We have been watching the surf industry gasp and whirr like a broken computer in The States, OZ and Europe, while the South African version has managed to hold steady, pretty much. There might have been a few shaky moments, but on the whole the local surf industry has been solid. A whole bunch of new brands have come into the market and despite much talk that they would never survive, they all have made it past the difficult first stages of their development and are gearing up for a Christmas season. It might be somewhat subdued this year, but it is going to be a Christmas season nonetheless, and everyone is going to go out and celebrate the birth of Jesus by buying surf-branded clothing and alcohol and get drunk in their new threads.

Still, while all of us who are dependent on the mechanisms of the surf industry to put food on the table are breathing a few short and sharp breaths of relief, a few cracks are starting to appear here and there. Brand and marketing managers world wide have taken long and hard looks at where their money is being spent and have come up with some bold, cost-cutting decisions that are going to have reverberations around the competitive side of our sport for a long time.

This is where pro surfing is going.

No longer does it seem a logical option to throw large amounts of coin onto a surfer who is going to disappear into the quagmire that is the WQS for a number of years. Surfers competing hard on the WQS do not do much for a sponsor. Quite simply, unless they are winning 6 star events, and doing so by punting some outrageous air turns, they are below the radar for much forms of media. Surfers getting quarters and semis in WQS events, including 6-stars, are in the media doldrums

(doldrums definition – a place where the wind doesn’t blow)

So why should they be paid large amounts of cash to disappear. The theory is that the good ones will reappear at some stage and make name on the World Tour and this takes a long-term commitment from surfer and sponsor, but in the current dejected economy, brand and marketing managers are being forced to think differently.

Similarly, the brands have realised that there is very little return on staging multi-million rand 6-star WQS events. They have realised that putting on such events doesn’t do that much for them in the way of selling more tees and shorts in inland urban centres. There are way better ways to leverage such money, to entertain the public.

Our surfing world is set to change in many ways and there will be many different avenues and outlets for good surfing to be viewed and enjoyed. From free surfing to speciality events, to made-for-tv surfing shows and many other interesting forms of surfing as entertainment. Even the World Tour, surfing slop in Sopelana and rubbish in Brazil, is verging on being seen as painfully boring now, and is seemingly becoming more listless per event. So World Tour calibre surfers have to look beyond the coloured vests as well. Jordy’s Mentawais flip was the most viewed wave of 2009 so far, and as the world went into a frenzy about it no one really cared about who was doing what on the World Tour at the time.

While it is incredible for Adriano to win a World Tour event, he is in an elite crew. © Scholtz/ASP/Getty

What about all the WQS surfers who have their dreams set on the World Tour? Well, here is the analogy.

A few short years ago, as the Internet grew at an incredible pace, so the way that news was consumed quickly changed. Many people stopped buying newspapers, as they could get all the news for free online. Media owners, publishers and newspaper editors could all see it, could all watch the graphs as online reader stats went up and hardcopy sales went down, and no one did a thing about this. Now there is a massive worldwide shift onto free online news, and newspapers and all the jobs surrounding the publishing of newspapers, are set to close down, to become redundant. Yet when it was obvious that change was imminent, no one did a thing about it.

So now the world of the Pro Surfer, the WQS hopeful, is set for dramatic and utter change. These surfers need to re-invent themselves, need to find a different dream, and need to do something to stand metres above all their thousands of counterparts. They need to dance a different dance to attract the money of sponsors and to secure a job. Or else they are simply going to become unimportant.