ASP's Prodan told the Weekly that the mistake was not due to the new, computer-driven system but was "human error." Officials there claimed that the complex tiebreaker formula was the problem.
But on ESPN's Action Sports blog, Surfing contributor Peter "Joli" Wilson questioned that, noting that if human error affected the world title decision, "You have to think, what other results and ratings might be skewed?"
PHOTO BY TED SOQUI
Pro surfer Bobby Martinez at his Santa Barbara home
PHOTO BY TED SOQUI
Bobby Martinez
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Room for error was plentiful given that the One World Ranking involves changing the point values that can be won at all ASP-sanctioned events and required a complex weighting system.
Even Quiksilver jabbed the ASP. It asked Martinez for an interview set at a Santa Barbara–area tennis court. There he delivered a powerful serve — and some choice words. He lightheartedly suggested that surfers who'd qualified to try for the world title should check the math because their chance might have come and gone during the previous midyear cycle.
"Honestly, after New York, people were, like, 'Oh, man, he's crazy,' " Strider Wasilewski says of Martinez. "But now, after you see what happened in San Francisco, people are, like, 'Maybe he's not so crazy.' "
Wasilewski is a widely liked pro surfer who works in the industry and whose approach to criticism is softer than Martinez's, but he too questions the results of ASP's changes.
"They did it to evolve the sport as a business, so that more people would stay interested and they could sell the package — but it didn't work," Wasilewski told the Weekly in early November. "They still don't have a blanket sponsor for the tour. They don't have a TV deal, the companies are all funding their own webcasts, so there's no continuity. There's no webcaster or sportscaster or surfcaster, whatever you want to call it, that becomes a glue and people get familiar. They have not put together a package of any sort for anybody to actually become interested. To me it didn't help evolve the sport."
By mid-November, the ASP was considering backing off the change that Martinez found so egregious, the midyear cutoff. And surfers were pushing for a return to the two-tier system made up of a title race and qualifying tour, said Renato Hickel, the World Tour manager, by phone from his headquarters perched over four noted Australian surf breaks. "A lot of guys want to go back to the two-tier system," he said.
Hickel has a warm Brazilian personality, and it's easy to take him at his word when he says that calling Martinez in New York to ban him from the tour was difficult. "I know Bobby and I'm really fond of him," Hickel says.
Although the press and gossip were painting Martinez as having lost it, Hickel saw a different man. "We met later in the hotel, and he gave me a hug and we exchanged a couple of jokes."
Martinez had spoken up and moved on.
But ask Hickel which individual surfers are pushing the ASP to return to the old system, and he buttons up. "Surfers that attended the board meeting were representing the 'surfers' as a whole, so it is best to address as 'the surfers' or 'the majority of the surfers on tour,' " he says in a follow-up message.
With ASP refusing to name the board representatives who spoke out, surfing had lost the guy who was always unafraid to speak on the record.
"Maybe the way [Bobby] said it wasn't extremely diplomatic. It could have been done in the King James version of etiquette, the rules of Canterbury or whatever, or like the way you see the House of Lords do it on C-SPAN: 'Good gentleman, I object, this is bullshit, as we say,' " says Lightning Bolt's Paskowitz, thinking it over at his setup in Venice, miles from the money in Orange County. "Maybe, yes, semantics could have been different — but the guy's point is valid."
In fact, on Dec. 27, the ASP and the surfers' union announced that they were dropping the midseason cutoff system, which would have affected top surfers in the 2012 title race. They cited scheduling complexities as having made the new system unmanageable.
The essence of their decision reflected Martinez' point of view: A midyear rotation doesn't work in competitive surfing. Martinez just didn't say it that way in New York.
What Bobby Martinez did was "no different than a John McEnroe outburst, you know — get over it. That's the one analogy that I used," says Monster's Tim English. "After I put it in that context, everybody was, like, 'Oh yeah, why is everyone making such a big deal out of it?' "
