Riding the Wave

At the Honda Element U.S. Open of Surfing in Huntington Beach this week, not all the talk will be about the size of the waves or the level of competition. Some might want to know, “Is Holly Beck really jealous of Roxy surf wear models?” Or, “Does Sunny Garcia always punch people like that?”

Reality-based television has thrown out the welcome mat for some of the world’s best surfers. “The Boarding House: North Shore” recently completed a six-week run on the WB Network and producers are getting positive feedback from the series, which followed the lives of seven surfers living together in Hawaii while competing in the prestigious Vans Triple Crown of Surfing.

The WB is one of several networks that have recently connected with production companies interested in bringing the sport and its alluring lifestyle to young audiences across the country.

International Management Group, which manages the U.S. Open of Surfing, has purchased a year’s worth of time slots on Fox Sports Net, allowing it to broadcast surfing and extreme-sports competitions on a consistent basis. The show, Fusion TV, has become the network’s highest-rated program of the week for its hourly afternoon slot.

MTV has also created a reality show called “Surf Girls” in a joint production with Quiksilver subsidiary Roxy. ESPN is stepping back into the mix with its inaugural X Games appearance next month in Huntington Beach, where an East versus West showdown will feature 16 of the world’s top surfers. Outdoor Life Network is airing footage from the sport’s most competitive series, the World Championship Tour.

Former world champion Peter Townend, a television color commentator for surfing during the 1980s and ‘90s, hasn’t seen as much television exposure in decades. “It’s the most high-profile the sport has been since the Beach Boys were around in the ‘60s,” he said.

The latest trend is not because of a newfound interest in the sport. Rather, experts say it’s a way for advertisers to tap into the popular lifestyle.

Networks for years have searched for ways to attract young consumers, who have been known to change brands faster than they can wear out the last product they were enticed to buy. By integrating the surfing lifestyle and its aesthetic scenery with crisp competition footage, many network executives believe they’ve found just the right hook.

“From an advertiser or sponsorship point of view, it’s not the sport that’s attracting them, it’s the target-rich environment,” said David M. Carter, a sports business consultant who teaches a class at USC called the Business of Sports Entertainment. “Before, you would create the sport and then find the fan base. This way, the networks know who they want to reach and create programming around it.”

That certainly wasn’t the objective 40 years ago. Long before cable and satellite dishes began offering hundreds of programming options, and long before anybody sprung the idea of overcrowding a house with people and television cameras, surfing had already made its way into homes across America.

One of the original sports programs, ABC’s “Wide World of Sports,” began covering the U.S. Championships at Huntington Beach in 1962. Former Huntington Beach lifeguard Bill Richardson remembers helping with the production of the 1963 event, sitting in a tent with a producer who had never covered a surf event before and instructing him on the type of shots that would work best. Initially, the crew went a little overboard.

“I remember they had a crane on the pier and a guy hanging from a cage in front of the waves,” Richardson said. “He was so close to the water he was getting his feet wet.”

Joyce Hoffman, who won four women’s surfing titles at Huntington Beach from 1965 to ‘70, recalls being interviewed by a coat-and-tie clad “Wide World of Sports” broadcaster in 1962. As they both stood waste-deep in surf, she remembers wondering if he had stripped down to his shorts. There were other signs that ABC was out of its element.

“They didn’t know the things to ask and didn’t have the terminology,” she said. “It was definitely a whole new world for them, but they were trying.

“At that point, we were very pleased to see someone that big taking an interest. Surfing was in the very neophyte stages and to have Wide World of Sports recognize it was an absolute thrill.”

ABC tried to get better shots by implementing its first aerial coverage in 1968, but even that was a learning experience. Local surfing icon Corky Carroll still insists an ABC helicopter blew him off his board and cost him the title that summer.

A few years later, the program took its cameras to Hawaii to film the Pipeline Masters, where footage showed surfers dropping into massive hollow bowls. ESPN first televised a surf event in 1983 and then signed a groundbreaking, three-year broadcast deal in 1987. In 1994, the venerable Op Pro gave way to the television-driven U.S. Open of Surfing.

The sport appeared to take another step forward when Bluetorch was formed in 1999 and bankrolled by billionaire Broadcom founders Henry Nicholas and Henry Samueli through their Broadband Interactive Group. But a financial shortfall forced the company out of business two years later, although reruns of its cable show can still be found on some networks.

In the last 10 years, more attention has been paid to the entire extreme sports market and the adjoining lifestyles. When Prime Ticket backed the U.S. Open of Surfing, it drove awareness to unprecedented heights with TV promotion, drawing crowds of more than 200,000 with additional attractions such as expositions, music and other extreme-sport competitions.

Prime Ticket, which became Fox Sports Net, began to lose interest about the same time the event began experiencing a high turnover rate of title sponsors. Companies were struggling to make the connection between their products and the consumer.

IMG stepped in two years ago and teamed with title sponsor Philips Electronics, whose state-of-the-art products lured a new wave of visitors to the event. IMG added more sponsor booths and extreme sports venues last year as the partnership continued to grow.

With Fusion TV, IMG executives are hoping to provide the same something-for-everybody format. Quick-paced episodes feature athlete profiles, competition, music and reviews of the newest technology. The U.S. Open of Surfing, which started Monday and runs through Sunday, will be broadcast in six shows, beginning Aug. 26 and ending Oct. 1. James Leitz, vice president of IMG X Sports, said owning a time slot is key to reeling in a faithful audience.

“Before, you didn’t know when you were going to find surfing on TV, it would just move around like fringe programming,” Leitz said. “You can’t generate a rating or interest without a consistent time slot.”

Television executives long ago gave up on the idea of broadcasting a live surfing event because of unpredictable lulls in the surf that can last a half hour to several weeks. Even substantially edited, tape-delayed sporting events are not the meal ticket for networks, even 24-hour sports stations.

Many believe “Boarding House: North Shore” captured some of the best television footage ever of the famed Vans Triple Crown of Surfing, the longest standing surf series in the world, consisting of competitions at Haleiwa, Sunset and Pipeline.

The cast included Garcia, a three-time Triple Crown champion who seemed to lose his temper at least once per show; reigning Triple Crown champion Myles Padaca; Damien Hobgood, one of the top-ranked surfers in the world; big-wave specialist Danny Fuller; model-surfer Veronica Kay; Chelsea Georgeson, one of the top woman surfers in the world; and Beck, a Palos Verdes native who was one of the show’s most popular figures.

But where the show broke new ground was in displaying the personal lives of the housemates -- what they thought, where they went and who they hung out with when they weren’t charging down the face of a wave.

“It embodies the California dream,” said Lisa Hennessy, the show’s executive producer. “A television show that depicts an endless summer, where surfers live really truly fantastic lives that are very fun, very healthy and very free.”

Some surfers are wary that the lifestyle is getting more notice than the sport, but others believe you can no longer have one without the other.

“Shaun Tomson said a long time ago, ‘The surf community is a community of beautiful people who are tan and usually good looking,’ ” Townend said. “Everybody aspires to be that.”

Carter, for one, believes the trend of increased television coverage will continue.

“A lot of [young people] are a lot more burned out on the stick and ball sports than ever before,” he said. “We’re seeing a very significant shift in their sports consumption habits and that’s not going to go away.”