‘Because I would have won $6, Mom. These guys dared me to do it.’ ”

Slater’s agent said top surfers have no problem finding endorsements in the close-knit, laid-back beach industry. But try landing these guys on a Wheaties box.

“On Madison Avenue, where the money is, it’s tough to promote a guy who’s wearing a nose ring,” Taylor said. “They (advertisers) think of surfers as a bunch of yahoos.”

But Slater is taken seriously.

His half-hour surfing video is the top-selling video in Australia. An East Coast company chose him, along with Michael Jordan, as the first to appear in a series of life-size wall posters.

NBC has contacted Taylor, asking if Slater was free for a movie shoot in January. Paramount spotted him in a national sports magazine last winter. A few weeks later, he was doing a screen test.

Slater shrugs it off.

“I think you have to have an ego problem to be in the movies,” Slater said. “You have to be real showy, flashy, outgoing. I’m not into that. It’s just not me.”

After all, he’s camera shy.