Author Lauren Rowe, of the self-proclaimed “swoon-worthy” romance novel trilogy, The Club, once wrote: “Find what you’re good at. whatever it is, and become excellent at it. Excellence isn’t magic – it’s habit, the byproduct of doing something over and over and striving to be the best at it. Simply figure out what your passion is, and resolve to make excellence your habit.”
For Zoltan Torkos, a surfer out of Santa Cruz, CA, he has found that one thing. He is, by and large, surfing’s foremost expert in the niche world of aquatic kickflips. Sure, there’s others out there who have stuck the traditional skateboard trick on surf craft before. But Zoltan – aka “The Magician” – has basically dedicated his entire life to the surfing kickflip. And now, according to him, he’s pulled off the first one ever in a wave pool. Check out the footage below.
The clip comes from the pool at Waco Surf, deep in the heart of Texas. Torkos stomps the flip about mid-wave, similar to how he’s previously done them in the ocean. In fact, that specific detail of his patented maneuver spurred some controversy a while back.
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You see, a handful of years back, Volcom held a digital contest for the first person to land a kickflip on a surfboard. The prize money for the winner was $10,000. Torkos had seemingly pulled it off, however, his kickflip was not “above the lip,” as stated in the rules. After some back-and-forth, Volcom still ended up giving Torkos the money – and he stuck one off the lip later, as well, just for good measure. And now, years later, Torkos is still doing the maneuver.
It’s not just kickflips, either. It appears that, during his trip to Waco, the magician dug deeper into his bag of tricks, and also executed a darkslide – another skateboarding-inspired trick in which one flips the board over halfway, then rides (or grinds) with the deck facing down. It’s not every day you see something like this on surf craft, let alone a skateboard even.
But Zoltan is cut from a different cloth, and he proudly lets that freak flag fly.
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