But the highlight of the night belonged, as it always does, to big wave legend and surfing icon Greg Noll. “Da Bull” took to the podium to announce the winner of the biggest tow-in wave, and in his speech mentioned that he’d been asked to keep things a bit more wholesome and family-friendly this year. He then launched into a lecture about taking care of your health when you are young, and shared a story about an old friend of his who recently had to go into the hospital for throat surgery.

For the first and only time of the night, the entire venue went silent as Greg talked about how worried they were for his friend, and how he’d waited nervously to get a call after the surgery. He explained that when that call finally came, it was a nurse from the hospital wanting to let him know that his buddy was alright—and that what they’d thought was cancer was really just a hairball that Greg’s friend had accumulated from years of sharing “oral pleasantries” with dozens of women (although Noll used decidedly less wholesome language when telling the story).

By the time he’d nailed the punch line, the silence in the venue had turned to uproarious laughter—but Da Bull wasn’t finished. He said his friend called him a month later to tell him that he was embarrassed because the whole town knew what had happened, but that, on the plus side, his phone was ringing off the hook with calls from attractive women.

The moral of the story, Greg explained, was that if everyone there at the XXL Awards wanted their phones to blow up with calls from attractive women—well, then they knew what to do.

So much for the pomp and circumstance of the “Oscars of big wave surfing!” But then again, that’s par for the course in the wave riding community. While other sports are golf clapping their way through doping scandals and gambling controversies, we’re rolling on the floor as 80-year-old legends introduce record-breaking rides with dirty jokes.