I can imagine the process that led to the WSL’s post titled “5 Footballs Terms For Surfers.” Well, when I say process, I get the feeling it may have been more of a Digital Content Creation Group Think, where the best ideas were upstreamed into the idea solo after a thought shower.
You see American Football is kinda of the holy grail for surfing’s governing body and the CEO Paul Speaker worked, successfully, within the sport. In and around the time of the ZoSea takeover one of his favourite statistics was that, “97 percent of people who watch the NFL have never played a game of football in their lives.” It is a stat that I think he would love to replicate. If only surfing could be beamed straight into the eyeballs of the majority of the population who haven’t a hope of ever doing the sport, then the corporate sponsorship coin would coming flooding in. The best surfers would be watched by a gigantic new audience. And although they wouldn’t know Mick Fanning’s left testicle from Joel Parkinson right ventricle, it is the type of mass penetration that “the key stakeholders” dream of.
Anyway, whatever the process, the end result, timed to coincide with America’s Super Bowl last Sunday, was a piece of online magic called 5 Football Terms for Surfers. It’s goal was to illuminate “some key football concepts in terms surfers may better understand.”
It was desperately needed. I’m not sure about you, but if I had a dollar for every time I said, “If only someone would illustrate some of the most easily comprehensible aspects of a largely incomprehensible and quite shit American bastardization of football with some cackhanded surfing content,” well, I could finally afford that front foot deck pad I’ve been eyeing off on ebay.
The WSL clearly realised that within the average surfer’s knowledge gap, they needed to prioritise a lack of understanding of American Football over, say, such trifling matters as whether John John Florence really did finger Taylor Swift, the effects of global warming on low lying Pacific atolls and just why oh why does Wilko wear muscle tees?
That’s obviously why they came up with illustrating the concept of an American Football cheerleader with footage of grown men from Brazil diving fully clothed into the ocean. Call me a smart arse, but isn’t the best way of illustrating an American Football cheerleader is with a picture of an actual American football cheerleader? I’ve seen them and they are a damn site more compelling than Gabriel Medina’s soaking wet, crying step-dad.
Mind you the comparison between a Kelly Slater drop-in and a two point conversion might be relevant, if I gave a fuck about American Football, which I don’t. And even if I did, I would know exactly what a two point conversion is, and so wouldn’t need a wave ridden by two people in the south of France to inexplicably try to explain it to me.
Maybe I might be outside the Venn diagram of surfers who watch American Football, but don’t play it, and so found this piece just a terrifyingly misjudged and bland example of surfing’s new owners trying to engage the mainstream. The non-surfers might like it, but for those who actually love the sport, it simply had the corporate stench of a bad idea, badly executed.
