ASP, Sweating The Small Stuff

By Chris Binns

Two times ASP World Junior Champ Pablo Paulino, and the sort of ASP surfing action and conditions ASP fans apparently just can't get enough of.

In case you haven’t noticed, there’s been a lot of talk about the state of the Dream Tour. One of the sport’s finest, three time world champ Andy Irons, openly stated his boredom with competition and pulled the pin on the tour in 2009, only to return to competition last weekend at notorious mushburger Huntington Beach for the Hurley US Open of Surfing. Why would he do such a thing? Same reason as his brother Bruce, who also quit at the end of last year: ’cos there was a hundred grand on the line. It’s not rocket science. As Mark Occhilupo famously said; “twenty years ago you’d win 30 grand and a car at a contest. Now you don’t even get the car”.

Kelly Slater’s talks with ESPN have been all over the news too (read Tim Baker’s story here). The sport’s greatest ever sees something ill with a tour that has brought him riches beyond belief and allowed him to spend his life on tropical islands, and he has sought out the counsel of others. This fact alone has melted interactive platforms on the net with rumours, gossip, innuendo and the whole damn world throwing in their two cents worth. Clearly, the people want change.

So the surfers and the fans aren’t happy. There is disillusionment amongst the surfers due to lack of prize money. There is boredom amongst fans because their heroes are bored, and because the sport, nay, the lifestyle they worship, is so hard to follow and badly represented in mainstream media. The ASP doesn’t own its competitions, the surf companies do, and while most of them do a fantastic job in webcast world, some are hopeless, and the tour struggles for uniformity from event to event. Anyone who slept through the online debacle that was the Brazil contest would readily attest to that.

Then this week, ASP Business News proudly announces the launch of the ASP World Junior Tour. If you could make it through the press release, which contains a staggering 47 mentions of ‘ASP’ (50, if you counted captions), and talks about the unparalleled success of the ASP World Junior Champs (compared to?) you’d have discovered that next year there will be three 48-grom World Junior Tour contests held around the globe. This adds a further two events to the current one held at Narrabeen every January. These will be run using “formats similar to those found on the ASP Dream Tour.” What this means is anyone’s guess, as even a fortnight ago at J-Bay, the Billabong Pro’s running format wasn’t chosen until a few days into the waiting period.

The surfing community shows little interest in junior surfing. Any magazine editor can tell you of endless letters from readers bemoaning the focus on youth by the industry, a focus that pays little attention to the talented grommet’s best interests in the long term. The fact that Kelly Slater managed to graduate from high school, whereas now we see 11 year old protégés deciding on “home schooling”, makes you wonder. Team managers will run high performance camps overseas during school term time with not a thought that this might impact negatively on their surfers. Even though there are plenty of school surfing programs tailored to the needs of those who’s priority is heat strategies over long division, this is not enough for the hundreds of juniors surfers who see grade ten as time to leave. As long as grommets have grommet levels of enthusiasm, junior surfing will always thrive, so does it really need more attention, and more contests? Surely the ASP would be better off aiming their energies at the real meat and potatoes of their existence, the premiere league Dream Tour?

The most glamorous, high-flying sport in the world is Formula One. This year a situation arose where the teams attempted to wrest away control of the sport from their governing body, the FIA. These are big name teams, with massive amounts of money and pull; Ferrari, Mercedes, BMW, Red Bull and the like. Did the F1 bury their heads in the sand, hope it would blow over, and announce a ramping up of the go-kart series? No, they sat down with the teams, and nutted out a plan to keep their circuit viable, and as pleasing as possible to all parties. Sure, it’s a work in progress, but at least the work is being taken on.

The two heats at J-Bay that garnered the most attention from the surfing community were those surfed between two old world champs, Mark Occhilupo and Tom Curren. The surf pumped, the webcast was fantastic, and the initiative of getting the boys back together was a great one. That there wasn’t a single ‘ASP’ in the reports afterwards tells a sorry story.

Click here for Nick Carroll's thoughts on the new tour