(This is the third/final part on a world championship of surfing series. Find Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.)
(by Bruno Pesca)
One of the many unintentional second order effects of the so many insights thrown by Jonathan Heidt’s work through my way was a reflection on where surf contests come from, in a basic behavioral way. Let’s dive into that, briefly.
Human beings in general need social recognition, social belonging & validation. That is not vanity or a modern trait but a deep rooted biocomputed algorithm, maximized for survival. If you’re a talented surf junkie in SoCal in the 1960’s, with no digital social networks and marginalized by traditional media, how do you achieve that? How do you make that pretty girl – or your family members – validate your social coolness?
If only they were qualified peers, you could of course just say stuff like “I was the last guy further out the third point and made all my waves to the pier“, or even “Yeah, just a fun day, threw a few hacks, got one really deep barrel…” Unfortunately, those words cannot possibly ring a bell to non-surfing people, especially if they are somewhat suspicious about you. In this case, if you want to pass as royal you need to have a castle. A social cathedral. An institution designed to get you validated by the social environment. In practice, you need to gather other experts from your field, make them validate your thing in front of that chick and pack that all into the coolest way possible. In fact, all other sports do it, so there is not even a need for anthropology guff here. All we have to do is copy them all. Right?
Maybe not anymore.
As much as I understand where all that obviously comes from, reminiscing tag team contests where heats were initiated by races over the sand to paddle outs; I happen to nonetheless be in the camp of those who respectfully disdain pro surfing’s cultural inertia.
By design, any social institution is a function of the “social” (a better word would be “tech”, which accounts for collective social intelligence) restriction in place at its given time. Therefore, disruptions are needed here and there in history, when the time goes on and the gap between that institution and a new social norm becomes too wide. Haven’t we reached that point by now? Otherwise, good luck trying to explain logic and resonate fairness from the Olympic finals day for the broader audience.
Meanwhile, surfing is curiously the only global popular (50 million + fans) sport that actually fits PERFECTLY into the new norm of digital social media controlling our brains through nonstop dopamine rewards (which is the core of Heidt’s criticism). Surfing heats are decided by 5-15secs rides. Surfer’s calibers are measured strictly from those seconds, all the rest is irrelevant for that matter.
Moreover, and by definition, surfing matches (surfer A vs surfer B) are not like Boxing fights or football matches, regardless of the fact that surfers may be nearby each other. Instead, it is more like the movie Oscar’s or comparing national economies: we evaluate the rides separately, against whatever same set of criteria.
In that conceptual sense, the traditional 20th century contest format derived from social restrictions of the 1960s (and filled up with marginal increments derived from the new tech norms in the following five decades, all the way to in-water cams and instant 4k replays) is somewhat like Hollywood’s Academy Awards imposing all movie directors requirements like “this year, and in spirit of fairness and equality as usual, all movies must be shot in Sarajevo only“, or “it has to be under the social lens of decoupling homophobia“, etc.
Would that make collective human creativity and collective entertainment better off?
There are a number of documented history moments that relate to what comes next: at some point, someone was mocked for absurdly suggesting that people should store and display their family pictures on computers, instead of on paper. “Are you nuts? Why would anyone do that?” At some point more distant, someone was mocked for absurdly suggesting that people should have personal motor vehicles. At some point more recently, someone was mocked for absurdly suggesting that high skilled workers would soon work from home on their pjs.
So, here is the moment where I suggest that the real World Surf Champion should be crowned by winning an online global ranking composed of different remote contests related to specific types of surfing (waist to overhead point break, reef break left, reef break right, double overhead barrel, under head beach break,…) that are each one sort of like the Billabong XXL concept. (Big Wave Ride Of The Year would be one of the events, too.)
Oh, and for the Olympics? I am sorry, but surf pools, always!
I would have a bunch of second layer suggestions on format details, but will skip that here. They should be all A/B tested anyway, so we learn as we go. From a commercial product perspective, however, this is a breakthrough from the struggle to fit into a standard copycat media coverage outdated model designed from sports that are fundamentally the opposite of ours. No wonder why the World Surf League (WSL) struggles to survive as a business. It’s like a financially broken Superman unsuccessfully seeking sponsorship for being Clark Kent, not even revealing his superpowers, just because he misunderstood the alignment with the herd of human influencers as a requirement.
How to monetize this new league depends on how you use it or, in better words, who owns it. If you’re Netflix, trying to be seen as the hub of global sports, this could be not just a statement but a huge subscription bait (say online venue is free and hyped to access, vote, etc, while a “Finals Day” plus all the storytelling around athletes are on Netflix only). If you’re Apple you may not even need or want a Finals Day, just plain and straight up awards with a voting system ledger even stored on a blockchain, but all validated through your hardware (say rides must come in with background data log such as speed, length, etc… all the “crap” (this perception will change) caught with the Apple watch. If you’re Meta, I don’t even know where to start.
But if you’re just a venture capitalist partnering with a former world champion to launch an indie league, more than only one big company can be your revenue stream. The point is simple: an estimated U$30-50 million a year (allegedly, and I doubt that WSL makes more than that) is not that much for those magnificent companies to experiment on such a popular human activity that clearly lacks a legit (commercial) cathedral (format/conceptually wise, not talking about existing entity A vs B).
And given the asset light business model, most of it would go straight to the surfer’s own pocket’s (and not just Gabby, but #367 would also make some money as well), not to a circus. Someone else will always throw a traditional surf contest gathering, hopefully, because that’s a good thing. But stakes will be way lower, more in coherence with the casual unpredictability they hold, leaning towards the Harlem Globetrotters, as said by João Valente.
Now, if a $50million revenue is the norm, imagine getting rid of ALL the opex. Imagine a U$1,000,000 prize money for the winner of each one of the five or six categories/contests. Imagine a $6,000 year prize money for a dude that placed 161st but did all from his home break anyway (or on a trip he wanted to do anyway), and now is formally ranked worldwide.
Imagine judges getting paid directly by a different institution, an athlete’s fund filled by submission fees. Athletes themselves do hire and fire judges, by voting, and their tiers on ranking determine how much weight an individual vote has.
Imagine Nathan Florence’s, Thiago Camarão’s & everyone else’s rides constantly getting them formal universal positions across the board, and the end of nonsense explanations we all have to give to relatives now that the whole world has seen by themselves how the game we adore works.
You may say I am a dreamer.
But I’m not the only one.
I hope someday you’ll join us.
And the surf world will be as one.
(ps: I am glad that the 2028 Olympics will be held in Los Angeles so it makes it easier for the surf community to stop sabotage its own sport by dismissing pools with self affirmative romances, and to embrace Kelly’s ranch for it.)
P-Pass 