Graham 'Sid' Cassidy: The Promoter Gets Promoted

While he had detractors and stoushes from time to time over a long and illustrious career as a surfing entrepreneur and administrator, anyone who understands the big picture of the development of professional surfing in this country (and around the world) would be asking only one question of Graham 'Sid' Cassidy’s induction into Surfing Australia’s Hall of Fame next month: Why did it take so long?

Not that the affable bloke responsible for one of Australia’s earliest pro surf contests (Forresters Pro), and then the richest (Surfabout), and who was the driving force behind the Australian Professional Surfers Association and later the Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) was ever one to throw his weight around in pursuit of the pro dream. In fact, quite the opposite. In business, Sid was quiet, polite, thorough, persuasive and he never gave up, even when corporate doors were slammed in his face. It was too important to throw your hands in the air and walk away. It was surfing! His lifelong passion.

If the above sounds like an obituary, rest assured it is nothing of the kind. At 77 and not in the best health, Sid will be resting up in his quiet place while his great Cronulla surfing mates Steve Core and Graham 'Reno' Gillespie accept the Hall of Fame induction on his behalf, but the spirit of one of surfing’s greatest can-do operators will fill the room, and Sid will be glowing!

Sid overseeing the contest site at one of the first Coke Surfabout contests (Surfing Australia)

Born in western Sydney in 1947, Sid discovered surfing in his early teens and was on the train to Cronulla every weekend, borrowing boards until he could cadge a ride with older 'westies' who had cars and bring a primitive mal of his own to surf Cronulla Point or his beloved Sandshoes, the short righthander around the corner from the point, where he soon became known as Sandshoes Sid. By the mid-sixties he’d graduated from high school and into a journalism cadetship at the Sydney Sun, where he soon took over the paper’s On The Boardwalk surfing column.

Steve Core and Reno Gillespie surfed regularly with Sid from the late-sixties. Steve remembers: “When I lived in North Cronulla I would drive south to Sandshoes to go for an early surf around seven. On my way, I’d pass Sid going the opposite way, driving his light blue Volkswagen bug, his hair dripping wet, doing his tie up with one hand and steering with the other. He’d already had his daily surf and was on his way to catch a train into the Fairfax building on Broadway where he worked. Sid would often only catch a couple of waves in those first light sessions, but he couldn’t do the commute until he’d had his ‘get wet’.”

Sid at Sandshoes (John Veage / Surfing Australia)

As surfboards began to get shorter, Sid’s contact list got longer. A fast-improving natural-footer, he quickly got to know all the key surfers between Cronulla and Palm Beach and was invited to join the struggling NSW branch committee of the Australian Surfriders Association in 1968. Although NSW had been the founding branch in 1963, and hosted the first world championships the following year, by the end of ’68 it was falling apart financially and in May 1969, the ASA transferred its national executive powers to Victoria, which didn’t stop the old guard from insisting that they had enough funds to host the 1970 world titles. 

They didn’t and the 1970 world’s went to Victoria. Despite having been the founding president of the NSW branch, Midget Farrelly had supported Victoria for the world titles, but he also had a bold plan to bring the world’s best surfers back to NSW for a pro event (Australia’s second, a few months after the Noosa Pro in late 1969) at the Central Coast big wave magnet of Forrester’s Beach. Farrelly Surfboards chucked in $1,000 but Midget then looked to an eager young committee man to find the rest of the sponsorship and organise the logistics. Sid jumped at the chance.

Sid was also called into service as a reserve judge for the Victorian Worlds, at which Midget finished an admirable second behind Rolf Aurness, possibly resulting in him being so focused on competing he failed to notice that almost all of his overseas invitees had flown home well before the five-day waiting period for Forresters began, with only South Africa’s Jonathon Paarman and Hawaii’s Randy Rarick turning up for the welcome dinner at Avalon RSL. 

Somehow Sid made up the numbers (Midget having to surf in his own event), Forresters fired on the last day and, even though there were to be no winners or losers, local John Monie surfed so well he was given the fattest cheque. It was a baptism of fire, but Sid now knew exactly where he wanted to be in surfing. In the driver’s seat.

Left, checking conditions at Cronulla Point for the 1976 Surfabout, the crew includes Col Smith, Mark Warren, Gerry Lopez, and Terry Fitzgerald, while at right, Sid calls the shots at Surfest 1985 while Rabbit Bartholomew and Andy McKinnon work the microphones.

While continuing to hold down an increasingly senior full-time gig at The Sun, Sid found the time over the next couple of years to send out more than 100 sponsorship pitch letters to corporate Australia, extolling the many benefits a surfing event would bring to their brands. At this time – early-seventies – the surf industry was in its infancy and no-one had a marketing budget, so Sid’s pitches were aimed at what we now call 'non-endemic' corporate brands where they met a resounding silence. 

But Sid found an unlikely ally in the form of Vic Carroll, one of the highest flyers in the Fairfax media empire where Sid toiled, and then editor of The National Times. Carroll took Sid aside and asked him for an honest opinion: his two young sons, Nick and Tom, were obsessed with surfing and were telling him that the sport was about to become professional and they could make careers out of it. Was this a crock? Sid quietly explained that a company called Rip Curl in Victoria had just announced that the 1973 Bells Beach Easter Classic - the best-known surfing event in the country - was going professional under their banner with the Curl outlaying a whopping $2,500 in prize money. Pro surfing wasn’t coming, it was here! 

Carroll stroked his chin thoughtfully, then commissioned a feature-length essay on the arrival of the pro era and its likely impact on the business world. A week after Sid’s article appeared he had a phone call from Stewart Litchfield, a young marketing manager at Coca Cola Bottlers, the Australian marketers and distributors of Coke. Sid told me years later: “Of course I’d had companies like Coke, Pepsi, and Nestle in my sights, any company that targeted the youth market, but I’d had zero response until the National Times piece. I was asked to meet with the Coke executives and realised that, although they were already using the beach and bikini girls in their marketing, the idea of sponsoring a surfing contest really polarised them, with most thinking it too risky. But Stewart was a bit like me. He wouldn’t give up.”

Sid with subtle product placement (John Veage / Surfing Australia)

If Forresters had been a mere blip on the pro surf radar, the arrival of the 2SM Coca Cola Bottlers Surfabout, “the world’s richest professional surfing contest”, as the marketing machine touted, blew it up. The media partnership Sid negotiated with Sydney’s youth-oriented and highest-rating radio station on Coke’s behalf was a masterstroke, with 2SM surf reporter Shane Stedman plugging the event every morning for months in advance, and the actual contest, which included some challenging waves at Fairy Bower and an all-star international competitors list, proved to be a huge marketing success. The Surfabout, with Sid at the helm, was here to stay.

A few years down the track, Surfabout was to break further new ground with the Nine Network creating an award-winning and high-rating lifestyle series – the Drive To Survive of its time – out of Surfabout '78 and '79 – but Sid had been promoted to a position in the Fairfax Media London bureau and missed out on the fun.

Having helped put Surfabout, the APSA and the Australian professional surfing tour into such a strong position, he could have walked away from surfing’s admin and promotion at this point to focus on his journalistic career, but Sid loved surfing and being at its pulsing heart too much to do that. When he returned from London in 1982 he was immediately drafted by Ian Cairns and Peter Burness into the formation meetings for the ASP, becoming vice-president.

It's the mid-eighties and pro surfing is booming to the extent it appears front and centre in Sydney's biggest-selling -newspaper - which just happens to be the same paper Sid works at.

In a nifty bit of cross promotion, the colour liftout with Tom Curren on the cover won the 1987 ASP World Media Award.

Through most of the eighties, ASP navigated a rocky road, copping flak for 'Australianising' the world pro tour by ending it in Sydney rather than in Hawaii, for failing to recognise that many pros didn’t want to support South Africa’s apartheid regime by competing there, and for making commercial decisions about where to surf. The flak was sometimes justified but the combination of strong wills in Sid and 'Kanga' Cairns was not for turning, until the hugely popular Op Pro at Huntington Beach, the ultimate car park event, literally exploded into violence and mayhem in 1986, after which Ian Cairns resigned all positions and went home to his farm in WA.

Now it was the Sid show.

As Surfing Australia noted in its Hall of Fame announcement, Sid’s “structural genius came to the fore during his tenure as executive director of the ASP from 1987 to 1994. It was during this period that he helped establish the tiered competition structure that is the very backbone of the modern World Tour. Later, in the early-nineties, when Cairns was running the Bud Surf Tour in the US, Sid approached him with an idea that would permanently alter professional pathways: linking the ASP and the Bud Surf Tour to create what is now globally recognised as the World Qualifying Series. The scope of this achievement, transforming a loose series of events into a unified, competitive enterprise, was profound.”

In 1992, Kelly Slater won his first world title and it was also the year the ASP, at Sid's behest, split the tour into two tiers: the Qualifying Series and Championship Tour. (John Veage / Surfing Australia)

In 1992, Sid finally left journalism to become full-time administrator of the world governing body of pro surfing, gaining an ASP salary for the first time and repaying it by negotiating a multi-year, multi-million dollar deal with Coca Cola to become umbrella sponsor for the world tour. But sometimes no good deed goes unpunished, and in 1994 the Big Three surf brands: Quiksilver, Rip Curl, and Billabong, fearful of losing control of the branded events they paid for, and resentful of the rise of non-endemic sponsorship, engineered a coup resulting in Sid Cassidy stepping down.

In a 2011 interview, Sid told me: “The big three just ganged up on me. I had a proven track record, I’d brought Coke on board for $2 million a year and for me this was the start of my dream. I’m philosophical about it but I could have been smarter. I could have got the lawyers in.”

To add insult to injury, in December 1996, the ASP board voted to scuttle a major broadcasting deal to grow the pro tour into the new century with London-based sportscasting giant CSI which Sid had been working on since leaving ASP. “I'm disgusted, horrified,” four-times world champion Mark Richards told media at the time. “In the end CSI would have been for the benefit of everyone.”

Sid bore no grudges, and his interest in surfing at all levels never waned, even as his career in other areas of media and marketing blossomed, serving as media director for the Sydney 2000 Olympics and later with the City of Sydney. As seven-times world champion Layne Beachley told Surfing Australia: “Sid’s love for surfing was boundless. When women’s surfing struggled for recognition, Sid stood with us, cheered for us, and helped us rise.”

1976 world champion Peter Townend, a close friend who lived in Cronulla while working for Gordon & Smith in the 1970s, says: “Sid was a key architect in developing pro surfing as we know it. A journo by trade, but it was his love of surfing that motivated him to make it respected in the mainstream and he did just that. He loved surfing Sandshoes, playing touch footy in the park behind Shoes and just socialising with friends. A true mate!”

Says Steve Core: “Sid had boundless energy, always full of beans. He lived right on the Esplanade walkway facing the ocean and his beloved Sandshoes. In between surfs at the reef, Ross Longbottom’s house next-door was always the meeting place for table tennis tournaments, barbeques, and backyard cricket games, Sid always in the thick of it. 

“If Sid believed in something he was 100 per cent full-on, giving it everything he had, the same way he ran any of his surfing contests, whether it be Surfabout or the Straight Talk Tyres or a local Sandshoes Boardriders monthly pointscore.”

Sid and I worked at the far ends of the vast open-plan Fairfax editorial floor when I started at the Sydney Morning Herald in 1970, so I didn’t really get to know him until the first Surfabout in May 1974. Just back from a working holiday in London and wearing a heavy olive-green suit I’d bought on Carnaby Street, I clambered down the rocks at Fairy Bower to get my media pass. (There weren’t any.) Sid stood outside the admin tent with a clipboard in hand, laughing at me. He said: “Journo wears business suit to surf comp, there’s your headline!”

Then he added: “Don’t worry, mate. I’ve been there, done that.”

// PHIL JARRATT