For the first time in Sports Illustrated‘s 60-year publication history, it is letting fans choose its cover. Sports Illustrated editors have picked the best 15 moments from the 2011 sports year to be voted on. One of the classic moments that fans can choose is Kelly Slater winning his historic 11th ASP World Championship. You can vote as often as you like from now until December 16th.
The California city that inspired “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” the 1982 comedy film that did much to propagate the laid-back surfer image, is now home to the world’s first Center for Surf Research. And, no, it’s not a clever way for college kids to earn their degrees by hanging out at the beach.
Jess Ponting has heard those jokes. A sustainable tourism professor, he recently founded the first-of-its-kind institute at San Diego State University with the aim of building a database and spreading awareness about what has evolved from a beach counterculture to a multibillion dollar global industry, with both positive and negative impacts. Ponting was amazed to find how little research and critical analysis exists on the surf industry
“We want to quantify exactly what we’re dealing with,” said Ponting, who, on the university’s web site, sports a suit-and-tie while holding a surf board. “I think it’s way bigger than anybody gives it credit for, but no one has taken it seriously enough to look at it before.”
Decades ago, long-haired surfers chasing isolated ocean peaks far from the crowded beaches of Australia and California stumbled into remote villages from Indonesia to Latin America and kicked off the global phenomenon. Today, so many surfers are traveling the globe in pursuit of that perfect swell that surf tourism is being seen as a top income-generator for nations from Papua New Guinea to Liberia, Ponting said. Even China has created a so-called Minister for Extreme Sports to dive in on the booming business.
Sports Illustrated will announce its choice for Sportsman of the Year on Dec. 6. Here’s one of the nominations for that honor by an SI writer.
Forgive the pro surfing officials who on Nov. 2 prematurely crowned Kelly Slater the winner of the 2011 ASP World Title.
After all, it’s not as though there was any doubt that Slater would, as usual, emerge as champion. So while it turned out he had not mathematically clinched the title on that Wednesday afternoon, a couple of days later in the surf at Somewhere in San Francisco, Slater won a heat — with another gorgeous and nuanced ride in a lifetime of gorgeous and nuanced rides — and that sealed things. Slater had won the title handily with an event to spare.
This is what Kelly Slater did over the first 10 stops of the 11-stop ASP tour: He won the season-opening contest in Australia in March. He won at Teahupoo in August. He won at Trestles in September. At two events Slater finished as the runner-up. Three other times he took home a fifth-place purse.
“To me, it’s amazing,” surfer Owen Wright told reporters after watching Slater surf the swell at Somewhere.
