Got a yomega brain in a mcdonalds happy meal in 1990. Used to love that thing till it broke 6 months later. I did learn all the beginners tricks on it though. ( A few years before the yoyo boom) Never yoyo’d again till i seen the youtube videos for the 2009 world championship. I then google searched for my old yoyo and found the yomega site. Bought a yomega x-wing gamma brain with smart switch and learned about half the yomega mania dvd before i realized the brain didn’t have enough spin time to accomplish the advanced section.(i didn’t know it but at the time it was probably my throw) anyways, new google search for yoyos lead me to toys r us and a duncan mosqito. Was with that for a while and then i wanted a metal so back to toysrus and the lady was putting out duncan drifters on the racks. I asked when those came out and she said “right now”. Lol. Anyways i had found the YoYoE http://yoyoexpert.com/forums/Themes/Expert_Default/images/post/xx.gifpert page shortly after the mosquito. The drifter made it a lot easier to do andres tutorials after i ordered a kk bearing and put dif pads in. many hundreds of tricks and many yoyos later I’m still here. ;D
Two years ago in a old country store I really wanted to try a wooden fixed axle yoyo.
I learned Andre’s tutorials with that. I got the trapeze down with it. Then it broke, so I gave up for a year. Last year I was searching youtube for random stuff and came across a Duncan Metal Drifter yoyo. I was like, “Mom! I need to get this!” So I got it. 
I kept working, and one day after coming home from my sisters college, I really wanted to go to the A2Z store. It was ridiculously awesome. My mom walked up to Nick Gumlaw, (I didn’t know who he was then. :P) and she was like, “He’s really good at yoyoing!” (I really wasn’t then. :P) I got my Dm2 that day. It was such a good day.
I consider when I got my Duncan Metal drifter that that was my beginning of throwing. I haven’t stopped since!
I started when my grandpa found 2 Duncan imperials in his house I threw them for a little while learning the basic stuff like walk the dog and forward pass. Then the NED show came to our school and that’s where I got my first ball bearing yoyo. I threw for a while and then in the middle of fifth grade when football season started I stopped throwing. Then during the summer after sixth grade I picked it back up and the rest is history. By the way I also just realized that if you flip the sides and axle on the Ned yoyo it becomes a looper. We need another yoyo like that.
It all started in 2009. There was a TV cartoon in Hong Kong called the Super Yoyo, and the players in that played with wooden bearing yoyos and did impossible tricks with them. Soon there is this HUGE yoyo fad in my school (I was in the 5th grade back then), and everyone started yoyoing with those Super Yoyo Yoyos and some Blazing Teens. I was not convinced until one day in assembly, our principle told us that SHE was a yoyo champion back in her times. She showed us some tricks, and i started to get into yoyoing. Soon this fad was over, but that didn’t stop me and some of my friends to stop yoyoing. We were throwing YYJs, and before i knew it, I was in advanced tricks with my Hitman. Me and my friends kept yoyoing in school until Primary Six. Thats when my friends kinda quitted and i also kinda quitted and cubed. I was very good at cubing, hitting sub20s over time. I picked up yoyoing about a month ago, when I went to a cube meet with my friend and he showed me some yoyo skills. I told him everthing, and in the next cube meet i bought my hitman to him. Last week I went to buy my first metal, DV888, and thats wheee i am now. Master Level in 1A, loving ladder escape and learning Vector now. I am waiting for my chance to buy a Loop 900 and start over again on another style.
My dad showed me how to rock the baby back in middle school. I guess that was over 15 years ago. I picked it up from there and could do a lot of basic responsive tricks and some looping…but this was before widespread internet so I had to read about it IN A BOOK. Imagine that.
Anyway, once I got pretty tough I took my Fireball in to school and people were amazed. Overwhelming positive response. There was actually kind of a little yoyo explosion after that.
I never got much more serious about it over the years but I did always have a throw around and I’d pick it up from time to time. That was until recently when I randomly decided to look around the web and see what was happening in the yoyo world. Unresponsive totally caught my eye and now here I am, far more into it than ever.
my grandfather let me borrow a cheap imperial style yoyo from a senior’s center. i started to loop, then found out about string tricks. i wish i still had that yoyo. it was great.
if they still gave out yoyos in happy meals I would actually go to mcdonalds
Me too. ;D
Well I got my first yoyo in the late 70’s. Then almost 30 years later I met Adam Brewster at our church. He turned my boys onto yoyoing and I followed a month later. that was in 2004. Been throwing ever since. Started on the forums in 2006. Couldn’t be happier.
Thank you Adam Brewster. Love you Brother.
I started young in the mid 90’s as well as a few have said, got a butterfly, won yomega xbrain yoyo on a tv call in contest, and got a bumble bee shortly after, I bought a few cheap yoyos over the years since but when i was learning I didn’t have youtube and I didn’t know any other throwers so I just kind of got bored with it. I got back into it almost 2 years ago when i found out about this site, and found onedrop right here in my backyard in eugene at the beginning of this year. I now have about 20 metal yoyos, mostly one drops, but I have thoroughly enjoyed getting back into yoyoing. I have learned so much in the past two years, and as when i was younger, the more i practiced, the better i got, plain and simple. Now meeting local yoyoers has been the best influence to pick up new tricks and styles, there is something about seeing a trick in person that makes it easier to duplicate.
Dave
Let me think back to when I first was introduced to yo-yos. It was the early 90’s. I do believe I was maybe around five years old and I was given a basic Duncan yo-yo, a looping type of some sort. It was red and looped, what more is there to say? I then remember buying a Duncan Butterfly and asking my dad if he could order me the Duncan trick book. The day it arrived is still fresh in my mind. It was wintertime and my hands were freezing to death trying trying to learn the tricks in that book while throwing that butterfly around. I learned most of the tricks in that book and was darn proud of myself afterward.
Years later my dad gave me a purple Yomega Fireball that I still own to this day. So many lovely scratches and chips in that yo-yo from all the abuse I put it through. I learned most of the string tricks that could be performed on it at the time and I had one friend who was into yo-yoing as well so we would practice together. After he moved I just stopped throwing and went onto other hobbies.
At some point in the mid 2000’s I remember watching the World’s yoyo competition online and witnessed top players performing tricks I didn’t realize could be done. I tried it with my older Yomega yoyos and couldn’t figure out how they managed to do their tricks, so I kinda left the idea of getting back into yoyoing in the back of my mind again. Last year though I started watching yoyo competion videos again, particularly Hiroyuki Suzuki’s, and looked into what yoyos were like now. Lo and behold, I found out they’re made unresponsive and that’s how all these wild string-based tricks are done. I got my first unresponsive yoyo, the Plastic Grind Machine, and I’ve been having fun learning new tricks and constantly trying new yoyos to see which one I like the best.