The warmup, pre lost iPhone footage. Photo: Screenshot
Boredom does crazy things to humans: it can inspire them to do inexplicable things to their hair, or make them think eating a whole box of Joe Joe’s in one sitting is a good idea, or even push them to watch re-runs of the Oi Rio Pro. The Coronavirus pandemic has dominated the news cycle for the past two weeks, forcing most Americans into self quarantine. While it’s driven some to insanity fueled by self pity, the lucky ones have picked up – or even improved upon – a hobby.
Thus is the case for one Julian Smith, a La Jolla, Calif.-based pro surfer who’s been stuck inside, eying his enviable quiver of asyms and potato chips and twin fins (even though Julian admittedly hates twin fins) while watching one too many pro surf vlogs turned workout tutorials. Julian revived his old high school pursuit of fingerboarding and turned his reclaimed talent into a world’s first on Wednesday, becoming the only pro surfer to ever throw a quad cork 1800…on a fingerboard.
How, you ask? Well, I asked Julian the same question, given that a quad cork 1800 is basically four flips while spinning the board five times around its axis (usually the human body is the axis, which is usually attached to a snowboard). How did he keep the finger-sized shred stick attached to his once-grimey, now overly-sanitized digits? And how did he avoid dislocating his wrist in the process?
“Well, I didn’t really,” he said, his hand wrapped in a brace. “After about 16 hours straight of twiddling with my fingerboard, I learned I’m actually quadruple jointed. The spins are where it got hard. It took me about two weeks to work on it but by the end, I could twirl my hand like a top – fast enough to create the centrifugal force needed to keep the board attached to my piggies. Unfortunately, now I need wrist surgery to reattach the joint. It won’t stay in place. Maybe we’re not supposed to be quadruple jointed, come to think of it?”
The fingerboard expert had to find the perfect ramp to pull the trick off, something with an ideal jump into a smooth transition: “I tried the sink but it wasn’t quite big enough on its own,” he said. “The best transition – and I know this sounds gnarly – was out of the toilet, into the bathtub. They were spaced apart just right and while it kind of disgusted my girlfriend that I had my hand in our toilet for two weeks, it created the perfect man-made feature to pull the trick off.”
Despite misplacing the actual footage, Julian sent out the career-changing announcement through his agent April 1, 2020. More as the story develops.
Editor’s Note: If you didn’t figure out this was satire within the first few sentences, shoot us a note and we’ll immediately send someone to hit you over the head with a frying pan.
