Welcome to Our newsroom!

XXL: Big, Wet, & Boozy

Inside the Academy Awards of big-wave surfing
The Grove in Anaheim is a mid-sized concert venue located just outside the border of Disneyland in Anaheim, California. Once the site of orange groves and perhaps a few historic battles in the wild, wild West, it's now the location for regional productions of Rent, George Carlin LIVE!, and other events for the SoCal bourgeoise.

The Grove itself is an ugly stucco, boxy, early-'90s-strip-mall-architecture building, in a color that can only be described as "dark tan" with mustard yellow undertones – much like the skintone of the crowd that now gathers at sunset for the Billabong XXL Big Wave Surfing Awards. Big waves are defined as death-defying swells over 25 feet tall and sometimes as big as 70 feet tall. Most of the guys (and yes, they're mostly guys) who surf these waves are towed into them by Jet Ski, though there's a separate category for those who paddled into the waves the old-fashioned way — with sheer upper body strength.

Billabong started the XXL Awards in 2000, and it used to be that the winner got $1,000 per foot of wave. But once guys started riding 69-foot-plus waves, well, now the big prize is a flat fee of $50K.

This is a better-than-average-looking demographic: very stereotypically Southern Californian — tan, slim, athletic, blond. There's not a single person of color in sight (unless you count a handful of Brazilian surfers), and the crowd is 70 percent strapping 20-something surf lads, the desirable demo for surfwear and surf lifestyle brands.

But the big prize of the night goes to an elder stateman, former pro Shane Dorian (in his mid-thirties) of the Big Island of Hawaii, for surfing a monster tube at Teahupoo, Tahiti. He accepts, tears in his eyes and beer in hand.