What’s not to love about the ’90s? Photo: Dmitry Naumov/Shutterstock
While Jamie Currie “was a little bit sick” to see Zoltan Torkos stomp another kickflip, this time arguably “off and above the lip,” I actually rejoiced at his antics. And upon revisiting Torkos’ homegrown Innersection submission, I actually cued up some Bl’ast and decided to speak up on behalf of the Santa Cruz working man.
Mr. Currie argues two main points that are ultimately overshadowed by some pretty hilarious visual analogies. I must admit, pondering the functionality of a cat taped to a banana and comparing skate tricks performed on waves to blight-ridden Aussie rabbits constitute rhetorical gold, although methinks that taping a banana to an Aussie hare might indeed be quite functional. Yet I digress…
Currie’s first argument is that Volcom shouldn’t buy the kickflip a place in surfing. Throwing money at throwaway tricks, he claims, only encourages novelty acts like Torkos to continue their Internet-driven one-man circus.
Let’s be honest: back when the Kickflip-Off was announced in 2008, Volcom’s creative minds didn’t really think anyone had already dedicated the better part of a decade to learning kickflips, muchless a no-name from Santa Cruz. Had they known, they might have lowered the stakes a bit or at least added the clarifying language found in the revised 2011 Kickflip-Off, a revision deemed necessary after they bitterly paid Torkos his hard-earned $10k for, as Currie claims, making “surfing look geeky.”
But the fact that we’re mentioning the Volcom brand by name in print today demonstrates just what an ingenious publicity scheme the Kickflip-Off has really become. Five long years of marketing their brand with novelty clips of bails and surfed-skate moves that surfers love to hate and skaters hate to love, Volcom’s cultural stock (and Gucci, er, PPR’s stock) is higher than most of the big surf brands across the action sports spectrum. Lest we forget: Volcom was started in 1991 not as a surf brand, but as a hybrid skate-surf-snow brand. Even if Zoltan Torkos is (maybe rightfully) relegated to obscurity, the Kickflip-Off has achieved its business function of building the mutant brand, surf style purists be damned.
Volcom aside, Currie’s primary argument is that the kickflip’s introduction to surfing comprises change for the sake of change, not progression. As his title indicates, skate tricks constitute a regression into surfing’s primitive past. I would agree: much of the film that I’ve seen of Mr. Torkos isn’t all that impressive compared to the legions of rail-and-aerial clips by the Top 34 or a whole slew of recent up-and-comers. Torkos is a working family man who uses his recent media attention to reduce gun crime in his community, NOT a top international competitor. I wouldn’t quite expect him to have perfected the ASP criteria when the only “grind” he knows is a 9-to-5, not the World Ranking tour under the auspices of a major sponsor.
But Mr. Currie has it all backwards: the value of Torkos’ kickflip isn’t in its progressive value. Rather, the value of the kickflip is precisely in its throwback value. Zoltan Torkos’ persona, surfing, musical taste, and film clips—from camera and film quality to angles and editing—demonstrate an unabashed advocacy of the trends of a long-decade of nineties surfing that the global surf community is reticent to revive. By “long-nineties” I mean the surfing trends from the late 1980s through the early 2000s, a time when very little was changing in style, media, and progression relative to the exponential acceleration in technical progression and equipment design that we’ve seen since the Internet has wholly changed our notion of surfing’s progress curve over the last decade.
