Business 101: If you purchase a mind-blowing R&D lab, use it for R&D.
Here is one famous behavioral study in the field of psychology that is quite suggestive to the professional surfing universe.
Participants in an experiment are invited to analyze images and name their colors. In the second stage, they need to say words associated with the color they saw. For instance, they say sky when they first say blue. Quite simple. Then, things run again but this time actors mingle among the participants and purposely name colors incorrectly in front of them. As a result, surprisingly, participant’s answers in the second stage became creative. Words that do not necessarily relate to the referred color (star for orange, ice cream for blue, etc.) came abound. In other words, when surprised by different analyses, even our cake walk judgments can bug weirdly.
Fishy judgements in surfing contests are just as old as surfing contents. National leagues, amateurs, locals, internationals… Raise your hand if you have surfed in a jersey more than a dozen times in your life and disagree with that statement. Life itself is unfair, fishy stuff is everywhere. So should we just accept that as just another beautiful metaphor from our beloved sport? At some level, maybe… But maybe we should grow up first. Education is not a life distraction, it allows the unpacking of unnecessary fishy deals, making lives easier.
There is so much to unpack in pro surfing that I will just stick with the basics. Here is what I was told as a grom in the 90s about ASP’s head judges that seems to hold true in WSL as of today:
“RULE: The Hedge Judge draws attention to issues that a judge may have missed, bringing comparisons, enriching the judges, standardizing the analysis for a certain convergence.
PARAGRAPH: Believe me, I know more than you because I’ve been working on this for years, and that stated above is necessary.”
Anyone who has watched the movie MoneyBall, however, knows this kind of embarrassment. Someone may very well be a sports expert while still being scientifically illiterate, and therefore deadly wrong. Words on the streets say that the International Olympic Committee was quite shocked by our level of stupidity when we introduced surfing’s head judge.
Even if standardizing the scores for some dogmatic funnel is imperative (a highly questionable idea), appointing a person to do so is the worst way. In fact, it is exactly the dictatorship’s sales pitch: a virtuous person overrides the minds of authorities, thus safeguarding the interests of the people. A vote out of obedience is not exactly a vote. Neither is a judge under someone else.
Maybe wiser than a head judge would be a second panel, perhaps composed of former athletes, to judge the judgement post-decisions. Then, if the problem is indeed the divergence from dogma, it would be enough to dismiss (fire) the judge with the highest history of variances from the median, later on. The dogmatic philosophy is preserved, while the corrosive noise effect is eliminated.
Once that nonsense in itself is overcome, let us now examine its objective.
Dogma and Judgment Method
In mathematics, the name for the most frequently occurring response in a sample is trend. It is such an important concept that the word applies in everything. For example, Gabriel Medina’s recent complaint about non rewards for all-in risky and progressive surfing seems clearly empirical, since the trend is so clear. But that’s not even the point. The inevitability – to some degree – of trends, whatever they may be, is the point. But if so, what would be a ” desirable degree”?
Some fellas like myself still fancy Tom Curren as a gold standard for how a wave should be ridden. I do acknowledge, however, that that becomes conservatism if imposed. Poor. And for a sport that struggles with its commercial incompetence, it’s actually quite stupid.
Imagine a world surfing league that brags about diversity in an attempt to check boxes for advertisers. It would make no sense for them to do so if in the essence of surfing itself, action-wise speaking, in the very sole purpose of a global league, nobody actually appreciates diversity of expression. Right?
Once again, this is not even the point as we are stuck in an even dumber culture: even assuming that an attack of the clones on the world tour would be desirable, it would still be more efficient if judges were required to dissect their evaluations under formal parameters. In other subjective sports, just like in economics, parameters are formal for a very good reason. Rather than mythologized, things should be simplified for the judge’s brains (and for our’s).
Speaking so much about justice, the less an athlete’s entire career is subjected to the feelings of a third party, the better. Especially if this third party is burnt out, as they perform the same task for too many hours in a row because there is no budget (or swell) for another half day break.
The less holistic the human judgement needs to be, the more reliable it may be. Parameters, parameters! If not formal and not published, there are no parameters ! Moreover, from whom did they come from? Who judged? Credibility and anonymity are incompatible when an individual (not a blockchain) is what we are talking about. This is ethics 101! Worse than shallow woke speeches from a CEO, such kinds of habits might be too big of an obstacle to serious endorsers.
Now, given the challenging nature of surfing, where the action takes place in a few seconds and needs to be semi-instantly evaluated (scored), I may suggest two options:
a) Each judge evaluates only one criterion, previously expressed in the rulebook (flow, commitment, creativity, etc). For example, the flow judge could give a high score even to a well-carved wave but without any real punch. But the criterias would not necessarily carry the same weight in the final score, and such relative calibration could be done either before the event, depending on the wave, or perhaps more interestingly, instantly by another (different) judging panel.
Parenthesis: Regardless of the model, no judge should communicate with another during heats. Before and after the events, on the contrary, they should gather and discuss everything from the footage (heat analyzer). And that gathering should be recorded.
b) The five judges remain holistic instead of specialized, but the audience is informed on their identities and backgrounds (also necessary in case “a”)) and they attend the late show broadcasts, explaining their scores based on comparative replays. They are also evaluated themselves (and subject to a mid-year cut), by another panel.
Parenthesis: Again, regardless of the model, important surfing contests need to relay two different judge panels heat by heat or adapt at least the Pomodoro Technique (a time management method based on 25-minute stretches of focused work broken by five-minute breaks).
AI Forever
Long before LLMs (ChatGPTs, Bard, etc.) emerged to the surface, startups working on the use of AI in images had already been producing tempting solutions for professional surfing. This is especially true in biomedicine, where correctly interpreting tumors and other microscopic events from videos can be as complex or even more so than interpreting performances on waves.
The world surfing circuit is a perfect showcase for such technologies, just as Formula 1 was and still is for many others. For a global surfing league, this should not entail any expenses (remember that in Formula 1, it means free revenue bait ). It is imperative that the league’s management has the know-how to move in this direction, signing MOUs (Memorandum of Understanding) to submit its inventory ( past heats) for the construction of a test database. When something reasonable for the purpose actually emerges (following the topic through the lens of Venture Capital, I believe it will take a while), we will be ready to be used as a showcase.
In fact, this alone might justify not just sponsorship but the acquisition of the league by one of the FANGs or big tech companies, covering up the league under a bigger comercial strategy that actually justifies landing more capex and opex into our circus. Similar to Kelly Slater’s wave pool, it seems obvious that the world surfing tour is not a cash cow per se. It needs to be tooled in by larger strategies (again, look no further than motorsports).
In my opinion, Apple would be an obvious explorer. Firstly, because they passed on Tesla and other way less obvious acquisitions when the bargains were offered. So they must have learned to be alert, just like GM did after bankruptcy. Secondly, at least in theory the crossovers are endless, but that would be a theme for another article.
Judges morale and customer affairs
I will just finish the Apple call by remembering Steve Job’s famous adage: people don’t know what they want until you show it to them. We, the fans, are ultimately the true culprits of all surfing’s malaise. We want a high quality show, but we don’t want to pay for it. We want changes, but we don’t like to experiment. We want equal opportunities, but we hated the idea of identical waves in a pool. We want higher stakes every time, but no mid-year cut. We like unpredictability, but at the first disagreement with the judges, we crudely accuse them of corruption.
This last point is noteworthy. If one follows competitive surfing media blogs and vlogs for long enough, one might have noticed that although former world tour judges interviews are common feedstock to the criticism consuming market, none of them has ever endorsed suspicions of Rip Curl money wires to judge A, or of WSL’s suggesting to judge B that his job is at risk if the next world champion is not someone from country X, or of any of that nonsense. Quite the contrary, every qualified critic rejects it. Instead, they all endorse the exact classical fatalism mindset of those who work at any industry or institution that is somewhat broken by design.
This is where management is supposed to make all the difference (and why management schools supposedly exist). There’s too much to unpack here also, so I will keep it simple by focusing on what seems like an emergency.
Legendary NBA commissioner David Stern was never a showman like UFC’s Dana White, but just like White (or any other successful ringmaster) he was a very intense leader, deeply respected by those inside, deeply comfortable speaking up to the mob (or even more importantly, for his own stars). History is full of discrete, introverted generals who slowly and steadily earned their status, but steadily is a key word here. As in surfing, we can’t trust that a QS guy who is unapologetically freaking scared of waves of consequence will ever become a Shane Dorian. Sure anything is possible, but why betting all we have?
Given both its never-ending infant stage as a commercial product and its inherently interpretive fundamental character, professional surfing needs an embodiment in a leader, by definition. We shouldn’t headhunt John Sculley (Apple again) if we need to build the iPhone. Erik Logan took risks that I would have taken myself (in his position), and for that I really respect him. But maybe because he’s not a native like us (someone in deep relationship with this sport for decades who prides himself more for his barrels than for his white collar achievements) he doesn’t speak out properly. Who is left to spread the vision?
This lack of institutional voice and heat feeds up tribalists even more. Different cultural codes become more mystified by one another, then demonized. Imagine that the rules of basketball were such that there was room for the scoreboard to add just 1 point for any of Michael Jordan’s throws through the game (because unconsciously we all expect even more of him). This kind of subjectivity would demand even more from Commissioner Stern, not less.
Conclusion
It seems from the audience that WSL thinks zero steps ahead. The surf ranch itself only exists because Kelly himself went entrepreneurial, so a team that was not WSL commissioned worked for 8 years on it, before we ever heard of it. Finally, when the league acquired it, what did they tell us? “Get ready to watch progression on a level never seen before.” What does MoneyBall crude math show instead? From 96 waves surfed in Men’s R1, all very predictably, only 6 scored above 8.
I actually can’t believe that they own that amazing surfing lab and induce the best surfers on the planet to forget creativity and play old school on it. (That’s not to mention that harnessing softener parts of a wave and flow are not the same thing!)
For all those facts, blaming a tricky sport nature and uneducated fans (both correct observations) is too easy. If WSL is not poorly (maidenly) managed, which sports league is?
(This is Part 1 of a WSL trilogy. Read Part 2 here.)
P-Pass 