"If there is one thing the WSL should copy it's that sense of a sport, that even as it's grown massive, hasn't sold out the vital interests of its fan base."
So, the WSL is gunna run a reality TV show called Ultimate Surfer, based on the ultra-successful UFC franchise, and we need to find, as Chas has suggested, our hero.
This pivot has been a long time coming.
Are you surprised, like me, it took so long?
Worthy, I think to analyse this new direction and put some scaffolding around the idea beyond the breathless press releases.
No doubt UFC is the business and business model the WSL seeks to emulate. No secrets there, they bought on former UFC exec Joe Carr in 2017 to drive business development.
Carr was best known for driving the sale of UFC to WME-IMG for $4.2 billion. Yep, billion. A tasty prospect for Ziff, who got the ASP for nix.
Are there parallels?
Can the wozzle crib the UFC playbook and fatten for sale?
Joe Carr said in a 2017 interview he sees a “ton of parallels between both companies”. It took him two years to get there but he foresaw back in 2017 that the Kelly Tub would offer content creation opportunities like “reality programming and social media possibilities”.
The UFC itself was a loss-making business, described as human cockfighting, banned in many states when it launched its own reality series, The Ultimate Fighter. The premise of this show was simple enough for anyone, of any country and background to understand. Fight your way through a tournament and get a six figure UFC contract as prize.
The Ultimate Fighter has been a stunning success. MMA historians say the final fight of the first series in 2005, between Forrest Griffin and Stephan Bonnar rescued the entire UFC franchise and catapulted it into public consciousness.
That was well before my time, my introduction to the sport came at the hands of the late great Brazilian tube maestro Ricardo Dos Santos. Down by Teahupoo’s boat harbour the young Brazilian and I shared some space and tube-riding sessions were the only thing able to get him off the screen watching MMA.
It was the era of Anderson Silva, and Dos Santos talked me through his greatness.
The parallels, of course, between the Brazilian toying with opponents in the the ring and Slater toying with the tube were obvious.
The UFC has the inbuilt advantage of an inexhaustible supply of interesting stories. Larger than life tough nuts like Tony Ferguson, Connor McGregor, Khabib Nurmogomedov make our middle-class Norte Americano surfers look one dimensional and insufferably tepid.
Absent Slater the WSL Mic’ed Up series has been a snooze fest. The Australian working-class story died with the retirements of Parkinson and Fanning. Coastal real estate prices saw to that.
UFC did experience huge growth post TUF. Multi-billion dollar sale, multi-million dollar broadcast deals with ESPN.
The WSL is trading in smoke and mirrors, hoping enough softball interviews where they pump their own tyres might create its own reality.
“Our growth over the last four or five years has been exponential,” said Erik Logan in his recent Sportspromedia interview, but he’d say the same thing to his cat every morning.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bill Finnegan, by contrast, began his long form reportage into the inaugural Surf Ranch pro having to establish the existence of Kelly Slater from scratch because there was zero brand awareness of him in New York City.
When your greatest of all time is an unknown with no reco in the Big Apple then you’re light years away from the mainstream.
UFC has other advantages apart from the visibility of genuine superstars like McGregor and Khabib and even the vanquished Rhonda Rousey. They control their whole biz from top to bottom, like WSL, but they ain’t strictly bound by the conventions of a true sport.
They can operate in a pure entertainment space, making blockbuster fights where and with who they choose. No CT schedule or QS grind to navigate. If they want to match up two crowd favourites, like Jorge Masvidal and Nate Diaz, invent a whole new made up belt called the Baddest Motherfucker and stage a card at Madison Square Garden they can.
And they did.
Could pro surfing do the same? Match up John John Florence and Gabriel Medina at ten-foot NoKanduis and live stream it for some imaginary title? We seemed to be on that path with the rumoured tour restructure, but that future looks further away than ever.
Lets not compare UFC pressers with WSL pressers, because one organisation has elevated the presser to a near artform and the other just serves up mashed banana.
It is worth noting the difference in leadership.
If there is one thing the WSL should copy it’s that sense of a sport, that even as it’s grown massive, hasn’t sold out the vital interests of its fan base. Dana is all over it, every day whilst we might get a glimpse of Sophie scurrying around behind the scenes on the webcast and a corpo-speak press release every six months.
Dana White, the UFC Prez, has been there since Day One and continues to steer the brutal sport of cage fighting. In a sense, he’s almost the polar opposite of our Sophie G. Knows the game intimately, is highly visible and accessible to the press.
Fully accountable, manages the sport for the benefit of the fans.
If there is one thing the WSL should copy it’s that sense of a sport, that even as it’s grown massive, hasn’t sold out the vital interests of its fan base. Dana is all over it, every day whilst we might get a glimpse of Sophie scurrying around behind the scenes on the webcast and a corpo-speak press release every six months.
We have a ready-made Dana White waiting in the wings and his name is Kelly Slater. Not that Kelly would do the right thing, but at least we know, that if followed his instincts, he knows what direction to head in.
The other great impediment facing WSL in following the UFC to the path of mainstream acceptance and riches is its embrace of woke culture, particularly greenwashing.
You can see the thinking and the desire to get out ahead of the curve, but when the rhetoric don’t match the reality all you are creating is what I believe they term in corpo-speak: “reputational risk”.
“It’s always you against mother nature,” Elo gushes in the sportspro story. “Because of that alchemy for what exists in the ocean, it really gives a great arena for rich and layered stories.”
But you put the reality series in the Tub Elo, a hundred miles from the ocean.
The WSL claims to become carbon neutral in 2019, but makes no mention of offsetting the immense carbon footprint of building a massive wavepool development on a Queensland floodplain nor attempting to deal with the Q’ey. To have some credibility in this space, Ziff would have to buy Brazil and reforest the Amazon to account for the carbon footprint at current rates.
See what I mean?
The WSL claims to become carbon neutral in 2019, but makes no mention of offsetting the immense carbon footprint of building a massive wavepool development on a Queensland floodplain nor attempting to deal with the Q’ey.
To have some credibility in this space, Ziff would have to buy Brazil and reforest the Amazon to account for the carbon footprint at current rates.
Will they stick with the green direction? Probably.
Will a sceptical public buy it? Probs not.
Is that bad faith criticism or realistic observations? Tell me where I’m being too harsh.
You can see, in this Age of the Storyteller phase of the WSL why they would want what the UFC has.
Money, broadcast rights, huge fan base.
What we can’t see is how this latest gimmick gets ’em any closer to it.
