Remember why you yoyo

No. Not some controversial agro-inciting posting.

Just think back. Why do you yoyo? What about this simple toy lured you to it? Share your stories.

I’ll get started. I’ll keep it brief. Well, MY brief, not your brief!

I had seen yoyo on TV. I forget what, maybe it was the Smother’s Brothers, but I can’t recall. It just looked cool. but I was 6 or 7 at the time. In 1978, I got a a white Duncan Imperial so I could start my own yoyo adventure. This was one of the hot toys that year, by the way. It was also inexpensive, just as they are now as well. My mother and father could at least gravity pull, but the failed to pass along any help or knowledge, as simple and as little as it may have been. So, after the string broke after months of trying, my adventure in yoyo crashed and burned. But the interest never went away. I still enjoyed watching people use the yoyo.

After many years, fast forward to May of 2011 to be exact, I needed something to help occupy my time(what little there is at times) and the yoyo re-entered the picture. This time, it’s gonna stick. I wanted something that didn’t need batteries, was small, portable and didn’t weight much and wasn’t complicated. Well, it is small, it’s portable, it doesn’t weigh much, but complicated? Well, that’s a bit open to debate. So much better than video games! When I can throw, I’m having tons of run. Sure, I can’t do all those wicked cool tricks yet, but the time I put in, I can get there. Yes, it is as fun as it looked on TV. Plus, the amount of accomplishment when a trick comes together. It’s very satisfying.

So, what’s your story. Share. Thanks!

those are some old posts :slight_smile: (of mine)

My motherboard went out, so I started watching TV and stuff to pass time. I made a ball in a cup thing in woodshop, and it ended up breaking… so i found an old yoyo with 8 knots in the string and started learning how. It was cool so I looked up some tutorials heh.

Nothing fancy just got a cheap party yo at a party and it didn’t work at all. Then got my red imperial, I was quite young, my aunt worked with me for hours trying to get a gravity pull.

The rest of my story I bring to you from another forum:

As a kid I was trying to skip it across the surface of my wading pool like you throw a stone. I missed the pool and sent it through the neighbors window. Cost me dearly!

Playing the imperial in 1st grade while the teacher was out of the room. Mrs. Marcy ruled her room and as she came back in, while hiding it in my pocket, I tipped her coffee cup, staining the papers on her desk, and sent a figurine crashing to the floor. Cost me even more than the window.

Twirling the imperial above my head, pretending to fly my helicopter, the string broke and went sailing into a dog kennel. While retrieving the yo the dog ate my shirt, got out of the kennel, and somehow managed to communicate all of the event to my mother before I could get home. Cost? You don’t even want to know.

Duncan red imperial: Most expensive yoyo I’ve ever owned but also the yo I’ve owned the longest. Most cursed, loved, yo on the planet!

So much more than just a yo. I carried that thing in my pocket for years and I still have it!

Fast forward to today!

I saw a kid doing an eifel tower one time and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I had always had an interest in yoyos but i forgot about it once several dollar tree yoyos didnt work. So i asked that kid where he got his yoyo so I went out to Toys R us and bought a Yomega Xodus 2 and a yomega Brain. I learn a lot with that xodus from the yomega mania dvd. my xodus broke when it flew into my door but I had found andre on youtube and bought a dark magic. That was my gateway into real yoyoing. My dark magic stripped cause I used it so much but I had bought other yoyos. Now i have a small but growing collection and I’m trying to venture into different styles of yoyoing. 2A and 5A.
When I first saw all of andres tutorials I thought “I’ll never be able to learn all of these tricks!” But now I have learned them all (in 1A) and Im scouring youtube for more tutorials. Theres a lot more out there than i thought!

Now you start making your own. easier than looking up tutorials.

prepares fingers for typing up a novel
Ok, I’ll try to sum this up as much as possible but in the long run, yoyoing was a huge part of my later childhood. It started when my cousin got this cheap plastic party favor yoyo for suffering a painful dental treatment (or as they say, being a good boy). My cousin and I were doing the gravity pull, seeing who can do it the longest. That evening was grocery shopping night and my mom saw that we were playing with this cheap toy for the longest time so she bought us each a full-sized Imperial-shaped yoyo. Too bad it wasn’t Duncan however. This seemed to be a short lived fad though as we quickly got tired of dribbling by the time the night ended.

About a week later, we went to a friend’s party where he was messing with a Yomega Brain. I had seen these things in catalogs before but didn’t know how they worked other than being a yoyo ball ripoff. When he was doing his thing, I noticed that it was ‘stalling’ at the end of the string, then coming back up. Right there I was amazed. I walked up and asked to see it and try it. No dice however but he did tell me where he got it.

The following day we were all going to the mall which sold those throws. After heading to the Imaginarium store and finding it, I showed it to my parents. After seeing the $12 price, they denied it and said to wait and see what my birthday brings. Bummed, I left with my cousin and headed to KB Toys. With $5 in my pocket and hearing how Duncans were the best, I spotted a shiny red Imperial and bought one of those. I got my string cut to size and began to dribble. However I noticed that when I dropped it, it spun at the end. The ‘magic’ of the brain yoyo was then debunked when I figured out how to overhand throw and get it to sleep. I still wanted to get the Brain but lived off the Imperial for a while. While walking through the rest of the mall, I just continued practicing and before I knew it I was walking the dog and even figured out Rock the Baby. Eventually for my birthday (about 3 weeks later) I got the Yomega Brain.

Hype dies down immediately after. A couple months later, I see a kid at school with a cheap ‘freebie’ yoyo, trying to figure out how to use it. I showed him how to throw and the following day I smuggled my Yomega to school. Little did I know, I was bound to start a major boom on the school yard. Following day, the rest of my friends bought Duncans and learned until the yard attendant came up and stopped us. Bummed we wrote a petition and were successful. We got a designated yoyo zone on the yard and we threw, learned tricks, etc. The end of the year finale: my teacher buys a box full of Duncans and we did this little physics program Duncan had. After doing a couple experiments with gravity and flywheels, we watched the Duncan How to YoYo video featuring Arnie Dixon…the video with the cheesy music video at the beginning. After the video was over, we spent the last half hour out on the yard practicing what we learned on the video. That summer, I hit up the local (now closed) toy store and snagged a bunch of different yoyos being a Fireball, Technic, and some more Duncans. This was all just before the major 1999 boom.

High school time: Pokemon’s cool, Magic the Gathering, etc. I ditch the yoyo and jump on the Magic bandwagon. Sorry yoyos!

2009: My birthday’s coming. My parents buy an Imperial as a gag gift for me. After a couple throws, I had this urge to get back on it. That weekend I bought a Mosquito. After a while, I stop until the following year when my niece comes home from school with a NED yoyo. She heard I could do tricks so I grabbed my Skeeter and showed her some. It all came back. I had an urge to pick up a better yoyo and ended up snagging a FH2010. From there, I just stuck with it and here we are today.

Well long story short, saw someone from my school yoyoing, he ended up doing a split the atom and i was in shock. I didn’t even know a yoyo could sleep. Idk, why it interested me so much. That same day i went to buy a imperial. I brought it too school and he told me i was the worst yoyoer he ever saw =[. Well i took that personally. I didn’t stop yoyoing, i did the complete opposite. I ask my mom to buy me a raider, and it all started with a Walk the Dog. Well now, im not sure if he stopped yoyoing, but im still around or better then him now. Ik it doesn’t matter how good you are, but it was one of my goals. And now ive proven that im not the worst yoyoer ever xD, and i also understand that it doesn’t matter how good or how bad you are. Its about how much fun you having, and every time i start yoyoing it feels like i just started.

I first started yoyoing when I saw some kid in my grade yoyoing and I thought it was pretty cool. So I went to my local toy store and bought a yomega brain xp with the switch and I played with it everyday just trying to figure out how to make it sleep. So fast forward about 3 monthes later and at this point I had a new yomega maverik and was on the boardwalk down the shore. I then passed some yoyo show and went and talked to the guy that was doing it. He was Shane Karan a two time national champ after that I kept yoyoing and now I’ve gotten a lot better and go to the boardwalk to throw with Shane whenever I can.

Before I really got started, I was playing around with a novelty I got in a show box, effectively equivalent to a fire dog… Anyhow, this new found interest was coincidental because a few weeks later I noticed a kid who was doing split the atoms with a maverick, and this novelty I had couldn’t sleep due to all the knots in the gap… Fast forward a day or two and after much determination, my dad says “let me take a look at it!” so after about 20 minutes I hear a SNAP… “dad?.. Did you break it?” “no” he replied…“alright get on your bike, we’re going to toys r us”… I picked out a blue Duncan dragonfly and now the competition to beat the maverick kid began… I made it my mission to beat him… And in doing so, I found yoyoing very enjoyable. After roughly two years of list contact with him, I found that I had finally surpassed him, and I credit that accomplishment to this forum which he hadn’t found… But to this day and beyond, yoyoing will be a part of who I am.