Mixed Results

In October of 2012, in a brief statement that was as bullish as it was vague, the organization then known as the Association of Surfing Professionals announced a partnership with a company called ZoSea Media that, the statement promised, would “enhance the organizational structure of the sport as well as the direction of professional surfing.”

That announcement was curious for at least two reasons. First, the wording was so nebulous that it remained unclear what the deal actually was. Secondly, ZoSea Media was, at the time, an unheard-of company that had been formed only a few months earlier. Interested surf fans looking for more information on the company—if such people even existed—would have found very little to go on. On the day of the announcement, the company lacked so much as a website.

Though little investigative reporting was done in the immediate aftermath, it turned out the deal was not so much a partnership as an acquisition, and that ZoSea and its investors had purchased surfing’s governing body outright. When these details emerged, the broader picture started to take shape. ZoSea’s principals turned out to be Kelly Slater’s longtime manager, Terry Hardy, and a man named Paul Speaker, who was then on the board of directors for Quiksilver, the 11-time World Champion’s lifelong sponsor.

As for the “new direction of professional surfing,” a few months later, in February of 2013, Speaker was announced as the ASP’s new CEO, and he made the reorganized world of professional surfing’s agenda extremely clear: the new leadership was going to be unapologetic in doing everything in its power to take surfing mainstream. 

“We’re removing stop signs and replacing them with welcome mats,” Speaker told reporters. He also promised that surf fans, and, more importantly, would-be surf fans, “Will get an experience equivalent to that of other professional sports.”

This brash approach seemed remarkable, and was a distinct departure from professional surfing’s homegrown, grassroots past. It was all the more significant considering Speaker’s pedigree. The ASP was brazen in touting his mainstream cred at the time of his hire. He previously worked as “Director of Marketing and Ideas”—a Kafkaesque title if ever there was one—for the NFL, and had held top posts at Time Inc. Studios and RKO Pictures.

Single Sporting Event Viewership, 2014, as self-reported by each league: 
World Cup, 1 billion; Superbowl, 111.5 million; Pipe Masters, 6.2 million; Little League World Series Final, 5.5 million

Sports League Revenue, 2015, as reported: 
NFL, $12 billion; MLB, 9.5 billion; NBA, $6.5 billion. Minor League Baseball, $62 million; WSL: $ -30 million.

Annual membership costs, in USD: 
Madison Square Garden Luxury Suite, $1 million; Trump National Golf Course, $165,920; California State Parks Beach Pass, $195

For its part, pro surfing’s past was a high-wire act—a line graph that traced a long, slow arc toward “growth,” but one that was weighted down by surfers’ and surf culture’s deeply institutionalized distrust of outside, non-endemic forces, be they financial or otherwise. It’s hard to grow a league when a major selling point of your fandom is exclusivity. Put another way: how do you make a sport grow when the people who enjoy consuming your sport don’t want it to? 

Even if his promise to put surfing on par with other professional sports leagues always seemed laughably ambitious, the ASP’s sale and Speaker’s appointment as CEO were positioned as indications that the embattled organization was readying itself for a primetime close-up.

Now, as I write this, it’s five years later and Speaker is gone. The ASP has been rebranded into the World Surf League. But, the question remains: was the hiring of a new boss with mainstream bona fides, and the prospect of a TV deal, enough to legitimize surfing’s governing body? Actually it’s probably true that the question is a much deeper one than that. So, put another, more blunt way: why is it that a pro surfing league has never been sustainable over the long term? Why is it that pro surfing, as an enterprise, seems to be perpetually financially doomed? 

***

While surfing has long been extremely marketable to the mainstream (think Roxy ads and Rubio’s commercials) the sport has always existed in a strange double-bind: everyday surfers abhor mainstream attention, yet the professional arm of the sport needs that mainstream for financial success. In many ways, today’s WSL sits at the nexus of these two sides, as its contests represent the public face of the sport.

When the ASP was acquired in 2012, the league seemed to be sitting pretty. Professional surfing had boomed in the previous decade, with surf companies and professional surfers cashing in. At the time, Billabong was valued somewhere in the neighborhood of $225 million dollars, Quiksilver was also publicly traded and valued at $452 million, and Volcom had been sold to a French holding company for $608 million in 2011. Fat times for all. 

Professional surfing’s past is a high-wire act—a line graph weighted down by surfers’ and surf culture’s deeply institutionalized distrust of outside forces. It’s hard to grow a league when a major portion of your fandom doesn’t want it to grow.

But the ASP itself had not been able to capitalize for years, remaining hamstrung in part by what seemed like its own ineptitude, but also by the very structure of the endeavor. This is because the ASP, not unlike college sports’ governing body, the NCAA, was for the entirety of its existence little more than a shell corporation that served as the titular face of professional surfing. It made rules. It sanctioned events. It crowned a champion. But the heavy lifting was done by the major surf brands, which hosted, broadcasted, marketed, paid for, and owned the rights to the ASP’s contests.

Surfers like Slater were outspoken about the folly of this system. It’s easy to forget now, but in 2009, Slater was so fed up with the ASP that he attempted to form a breakaway “rebel” tour of his own.

What had him so rankled that he was ready to leave the tour on which he had built his legacy, thereby devaluing his own World Championships in the process? Slater’s key gripe might have seemed banal to a casual fan: “The inherent problem with the ASP is that it doesn’t own all its media rights,” he told Surfer at the time.

While it’s become increasingly commonplace to turn on your evening television and hear news of star athletes heading the players’ unions that represent them—and subsequently making strides in collective bargaining agreements—it is still hard to imagine LeBron James or Tom Brady complaining openly about the way the NBA or NFL handles its media contracts. 

But Slater, who is very aware of his place in surf history and surf culture, has spent a lifetime tilting at the windmill of trying to legitimize the sport that he loves—by taking surfing public. And he understood that the ASP was surrendering its greatest asset. Organizations like the NBA and NFL own the broadcast rights to their competitions. But up until a few years ago, if you wanted to watch an ASP event online, you’d be watching it not on the ASP’s website, nor on the website of a broadcast partner, but on the website of the event’s sponsor. For fans, this meant ASP contests weren’t nearly as accessible as they could have been, and that the quality of the webcasts themselves varied greatly from event to event. This was to say nothing of the blatant conflicts of interest that existed in such an arrangement—it’s very hard to imagine logging on to Budweiser dot com to watch the Super Bowl, and listen to the game called not by Al and Chris, but rather by two Budweiser PR flacks. For the ASP, the haphazard, slapdash nature of this arrangement always meant that they were left without what is traditionally a sporting league’s largest and best revenue stream. 

But, of course, the challenge faced by the ASP when it was acquired six years ago ran much deeper than renegotiating a contract for media rights. In fact, the media rights issue was only the tip of the spear, hinting at broader organizational dysfunction within the ASP. The organization’s biggest challenge was in negotiating that position at the nexus between mainstream attention and core-surfer street cred. How do you make a financially viable and professional league while also appeasing a base that values authenticity above anything else? 

This tension between pro surfing’s mainstream ambitions and its rebellious past was highlighted in the death of three-time ASP Champion Andy Irons. When Irons died from a heart attack and drug ingestion in November 2010 while on his way home from an ASP contest in Puerto Rico, the story made international headlines, but the ASP refused to comment meaningfully, or address specific questions about its drug-testing policy.

It was this type of failure to communicate effectively that had caused many fans to lose faith in the ASP’s credibility. A year after Irons’ death, for instance, the ASP prematurely named Kelly Slater its 2011 World Champion. It took a commenter on an online forum to point out that the ASP had gotten its math wrong, and that Slater had not, in fact, won the title. When this was brought to the ASP’s attention, it wasn’t the ASP that announced its error. It was Slater himself, on his Twitter account. He went on to win the championship, but the error was so embarrassing that former ASP CEO Brodie Carr resigned his post.

Another hurdle to mainstream success? The colorful reputation of surf culture itself. In 2013, Slater made headlines when he told an Australian website that while surfing didn’t have a performance-enhancing drug problem, it certainly had a recreational drug use problem. “There clearly is—absolutely. There’s no denying that it’s rampant, it’s full-on.” In 2012, the ASP said that it was implementing a drug-testing program, but surfers have indicated that the policy exists in name only. Slater told that same website that he got tested at the first event of 2012, but hasn’t been tested since. 

It’s not that any of these instances were so terribly damning or egregious that they were problematic in isolation—it’s that, taken collectively, these stories gave one the feeling that surfing’s governing body was being run out of a nearby hotdog stand.

Just as all these events were making headlines, reports emerged that the ASP was somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 million dollars in debt, and yet—and yet—the ownership of the league hadn’t changed hands in over 30 years. If any other endeavor had been run into the ground this way, one imagines mass layoffs. The ASP, meanwhile, had kept skipping along the bottom for years.

As this perfect storm of headlines swirled, and as those reports of mass debt began to emerge, the Association of Surfing Professionals, tapped out and looking for revenue, went to New York. For years, the organization had crowed about having “the world’s best surfers in the world’s best waves,” but the most attention-grabbing event on the 2011 schedule was the Quiksilver Pro in New York, which promised to have concerts and sideshows like “Tony Hawk’s Vert Jam.” More importantly, it’d only be an hour’s train ride down the Long Island Rail Road from Manhattan—and New York City’s 8 million prospective new surf fans. To make sure that tour surfers didn’t grouse about having to compete in a mediocre beachbreak, Quiksilver cut them in on the action, offering up a million-dollar prize purse—twice the normal amount, and the largest in ASP history.

The event was pro surfing’s all-in gamble on the mainstream, and the bet paid. As it happened, a hurricane swell churned out consistent head-high barrels, and the press release at competition’s end proclaimed that “100,000 new fans” were there to see it. That same release heralded “a day of surfing that will go down in history.” While surf fans in New York had their eyes trained on Kelly Slater as he effortlessly tore apart flawless Long Island 6-footers, it was the unseen architect of the event, a man named Paul Speaker, who had sowed the seeds of pro surfing’s future that day. Speaker, then on Quiksilver’s Board of Directors, had been tasked with attracting new fans, and their wallets, and he’d succeeded.

A year later, he’d be named President of the ASP. 

***

In January of 2017, after five years at the helm, Speaker announced that he’d like to spend more time with his family. When he stepped down as the CEO of the WSL, he did so in a lengthy resignation letter that also served as a brag sheet for what were his many real accomplishments. 

Much of that letter features language like “best-in-class product and culture” that is void of meaning and approximates the language of a Lexus ad, but Speaker was right to reflect on what the League had done in only five short years. Beyond the nominal change from the tongue-clunker Association of Surfing Professionals to the more palatable World Surf League, at the top of Speaker’s list of braggables were renegotiated media rights, and the introduction of non-endemic “corporate partners.” In short, it was Kelly Slater’s legislative agenda circa 2009. To that, I’d add that under Speaker’s leadership, the WSL acquired the Big Wave World Tour, and made real strides in terms of equality between the men’s and women’s world tours. 

Speaker notably did not relinquish financial ownership in the WSL, meaning that in some ways, this was a reshuffling of deck chairs. But the man did his best to take the sport mainstream, and the biggest trick in that regard—and the most notable and substantial change to professional surfing in its current, 41-year incarnation—had been in the offing for over a decade. Yet, it wasn’t finalized until right before Speaker kicked out. It had been the plan all along, and it had worked: the WSL, now owned partially by Terry Hardy, Kelly Slater’s longtime manager, had acquired the Kelly Slater Wave Company. 

Why is that a big deal? 

A couple months ago, my wife and I lay side by side in our marital bed on a hot July night, doing what lovers do: flipping absentmindedly through the DirecTV channel guide. There, in the blue and white grid of mindless entertainment, I saw something titled, “Pro Surfing.” 

I turned it on to find something called the 2017 Outerknown Fiji Pro. It had been years since I’d watched a surf contest, even longer since I’d cared about the results. It’s probably not worthwhile for me to note here that, for my money, “professional surfing” as it has come to be known and practiced was and is something antipodal to the joy of the sport as it’s actually practiced on beaches and on reefs around the world. But it probably is worthwhile for me to point out here that much of my cynicism and disillusionment was borne not out of some errant cool guy desire to be better than the endeavor, but rather out of having dug around under the ASP’s hood several years back, and seeing the writing on the wall—that things were in an extremely flimsy state, both for the ASP and for the companies that backed it. 

Having come to this understanding, it was hard to watch the contests and see them as anything but a cash-starved money grab. But much of the experience of being a person in this present age is living through things that would have seemed impossible to imagine only a few years ago. So as I watched the few minutes of that event—broadcast on the NBC Sports Network, several weeks after it had occurred and late at night though it may have been—I couldn’t get over the implications of a single person, Slater, competing at an event sponsored by the company he owns, on a professional tour he has an indirect stake in.

There’s something in the self-contained nature of the wavepool—square, understandable, not unlike a football field in its size or scope—that might appeal to a mainstream audience. Then again, that predictability shifts the attention away from the real star—the ocean.

There’s no doubt that professional surfing is cleaning itself up and that real strides have been made in an attempt to legitimize the sport, but that consolidation of power in any endeavor would be worrisome. I’m not sure what it says about the state of the sport that its hopes rest entirely within that seat of power, the same way that it did five years ago, and the same way it did five years before that. 

Here’s what I am sure of: 

In 2018, everybody surfs. The mom at your kid’s school surfs. The bros at the gym surf. Everybody surfs. And yet the surf industry, the professional surf leagues, and yes, the surf media (perhaps especially the surf media) seem to be in a more fragile state than one can ever remember. 

Five years ago, there were no legitimate wave pools spitting out reproduce-able, flawless, righthand barrels, and there was no consistent manner in which to broadcast either of the two. What will come five years from now is anybody’s guess. What does seem clear is the WSL’s path forward: they’re all in on wave pools and reformatting the tour to make it more easily consumable, for both surfers and prospective ones.

In January of this year, the WSL reached a two-year deal for its broadcast rights with Facebook for 30 million dollars. On the surface, it might seem like a fair bit of money, but in comparison to the sports leagues the WSL wants to emulate, it’s a laughably small sum that hints at the cash-strapped nature of the WSL. Fifteen million dollars per year for, in the WSL’s own words, “all elite Men’s and Women’s Championship Tour events, the Qualifying Series 10,000, and Big Wave Tour events, as well as the World Junior Championships,” is a lot to give for very little money. One imagines that it’s a bet on the future, a future that itself is tied closely to wave pools.

In September of 2018, the WSL will hold the Surf Ranch Pro at the wave pool created by the Kelly Slater Wave Company. The predictable nature of the wave pool will go a long way in trying to make it work. There is something in the self-contained nature of the wavepool— in terms of contest windows, absolutely, but also in terms of the geographic location of the pool itself (square, contained, understandable, not unlike a football field in its size or scope)—that might appeal, the logic goes, to a mainstream audience who can now tune in from anywhere in the world with an internet connection. 

What the architects of pro surfing never seem to have understood is that making a “sport” of the pastime is antithetical to what made surfing magic in the first place—the sensation of standing atop a moving wall of water for seconds at a time.

Then again, that predictability shifts the attention away from the real star of any surf contest—the ocean— and to a group of surfers performing a set of maneuvers. The whole appeal of surfing to a mainstream audience may get lost in the shuffle. This is a fear that will only be exacerbated by the fact that the WSL canceled events at Trestles in California, and at Cloudbreak in Fiji, especially considering that the League is currently at political odds with the state of Hawaii over schedule changes and late permit applications. At press time, the WSL will most likely not be permitted to run its most historic and important event, the Pipe Masters, on the North Shore of Oahu. 

All of these contingencies notwithstanding, one thing does stand: That the architects of pro surfing never seem to have gotten that making a “sport” of the pastime is antithetical to what made surfing magic in the first place. The allure of those sun-drenched Roxy ads and watery Rubio commercials has nothing to do with the sheer verticality of a frontside hack. I’m not sure if anybody actually cares if Filipe Toledo completes his third rotation on his fifth wave. 

What will make pro surfing appealing to a mainstream audience is surfing itself—standing atop a moving wall of water for seconds at a time. Bottling and peddling that magic is the job of making a product of professional surfing, and it’s unclear if it can be done. The first 40 years have issued spotty results.

[*All figures accurate at time of writing.]