"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.
