The Resurgence and Death of the Yo-Yo

I received my first yo-yo on my 6^th birthday. With no one in my household being able to demonstrate to me to make the yo-yo automatically return back up to me. It sat in my toy box for 4 years. 

It wasn’t until I was placed on bedroom house arrest for an entire summer for snapping or breaking Mrs. Margret’s favorite chicken’s neck Malcolm just the way “she’d” always demonstrated to me what she would do to me if I didn’t stop stealing brown eggs from her precious chicken coop on 125^th Street  Harlem, New York City in 1963.

If it weren’t for that illegal chicken raising from deep down south ornery old lady telling on me to my disciplinary parents, especially my corporal punishing father. I would have never become The World youngest Yo-Yo Champion in 1973. After about a week of solitary confinement (there was no colored TV or computer, x-box or e-books in those days to entertain a bored mind).

It was like  that Yo-Yo was calling me from the depth of that toy box and just like a child prodigy just knows how to play the Ludwig van Beethoven 5^th Symphony or really knows what Einstein was talking about with E-mc2-equation. I taught myself how to use the yo-yo in ways that no one had ever used or seen before. I even used a quote from Aesop as my mantra: Never shall I forget the time I spent with you (my Yo-Yo). Please continue to be my friend, as you will always find me yours.

The yoyo is supposed to have originated from Ancient China and Ancient Greece even though I don’t have clear evidence about the Greek origins of the toy. The Ancient Chinese yoyo represented the starting point for the later Diablo and the regular yoyo. Its newer “yoyo” name came from the Tagalog tribe language from the Philippines meaning “come-come”. The word yo-yo is actually derived from the Philippine language. The birth of the modern yo-yo was made in 1928 when a Filipino American Pedro Flores who started a manufacturing company in Santa Barbara, California that made the yo-yo’s. Soon his company was making 300,000 units that was the output of 600 employees.

The World Yo-Yo Contest is the culminating yo-yo competition of the worldwide competitive circuit and is considered the most prestigious yo-yo competition in the world. The winner of this competition in any of the six championship divisions is deemed the World Yo-Yo Champion the only event to award such a title.

To most people, a yo-yo is just a toy. But to me “Elmer Butterfat”, the whirling bundle of string, plastic and precision ball-bearings has become much more in my left and right hands. “It is a simple toy,” I must admit, but “as the design of yo-yo’s has changed, it’s become a lot easier to do tricks with them and you can do a lot crazier tricks.” Twice being a World Champion of the yo-yo and knowing that I didn’t get that honor with musty old moves like round-the-world or walking the dog. My routines were carefully choreographed flow of sophisticated tricks set to music. But yo-yos aren’t what they used to be either. Today’s yo-yos are usually butterfly shaped to better catch the string and spin for minutes on a single throw, thanks to smooth-spinning ball bearings instead of a wooden or plastic axle. Most Yo-Yo’s are also controlled by synthetic strings instead of the cotton of yore.

In a split second, I could flip my yo-yo into a sleeper spin, then weave a cat’s cradle of string between my hands. The yo-yo is soon hopping between portions of the string, then flipped back out and spun around my back, constantly pinging across my string with the precision and speed usually associated with assembly line robots.

In spite of the amazing and tantalizing difficulties of my Yo-Yo act what I tried to do is always have a really well balanced routine. Something that is cool for an audience to watch and is cool for people who maybe don't yo-yo or don't really know what modern yo-yoing is.

The use of the Yo-Yo disappeared for almost 20 years until in the 1990s saw a resurgence of yoyos popularity to levels surpassing the yoyo craze, during the 60’s. Now yoyo contests appeared again.

The record sleep time for fixed-axle yoyo was 51 seconds and the sleep record from transaxle yoyo was 13 minutes and 5 seconds, which is a dramatic increase. This already great spin time record was broken by C3yoyodesign BTH yoyo model which spun for around 30 minutes. Of course that once unsustainable record was broken by yours truly.

The newer yoyo craze swept all across the US between 1990 and 1999 bringing the yoyo back into the children’s hands. This time, the most popular yoyo models were from Yomega. The Yomega Raider, fireball and X-brain were the most popular models at that time. If you had 300-400 dollars to spend fast on something shiny you can get the advantage of the newly made titanium yoyos which have a feature that every yoyo player would want to have on an aluminum yoyo: the sparks. See, when you hit this kind of yoyo to the ground it makes sparks just as you cut some metal pieces or weld to pieces of steel. That made the titanium yoyo so special.

At the end of 1999, there was many, many public announcements that the yoyo would be banned from any school assembly, probably because it happened that somebody was doing looping tricks and the string snapped and someone was hit and hurt.

In that time, kids used to play with the yoyos at school to teach each other how to do tricks or just to show off with their new fancy throws. Everyone needed to have a yoyo, otherwise, they were rejected from the group. There wasn’t the Internet to communicate so easily. YouTube was launched only in 2005, so the children couldn’t watch any tutorials. The trend started to slowly die out over time.

The things that meant the end of the yoyo boom were Pokémon and the Star Wars Phantom Menace)(+Jar Jar Binks). Like any other trend, the yoyo boom simply disappeared. What I know for sure is that the yoyo will continue to fascinate every generation of children or even adults. As Mitch Hedberg said,” You can’t have enough yoyos!”