You can find video of the kid, if you’re of a mind, on the sport’s websites. There he is: a shy, mop-haired blond clinging to what looks for all the world like a trapeze attached to a giant kite.

Strapped to his feet is a wakeboard.

Beneath the wakeboard is water, water, everywhere.

Occasionally he will slip its surly bonds to go flipping and spinning and turning through the sky, 10 or 15 or 20 feet above the water, free for long, exhilarating seconds to simply be creative.

And it occurs, watching this, that maybe kiteboarding really is what 18-year-old Fort Wayne native Tommy Fields says it is.

“It’s a lifestyle more than anything,” he says. “Go to beaches and just chase the wind.”

He’s been doing that, he goes on, since he was 15 years old, when he discovered there was something even more liberating than wakeboarding. That had been his life, pretty much, since picking it up from his dad as a kid. He spent his summers doing at his grandparents’ cottage on Crooked Lake, and he and his younger sister, Jamie, competed in the INT, an amateur wakeboarding and water skiing circuit.

And then one year the family went on a vacation to Lake Superior, and he saw something that looked like wakeboarding-plus. He saw some guys kiteboarding.

Consider him hooked.

“Had to try it out,” he says.

Three years down the road, he’s followed the sport to Florida, where, in 2009, a year early, he graduated from Coral Shores High School in Tavernier, Fla. He’s a sophomore in the business school at the University of Miami now (“It’s the best setup I could find for school, and also wind-wise,” he says), and he lives in Islamorada in the Florida Keys.

He’ll go back to school this fall as the men’s amateur champion at the Bridge of the Gods competition in the Columbia River Gorge in Washington, the longest-running and most prestigious kiteboarding meet for amateurs in the United States.

Jamie, 16, a high school student in Sturgis, Mich., finished second in the women’s event.

Next on the agenda?

“Well, in the next couple years I’d like to compete more on the current world tour,” says Fields, who’s the team manager for Backdrop, a local wakeboarding clothing and gear company, and who’d like to get into the business side of kiteboarding as well. “Last year I spent three months living and training in Brazil and had pretty good results. So I’d like to take that and just promote the image of kiteboarding overall at different beaches around the country, make the sport even bigger and make the sport a center-stage sport.”

It’s already bigger than most people suspect it is.

“Pretty much every contest I go to, there’s at least 40, 50 people who participate in the event,” Fields says. “It’s really growing the last couple years. I just got back from Hood River, Ore., and any given day there’s like 200 people kiteboaridng, and that’s just one spot. And, there’s dozens of spots to ride there.”

The appeal, he says, is the freedom. A kiteboarder basically needs his kite and harness, his board and anyplace with water and a consistent wind. So you can do it in the Columbia River Gorge or on Lake Superior or on Lake Michigan off South Haven, Mich., which is where Fields got his first lessons.

“You can go anywhere in the world,” says Fields, who’s also won the Miami Kitemasters and Islamorada Invitational titles this year. “You’re not restricted, you can go to any beach. You can go to any beach.”

bensmith@jg.net