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"\"&lt;p&gt;When the White House wants to bury a potentially damaging item there&amp;#8217;s no better time than the Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend to float the story. The theory is that it won&amp;#8217;t get attention over the weekend and will be old news by Tuesday.\\n&lt;p&gt;The announcement that Surfing America has decided not to continue its relationship with Foster&amp;#8217;s &amp;#8212; buried as it was in the &lt;a href=http:\\/\\/www.transworldsurf.com\\/surf\\/surfbiz\\/article\\/0,15337,596013,00.html&gt;press release&lt;\\/a&gt; about amateur surfing &amp;#8212; is reminiscent of this tactic.\\n&lt;p&gt;But for something that was called &amp;#8220;the most important sponsorship opportunity in the history of American surfing to limp offstage in this manner is worthy of a second glance.\\n&lt;p&gt;In 2002 Foster&amp;#8217;s pledged the fledgling domestic pro tour &amp;#8212; which is operated by &lt;a href= http:\\/\\/www.transworldsurf.com\\/surf\\/surf_biz\\/article\\/0,15337,343109,00.html &gt;Surfing America&lt;\\/a&gt; &amp;#8212; with 300,000 dollars of direct support a year. In return, Surfing America promised sixteen events, a soup-to-nuts marketing blitz, and some form of TV coverage.\\n&lt;p&gt;A few of surfing&amp;#8217;s leading personalities even met with the heads of Foster&amp;#8217;s poolside at Mandalay Bay in &lt;a href=http:\\/\\/www.transworldsurf.com\\/surf\\/surf_biz\\/article\\/0,15337,342055,00.html&gt;Las Vegas&lt;\\/a&gt; to figuratively break the champagne bottle over the bow of the deal. On that surreal day, it looked liked smooth sailing ahead.\\n&lt;p&gt;[IMAGE 1]\\n&lt;p&gt;But the waters were roiling almost from the get-go. First, the Foster&amp;#8217;s management team who signed off on the deal soon left the company. &amp;#8220;No one is left, says Bill Sharp, who was the Foster&amp;#8217;s Pro Surfing Tour ambassador during 2002 and helped pitch the idea at Miller&amp;#8217;s headquarters in Milwaukee. &amp;#8220;There&amp;#8217;s not one person left from that meeting, he says. &amp;#8220;They&amp;#8217;re all long gone.\\n&lt;p&gt;Apparently this eventually hindered communication between Foster&amp;#8217;s and Miller Brewing (who bottles Foster&amp;#8217;s in North America), and between the beer brands and Surfing America.\\n&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#8217;s also clear that Surfing America didn&amp;#8217;t deliver what it had initially promised.\\n&lt;p&gt;First &amp;#8212; and possibly most damaging &amp;#8212; was the number of events Surfing America was able to cobble together for the Foster&amp;#8217;s tour.\\n&lt;p&gt;Back in 2002 it appeared the PSTA was the foundation on which the Foster&amp;#8217;s Tour would be built. In November 2000, Dynocomm  &lt;a href=http:\\/\\/www.transworldsurf.com\\/surf\\/surf_biz\\/article\\/0,15337,342844,00.html&gt;acquired&lt;\\/a&gt; the PSTA, and by the tour&amp;#8217;s kickoff event in April 2001 at  &lt;a href=http:\\/\\/www.transworldsurf.com\\/surf\\/features\\/article\\/0,15337,342775,00.html&gt;Trestles&lt;\\/a&gt; it was being heralded as &amp;#8212; if not the next big thing &amp;#8212; then pretty damn important.\\n&lt;p&gt;But less than a year later the Foster&amp;#8217;s\\/PSTA partnership was &lt;a href= http:\\/\\/www.transworldsurf.com\\/surf\\/surfbiz\\/article\\/0,15337,341934,00.html&gt;kaput&lt;\\/a&gt; which effectively halved the size of the Foster&amp;#8217;s Tour and killed the PSTA&amp;#8217;s relevance.\\n&lt;p&gt;&amp;#8220;I feel like the whole situation is a real shame, said an obviously bitter PSTA Founder Jeff Grell earlier this week. &amp;#8220;American surfing has never been in worse shape.\\n&lt;p&gt;A few industry leaders always had trouble with the idea of a beer brand backing the tour (whose primary followers, after all, are teens). There were problems serving beer on the beaches of many contest venues.Nevertheless, the Foster&amp;#8217;s Tour and Surfing America soldiered on in 2003 with an eight-event schedule (which was reduced to seven events after Hurricane Isabel lumbered ashore in September), but there was a feeling that the mustard was very much off the hot dog.\\n&lt;p&gt;But Gerard makes it absolutely clear that it was Surfing America who decided to terminate the relationship. While this in undoubtedly fact, you don&amp;#8217;t have to read the tea leaves for long to figure out that now Foster&amp;#8217;s has secured &lt;a href= http:\\/\\/www.transworldsurf.com\\/surf\\/surfbiz\\/article\\/0,15337,563811,00.html&gt;naming rights&lt;\\/a&gt; to the ASP WCT (for what&amp;#8217;s rumored to be a very good price) that it probably scaled down its dollar commitment to the American WWQS tour &amp;#8212; perhaps to a point where it wasn&amp;#8217;t worth the effort.\\n&lt;p&gt;&amp;#8220;Foster&amp;#8217;s was a great partner, says Gerard. &amp;#8220;For us, it&amp;#8217;s all about the bigger picture, and we&amp;#8217;re kind of seizing the opportunity while we&amp;#8217;re fixing the whole NGB thing &amp;#8212; hopefully &amp;#8212; to reboot the whole program.\\n&lt;p&gt;&amp;#8220;Since the Bud Tour years {which reached their heyday in the late 80s} we&amp;#8217;ve run around with our hand out looking for sponsorship deals, he continues. &amp;#8220;Whatever came to the table, we took. That&amp;#8217;s how the Foster&amp;#8217;s deal happened. It was like, &amp;#8216;Great! Grab it and let&amp;#8217;s go.&amp;#8217;\\n&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#8217;re at a point right now where, intellectually, it just makes a lot more sense to not run around desperately taking whatever money someone will give us, but to take a step back &amp;#8212; as we have with the NGB plan &amp;#8212; to take the time to do it right.\\n&lt;p&gt;Gerard proposes that Surfing America develop a comprehensive sponsorship program that connects to all the aspects of what it&amp;#8217;s doing and then present that plan to a sponsor who will step up to the table in a larger way. A daunting task, but who would have thought they had a chance of mending the fences between the amateur organizations?\\n&lt;p&gt;But in the wake of Surfing America losing its largest financial supporter,  how is the organization going to keep the light on? Gerard admits that terminating the deal &amp;#8220;will sting a bit but demures on getting specific. He says while there&amp;#8217;s no open checkbook from SIMA (who owns Surfing America), he&amp;#8217;s confident that &amp;#8220;too many people want it to succeed for it to fail.\\n&lt;p&gt;&amp;#8220;Surfing is too good of a property right now for us to put together a bunch of deals that aren&amp;#8217;t coordinated, he says. &amp;#8220;We haven&amp;#8217;t had the opportunity to coordinate because we were too busy trying to keep the lights on and keep the thing going. It&amp;#8217;s time to fix it once and for all.\\n&lt;p&gt;[IMAGE 2]&lt;br \\/&gt;\\n\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.grindtv.com/surf/surfing-america-parts-ways-with-fosters/>