Real-life Indiana Jones spent years mastering the whip

By Brelaun Douglas via SWNS

Meet the real-life Indiana Jones who has spent years perfecting how to crack a whip and can even slice a single piece of pasta with one lash. 

Torrance Fisher is an active member of the Los Angeles Whip Artists group, which met up twice a month pre-pandemic, and has competed at the L.A. Whip Cracking Convention since 2017.

Torrance, 30, from Orange County, California, fell in love with whip cracking after being introduced to it by a friend seven or eight years ago. 

“He brought me out to a park one day and he cracked this crappy whip for me and when it explodes you feel it in your chest and I was like ‘oh my gosh this is my life now’ and I dove into it,” he said.

“I think anybody who does anything with a whip owes it to themselves to try those contests at least once," he added. 

Torrance is now a full time whip maker, selling his whips to “performers, enthusiasts and people who dress up like Indiana Jones in their backyard.”

While he has been doing it for years, he said with whip cracking there's always new things to learn and room to grow. 

“The basic stuff can be learned in a few hours, but some of the complicated target work and some of the two-handed Australian stuff that I practice now I’m still not as good as I’d like to be despite doing it for four or five years,” Torrance said. 

“You could say that all of this is easy to get started in but difficult to master and you could spend a lifetime just doing drills, honing in, learning moves and improvising little things.” 

Torrance gives whip cracking an average danger rating and said that injuries that don’t typically last. 

“There’s many ways to get hurt but generally the types of injuries you get go away really quick,” he said. 

“When I was practicing with the very first long whip that I ever made, after a while I got messy and would try to crack it and it would wrap my ankles and I would get skinned.

“For a while I had matching scars on the backs of my ankles.”

Meetups and competitions consist of people demonstrating new moves, like juggling whips, competing in speed and accuracy and seeing how many times people can cut a single piece of pasta. 

“That's sort of a throw down in the whip cracking world,” Torrance said about the pasta cutting. 

“It’s basically a universal learning opportunity and we’re all just trying to build each other up.” 

While he loves the camaraderie of the whip cracking community, Torrance also loves the solitude of the activity.

“I’m a bit of introvert and it’s something that you can do by yourself and know that you're doing it correctly because you have that auditory feedback,” he said. 

“The whip is primarily just a tool, but because of the way it’s shaped and because of the properties of the braid in it, it moves like it has a life of its own.

“I could seriously spend hours just standing by myself doing cracks and watch the coil travel down the whip.”