From Expression to Profession: The IPS, ASP, and birth of professional surfing
As the soulful 60’s slid away, surfing was still essentially an amateur sport offering little in the way of monetary reward for its athletes. Hawaii offered some promise as the site of a mini series of events including the Smirnoff Pro and the Pipeline Masters. These events carried relatively rich purses (upwards of $10,000) for the winners. Top performers like Gerry Lopez and Jeff Hakman were pulling in income from clothing, surfboard, and product endorsements. But surfers were still little more than starving artists.
During this time, professional surfing globally was suffering a dearth of interest. But prompted by a concept proposed by early big-wave rider Fred Van Dyke, former champion Fred Hemmings and North Shore performer Randy Rarick attempted to expand the world championship contest into a world championship circuit on which surfers would travel from country to country accumulating points based on their results. This new professional tour with established sponsors and official judging criteria would prove a far cry from the willy-nilly days of the world contests which essentially left winners with nowhere to further their careers.
The new system, known as the International Professional Surfers (IPS), gave surfers a chance to chase fame and fortune like other professional athletes. And while names like Farrelly, Pomar, Hemmings, Aurness, and Young sound off like royalty in the context of surf history, none had this opportunity to compete for consistent money against international surfers in such diverse conditions as Florida, South Africa, Hawaii and Australia. With a few sponsors and a judging system in place, professional surfing was born. In 1976, after several international events had already taken place, the new IPS awarded points retroactively to a series of international events with Australian regular footer Peter (PT) Townend taking the title as the first professional world surfing champion.
As the IPS trudged on, the prize money increased and the first superstars emerged. Shaun Tomson and Wayne Bartholomew became household names (in surfing households at least) and Australian Mark Richards went on to win four consecutive titles (a feat many thought untouchable but soundly trounced by Florida’s Kelly Slater three decades later). In 1977, the IPS launched a women’s tour which Margo Oberg would rule.
1983 saw a watershed power shift as 1976 IPS tour runner-up Australian Ian Cairns commandeered the helm of pro surfing from Hemmings armed with sponsorship support from Ocean Pacific. With cash in hand and a new energy, Cairns’ new Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) rose just in time for an 80’s surf culture explosion and would give professional surfers more opportunities than ever before.
The inaugural season kicked off in South Africa. Powerful Hawaiian regular-footer, Hans Hedemann, won the first two events. In 1983, Cairns, in attempt to complete the separation from Hemmings, Rarick, and the IPS, banned ASP surfers from competing in non-sanctioned events, thus making the regal Hawaiian Triple Crown off limits to the world’s elite. Dane Kealoha ended his title hopes by entering and winning the Pipeline Masters. The following year, Richards’ reign ended with the emergence of Aussie power-surfer Tom Carroll.
By the mid-80’s, the ASP’s accelerated and somewhat bloated schedule boasted upwards of 20 events per year. Cairns’ vision of a true spectator sport drawing masses to the beach was yet to be fully realized, but the spectacles that went down at Huntington Beach at the OP Pro would get close (exploding in riots in 1986). Fueled by the phenomenal rise of Californian Tom Curren and a healthy international rivalry, pro surfing certainly had a new energy, but events were being decided in the shade of concrete and glass in tiny, gutless waves. That was never the essence of surfing. It lacked adventure and excitement. It lacked soul.
Curren was that injection of soul the surf world needed but as the 90’s ticked away, he “souled” out, withdrawing from the measly waves of the tour to search out perfect surf all over the globe. The contrast was evident as the economy dipped. The tour needed a face lift fast.
The ASP was originally based on the top 30 seeded surfers with a trials event held at each contest that would allow non-seeded surfers a chance to earn a spot in the top based on an accumulation of points. The system then switched to a separate tour for qualification, the World Qualifying Series (WQS) and a top 44 surfers.
With the new millennium came new talent. The ASP women’s tour came into its own with the rise of Lisa Anderson, a smooth and aggressive surfer from Florida who not only set new performance standards but also drew legions of new fans to the sport. But another Florida native would make an even bigger splash on the ASP tour.
Kelly Slater epitomized Hemmings and Cairns’ early vision of the professional surfer: a phenomenon groomed and nurtured by the industry, pulling in travel funds and paychecks as a grom and then expanding the surfing influence to advertising, network TV, video games, signature surfboards and now even IMAX theaters. Slater not only pulled in a record nine world titles but he has consistently dominated the pro tour for over a decade.
The ASP has since added longboard, masters, and juniors tours as well as exotic contest locations like Tavarua, Jeffery’s Bay, Garajagan and Teahupoo as part of a new “Dream Tour.” Waiting periods, mobile events, and live Internet streaming insure that the action is top notch and accessible to millions. While professional surfing has yet to hit the mainstream, the dream of surfers pulling in six-figure salaries has been well realized. Today’s ASP includes a one-world rating system with a trimmer top 32 surfers with both the WQS and WCT being used to determine a surfer’s ratings. Individual contest prize-pool cash has ballooned to a hefty $400,000 and the annual prize pool upwards of $4,000,000. It’s a long way from the early world championship contests, but the spirit of remains.
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