A-frame

Aaberg, Denny

Aaberg, Kemp

Abberton, Koby

Abbruzzi, Sid

Abellira, Reno

Abubo, Megan

academia and surfing

Adler, Tom

advertising and surfing

Aeder, Erik

aerial

Aguerre, Fernando

Aichner, Scott

Aikau, Clyde

Aikau, Eddie

Aipa, Ben

air-drop

airbrush

Airshow

Ala Moana

Alabama

alaia board

Alaska

alcohol and surfing

Alexander, Kala

Allen, Chuck

Alms, Paige

aloha shirt

Alter, Hobie

Alvarez, Pepe

Ancell, Kevin

Andaman Islands

Andersen, Lisa

Anderson, Craig

Anderson, Simon

Andino, Kolohe

Angel, Jose

angle

Angola

Angourie

Antarctica

Apocalypse Now

Arabian Sea

Aragon, Janice

Arakawa, Eric

Archbold, Matt

Arena, Eduardo

Ashton, Juan

Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP)

Atlantic Ocean

August, Robert

Aurness, Rolf

Auster, Ken

Australia

Avalon, Frankie

Azores

backdoor

backside

backside attack, Pipeline

backwash

bail out

Bain, Rob

Baja California

Baker, Bernie

Baker, Grant “Twiggy”

Baker, Tim

Bali

Ball, John “Doc”

Ballard, Bill

Ballard, Rochelle

balsa

Baltic Sea

Banks, Jim

Barbados

Barilotti, Steve

Barland, Michel

Barreda, Sergio “Gordo”

Barry, Michael

Bartholomew, Wayne

Baxter, Jackie

Bay of Bengal

Beach Boys, The

Beacham, Debbie

beachboys

beachbreak

Beachcomber Bills Grand Prix

Beachley, Layne

beavertail

Becker, Phil

Bedford-Brown, Stuart

Belgium

Bells Beach

Bendall, Ma and Pa

Bennett, Barry

Benson, Becky

Benson, Blanche

Benson, Linda

Bermuda

Bertlemann, Larry

Governing body of the world professional surfing tour, founded in 1982 by former world tour runner-up Ian Cairns of Australia as a replacement for International Professional Surfers (IPS). The IPS brought together a mostly rag-tag group of contests in 1976 to create the original international pro circuit, and over the next five years the tour made modest but steady gains as measured by prize money, media coverage, and sports-world stature. But competing surfers as well as contest sponsors were unhappy with the tour's rate of progress, and at the end of the 1982 season Cairns convinced nearly every key player on the circuit to jump over to the Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP), the organization he'd just created with financial backing from surfwear giant Ocean Pacific.

One of Cairns' first moves was to relocated world tour headquarters from the North Shore of Oahu to Huntington Beach, California. More contests were added to the tour: the 1982 IPS men's division season had 12 events worth a total of $338,100, while the debut ASP men's season in 1983 had 16 contests, plus four "specialty events" in Australia, for a combined worth of $487,900. Contestants were glad for the additional prize money, but the extra contests made for an exhausting travel schedule. Meanwhile, a disagreement between Hawaiian contest promoters and the ASP led Cairns to break a seven-year pro tour tradition and drop Hawaii as the circuit's season-ending location, finishing up instead in Australia—a decision that greatly subtracted from the drama of the tour, pushed the schedule into the next calendar year, and taxed the ASP's credibility.

Over the next 20 years the ASP stayed the course of slow progress interrupted by setbacks—many of them self-inflicted. A number of top-rated surfers, including three-time world champion Tom Curren, left the tour during the '80s and early '90s, burned out by a schedule that crammed up to 25 events into a season. The ASP also insisted on holding events in South Africa in the '80s, when virtually all other sports groups had boycotted the country as a protest against apartheid. The ASP's insistence on transforming events into huge, added-attraction, beach-carnival surf extravaganzas blew up in the organization's face in 1986, when spectators at the Op Pro in Huntington Beach rioted.

Meanwhile, franchise-making TV deals came and went over the years. Ocean Pacific pulled out as ASP sponsor in 1984; Coca-Cola signed on as the tour's umbrella sponsor in 1993, then quit in 1997; sports-watch giant G-Shock sponsored the 1999 tour but didn't sign up for 2000. The ASP dream of turning pro surfing into a mainstream sport had all but died by the early '00s. "We've rarely been able to convince anyone from outside the sport that competitive surfing is worth watching," California surf journalist Sam George noted in 2002, "because we don't believe in it ourselves."

The ASP has nonetheless produced an excellent set of world champions, including Tom Carroll, Frieda Zamba, Martin Potter, Kelly Slater, Mark Occhilupo, Lisa Andersen, Sunny Garcia, Layne Beachley, Stephanie Gilmore, and Carissa Moore. The number of events per season was scaled back in 1992, and not long afterward the balance of contests began to shift from spectator-accommodating beachbreak sites (which invariably led to undistinguished small-wave competition) to prime high-performance locations in places like Grajagan, Teahupoo, and Cloudbreak—the so-called "Dream Tour." Except for the 1994 season, the season finale has been staged in Hawaii since 1988.

The ASP added a longboard world title in 1986, a masters division title in 1997 (for surfers 36 and older), and a juniors division title in 1998 (for surfers 19 and under). A women's longboard title was added in 2006. In 1992, the ASP introduced a two-tiered schedule consisting of the premier-level World Championship Tour (WCT) and the World Qualifying Series (WQS), a sort of minor league for the WCT. This format was abandoned for the 2010 season, and replaced by a complicated system that incorporated results from the major world tour events as well as ASP Prime and Star events (formerly WQS contests), with a mid-year reshuffling of the rankings. The ASP returned to a two-tiered format in 2012, with the WCT rankings based solely on world tour contests, and the Prime and Star events serving as a qualification circuit.

The WCT is currently made up of 34 male surfers and 17 women, competing for their respective world titles over a fairly short series of international contests (10 for the men in 2012, seven for the women). There were 28 Star events and 9 Prime events in 2012, composed of an interconnected series of domestic ASP-affiliate circuits, through which aspiring pro surfers qualify for the WCT. Each men's division WCT contest is worth a minimum $425,000 in prize money; women's events are worth $110,000.

Graham Cassidy of Australia served as ASP executive director from 1987 to 1994, followed by South Africa's Graham Stapelberg (1995 to 1998), former world champion Wayne Bartholomew of Australia (1999 to 2009), and fellow Australian Brodie Carr (2009-2011). Carr resigned after prematurely awarding Kelly Slater the ASP championship in 2011. The ASP offices moved to Queensland, Australia, in 1999. In 2012, the ASP had over 1,600 members.

In October 2012, a new media enterprise, ZoSea, funded by Florida billionaire Dirk Ziff, entered into a partnership with the ASP, with ZoSea acquiring the media rights for all world tour events. Eleven-time world champion Kelly Slater's manager Terry Hardy, and former Quiksilver and NFL executive Paul Speaker, held the reigns of ZoSea leadership.

Subscribe or Login

Encyclopedia of Surfing

History of Surfing

Interviews

Features

The Sunday Joint

Videos