Zaturdays: Why You Should Do Your Tricks The Wrong Way

Posted on Friday, April 1, 2016 by Paul

Everyone does tricks in their own way, kind of. Lizard’s kickflips and Trevor Colden’s kickflips are different, but they’re the same in that they’re both perfect kickflips, done the correct way. But it wasn’t all that long ago though when everyone did their tricks a lot more differently. And it stemmed from the fact that most of us really didn’t know what we were doing, totally winging it. There were sequences in magazines maybe, and there were videos where we’d see people doing the tricks we wanted to learn, but there was very little in the way of tutorials, how-tos, step-by-steps, etc. Now we have the luxury of seeing thousands of examples of any trick at the push of a button, and like Starbucks is to coffee, the nature of things has become more and more homogenized. Same same same, day in day out. For example the technique for doing a stale fish tweaker is well known and widely accepted: do them like Gonz. That’s a good idea on paper because Gonz does them the best, but where does it leave us if we’re all doing them that way? The same can be said for just about every trick we do anymore.

Really what I’m getting at is this. Sometimes it might be better to do your tricks the “wrong way.”

This is a great example of what I’m saying. Mark Gonzales kickflipping The Gonz gap at EMB back in ’93. It’s nothing like any kickflip would ever look like today, but that’s also one of the reasons it’s so awesome.

I’m not a person who thinks that everything was better back in the day. Most things were worse, way worse, but I guess I am a person who thinks that variations of techniques back in the day were if nothing else at least more interesting. So what’s the point? What’s the point of anything, but whatever it is it might look better if it wasn’t so polished.

Look at these lien airs below. I love them all. The top four are being done the correct way. The last one is sketchy looking, ugly, wrong, but that’s also why it’s my personal favorite.