The sort of large, reasonably clean wave that occasionally breaks at Manly. In Winter. Pic: ASP

By now you’ll have heard or read about Hurley and Billabong teaming up to bring us the Australian Open of Surfing next year, a monster event happening at Manly Beach in February.

Some are calling it yet another move away from Rabbit Bartholomew’s original Dream Tour concept, which aimed to put the world’s best surfers in the world’s best waves. Others are saying a huge high profile event held in Summer on Sydney’s Northern Beaches can only be good for the sport.

With World Tour events being held this year at city beaches in Brazil, San Fransisco and New York, it’s easy to side with the alarmists. At best, we can hope the waves will be average. The odds of Manly scoring a long-period south-east swell with crisp offshores during February are, it has to be said, slim.

But as Swellnet pointed out when the event was first announced last week, Quiksilver and Rip Curl hold the only available Australian World Tour licences. This means Hurley and Billabong partnering up makes a fair bit of sense if they want to challenge the other surf co’s domination of the Australian leg. So the waves will be average. If all goes to plan, they could beat both other events in the all-important media exposure stakes, which is fairly important to the Australian Open’s third partner, International Management Group.

If you’re not familiar with the name, IMG are the world’s biggest event and sports management agency. As well as partnering with Hurley on the US Open of Surfing, IMG has a couple of little tennis tourneys called the Australian Open and Wimbledon on their books, as well as 15 PGA/LPGA golf tour events. Heavy hitters, in other words.

Hurley have turned the US Open at California’s Huntington Beach into a massively successful event over the past few years, and the Australian Open is on a mission to re-create the success here, with music and art and skating accompanying the contest in a “festival of youth culture”.

Like the US Open, as a six-star “prime” surf contest, the Australian Open won’t be part of the ASP World Title race. But that may not stop it out-doing the majors. The Billabong World Juniors, the crucial last contest on the ASP junior tour, will move from its traditional January slot at North Narrabeen to run at Manly alongside the Australian Open, and Surfing Australia are moving their Australian Surfing Awards and Hall Of Fame presentations to Manly.

The contest will be held from February 11 to 19, before the the Quik Pro on the Gold Coast opens the word tour. As Surfing Life pointed out on their website: “as all promoters know, if you’re in a line, it’s better to be first.”

That Hurley and Billabong’s Australian Open will generate a lot of mainstream interest is a given. Whether it’s good for surfing is another matter, but before you roll your eyes about the likely lack of waves, or the circus that organisers are probably hoping it’ll turn into, we can’t help wondering: what does “good for surfing” even mean? Kids will get to see their heroes, there will be hot fun in the summertime, and 60 seconds of surfing will finish the sports roundup on the news. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing depends on who you ask.