Kelly Slater

What's the most high difficulty and whatever.

Not necessarily, because the wave doesn't always ask for the most difficult thing.

You know, sometimes it's just a nice brushstroke.

You know, it's just a nice turn at the right speed.

It doesn't have to be.

the crazy fastest thing in the world.

You know, sometimes depending on the pace of a wave, it might want you to go slow or fast or do something radical or something that's much more subtle.

But it's the control with which you do it.

It's the, you know, the efficiency of body movement, all these sort of things.

But I don't... I guess the best way to kind of go about learning about judging maybe would be watching gymnastics, like a floor exercise.

Because...

the commentators talk you through it so, oh, you can see how they just stepped when they landed there.

Or they flared their arm at a certain place in a high dive.

Or in these different sports that are judged, high-level people can point out the small little things that detract from what the scoring would be.

And so you would kind of hope for that in surfing.

Sometimes, even all of us pros will be sitting around watching a heat.

We'll see somebody ride a wave, and we'll hear a score pop up that's either high or low, and we're like, what the hell is that?

Right.

Out of the blue, we're like, what did they see that we aren't seeing?

Right.