No Reason For Complacency

By Nick Carroll

Is Kelly Slater the one surf star supporting the new tour?

The clock’s ticking on the “Champions’ Tour” fantasy. And the longer it ticks, the more it’s beginning to look as if the ASP will dodge the bullet.

Yet if it gets through this debacle more or less intact, the ASP should not be sighing with relief.

Instead the team might want to ponder just why it is that their greatest hero of all time, Kelly fucken Slater for chrissake, got so frustrated by his attempts to deal with the ASP that he was willing to make such a quixotic move – literally lay all his cred on the line – in order to get done what seems to him and quite a few others to be the bleeding obvious.

There’s two kinds of sporting bodies in the world: governments and entrepreneurs. Examples of the latter include the USA’s NFL and Australia’s AFL – both tough minded crews who work the TV rights system to the max, engage with and try to broaden their fan base at every turn, and constantly push their sport into new areas, while somehow keeping a wide range of millionaire egos in check.

Then there’s the governments. Some are like the International Olympic Committee: ultra-fascist and all powerful. The IOC is so gnarly you almost wouldn’t be surprised to hear they run a dungeon somewhere in Austria full of errant athletics managers.

Others, like Cricket Australia, just sorta blunder along a bit complacently in the wake of their sport, filling in the gaps here and there, and hoping nobody comes along to sandbag ‘em.

That’s the ASP. It’s a classic government. It taxes its owners, runs the bureaucracy, and cringes at the thought of any serious initiative.

Taj Burrow's perfect arc.

Like most governments, it has some good people working for it, and it does some things well. Its ranking system works way better than those of either of its massively bigger brothers, tennis and golf. The World Tour judging system and panel, despite the occasional whinge or well-aimed barb from a disgruntled pro, is a minor miracle – a credit to the persistence of the judging team and their willingness to take criticism on board. It keeps the legalities in check and walks the fine line between too much athlete discipline and not enough.

Yet in almost every other area, it flails. It’s hopelessly in thrall to its surf company clients, unable to exploit its business properties, and unable to meaningfully engage either its surfer membership or its fan base.

Forget the pros for a moment; forget why it was they felt the need to form World Professional Surfers, an entirely separate group of their own, in order to safeguard their interests in the sport.

When was the last time YOU – you crazy pro surfing fan, you – were “pushed” a World Tour Fan Membership, complete with T-shirt, stickers, premium website access, block of Mick Fanning-signed wax, and a chance to win a free trip to the Pipe Masters and the ASP end of year ball?

Yeah, never. Because such a thing doesn’t exist. The biggest means of engagement for surf fans is FantasySurfer.com, a surf media innovation connected to the ASP only through its sanctioning.

Perhaps the most telling episode in recent ASP history revolves around the only serious tour innovation of the past 10 years: the webcasts.

Contrary to Kelly’s recent claims, the ASP does in fact own the broadcast and webcast rights to World Tour events. It’s just that it doesn’t know what to do with ‘em.

This was never clearer than in 2006, when the organization embarked upon an ill-fated attempt to turn the webcast rights to its and its franchisees’ advantage.

Webcasting goes back to the dot-com boom days of 1999, when event franchisees like Bluetorch and Billabong seized on the new medium as a way of bypassing the ASP’s apparent inability to get a win on the tour’s TV rights.

By 2005, webcasts were de rigeur for World Tour events. But surprise surprise, they ain’t cheap. Some internal surf corpo estimates had the cost of a single event webcast running at $200,000. Ouch!

So the ASP found itself in conversation with an Internet group called Lat34.com, an “extreme sport” offshoot of the media colossus AOL Time Warner.

The idea was that Lat34 would take on the job of webcasting World Tour events. Because Lat34 was backed by a massive US media empire, it seemed that everyone just assumed they’d be paying for it all, no doubt out of the goodness of America’s corporate heart.

But no! Guess what Lat34’s first move turned out to be? Yep – in an eerie precursor to the current circumstance, they went cap in hand to the surf companies. While the ASP was chirping its success at relieving the events of a financial burden, Lat34 had spotted a nice little earner in the offing … and naturally enough, the surf corpos weren’t super keen on paying someone else even more money to do what they were already doing.

So the Lat34 deal dissolved, and the webcasts defaulted to the place from which they sprang: the surf companies. Where they remain to this day.

This pattern has been repeating over and over ever since 1996, when the ASP’s original and rather startlingly entrepreneurial mission – ie, get big corporations outside the sport to pay for the contests – came to a more or less abrupt halt with the sacking of former CEO Graham Cassidy.

Since then, all the real innovation has come from either the surf companies, or when they get sufficiently pissed off with things, the surfers themselves. And it always seems to involve an awful amount of possibly unnecessary anguish.

Wayne 'Rabbit' Bartholomew focused on the outcome.

You can’t help but wonder if in some way, the latest crisis may be distantly related to the recent departure of Rabbit Bartholomew from the ASP’s helm.

Governments can usually fuck up left, right and centre and get away with it, as long as there’s a charismatic and credible figurehead in the mix somewhere. And Rabbit was that. Bugs is a natural politician; he’s got the common touch and he wears his heart on his sleeve. You can’t help but believe in him.

But Rabbit isn’t there any more.

Maybe – out of sheer terror of the consequences, if not out of good sense – instead of electing a new figurehead, the ASP might now consider seizing the reins of the sport and taking it places it hasn’t yet been.