Editorial:

It was, to put it mildly, a great weekend in Huntington Beach.

Thousands of people packed the beach for the Hurley US Open of Surfing — which paid tribute to 50 years of competitive surfing by the pier — and Huntington’s own Brett Simpson took home the top men’s prize. The women’s prize went to Courtney Conlogue, who lives a stone’s throw away in Santa Ana.

With a pair of locals finishing on top at a historic tournament, it was hard not to get caught up in the excitement.

But at the same time, it was hard not to raise an eyebrow over one aspect of the event. When Simpson came out on top Sunday, he won a check for a whopping $100,000 — widely publicized as the largest sum ever given at a surfing championship. The women’s prize for the same tournament? A mere $10,000, which was actually more than double the $4,500 originally proposed.

Even though surfing is a male-dominated sport, those numbers didn’t sit right with us. So after the Open ended, we contacted IMG Action Sports, the event’s promoter, and the Assn. of Surfing Professionals, which was the sanctioning body for the prize money, to find out how the men’s pot ended up so much heftier than the women’s. (Representatives from Hurley, the Open’s sponsor, did not return our calls.)

We hoped that once we talked to the people in charge, we would find that they weren’t merely sexist bureaucrats who viewed the women’s competition as a trifle on the side — and we were pleased to find that, indeed, that wasn’t the case at all. James Leitz, the vice president of IMG, gamely took our questions about the disparity between the men’s and women’s earnings, but spoke just as much about how, in his organization’s view, women’s surfing is getting bigger all the time.

According to Leitz, the current system developed, fairly or not, in the days when prize money was dictated by entry fees and sponsorships. If 200 men entered a surfing contest and only 30 women signed up, there was more money in the pot for the man who finished first. Also, according to Meg Bernardo, the executive manager for the Assn. of Surfing Professionals in North America, a number of corporate sponsors would only back the men’s or women’s contests, and they disproportionately lined up behind the former.

For the Open, though, that wasn’t the case. IMG and Hurley, the tournament’s sponsor, proposed the prize amounts to the association, which green-lighted them both. Leitz and Bernardo said there was no one reason for the women’s payout being smaller than the men’s, but that any number of factors — including viewership, marketing strategy or just an old-fashioned mentality — could go into a decision like that.

Leitz noted that the $10,000 given to the women’s champion was a record for the Open, and that his group promotes a number of sports, including tennis, where women virtually dominate men in terms of popularity. He added that he hoped to see the women’s Open prize getting larger every year. “Girl power is alive and well,” he said.

And so it is. But since the Open’s organizers have the power to dictate prize money, we encourage them to give girl power the ultimate boost and make the prizes equal in 2010. If that means cutting the men’s prize down to $50,000, fine. No one who watched both sexes battling the waves over the weekend could argue that one deserves a greater reward than the other.

As Leitz pointed out, the record-breaking men’s prize won the tournament a huge amount of publicity and lured some of the world’s greatest surfers to compete. If the Open could start its second half-century by introducing equality, that would be a media coup as well.