On Friday April 11, at the Grove in Anaheim, the surf company Billabong is going to give away $50,000 for what many consider to be the craziest award in sport’s history.
Technically known as the Billabong XXL Global Big Wave Award, the prize money is distributed in categories such as “Biggest Wave” and “Monster Tube” and other such monikers that are mostly unfathomable to those outside the surf community.
To give you an idea of what these awards mean, it helps to first understand the size of waves that most surfer’s ride. An average big day in California is roughly in the double-overhead range.
“Double overhead” is a technical terms that means exactly like it sounds: that the wave in question is roughly twice the size of an average surfer—or somewhere around 12 feet tall. And only very good surfers paddle out when waves get to that size.
In 2007, the Billabong XXL “Biggest Wave” award went to a California surfer named Greg Long for riding a 65 foot high wave at a South African surf break known as “Dungeons.” 65 feet is bigger than a six-story building. Riding one means being able to handle speeds in excess of 30 miles-per-hour with absolutely no margin for error for the simple reason that, at that size, most surfers don’t live through their errors.
Why one would want to risk everything on a wave is a question that has lately been getting some attention.
About a year back, Cal State Fullerton researcher Mike Boyd started asking similar questions about skateboarders. What he wanted to understand was how a skateboarder’s mental profile compared to that of other athletes.
So Boyd spent a number of years administering what is known as the “Profile of Mood States (POMS).” Developed in 1964 and unchanged since 1971, POMS is comprised of six different mood scales: Tension-Anxiety, Depression-Dejection, Anger-Hostility, Fatigue, Vigor, and Confusion-Bewilderment.
Using this scale, most elite athlete’s tend to have certain traits in common, including scoring low for depression, tension, fatigue, confusion and anger, and scoring very high for “task orientation,” which means they excel because of an internal need to push themselves, rather than a desire to compete against others.
This leads to what has been called “the Iceberg Profile,” a
representation of this outcome that runs below normal for all of the negative traits (the submerged portion of the iceberg) and contains one giant spike (the floating berg) in the middle of the graph for “vigor.”
This chart has been used to explain why some less-physically talented athletes occasionally achieve greater success than peers possessing greater physical ability.
What Boyd discovered is that elite skateboarders share this exact same profile.
This month, another Fullerton professor, Lenny Wiersma, has decided to do similar work with big wave surfers. One of the things about surfing that caught Wiersma’s attention was what happened in the final heat of another big wave contest, the January 12, Maverick’s competition (Maverick’s is a legendary monster near Half-Moon Bay, California).
There were 6 surfers left in the final heat, going for $30,000 in prize money. Rather than competing against one another for the cash, the surfers decided to split it—no matter who won.
This would be the rough equivalent of A-Rod splitting up the $28 million he’ll make this year among teammates if the Yankees win the World Series.
Which is to say, those surfers deciding to split their prize money is, um, some pretty a-typical behavior for today’s superstar sportsmen. Then again, riding 65 foot waves is some pretty a-typical behavior for anyone who wants to live through the afternoon.
Which is exactly why Wiersma decided to start his research in the first place.
