At what point did you become hooked on yoyoing? How long did it take?
Was it the moment you threw your first sleeper? Or was it after mastering a more complex trick? Maybe it wasn’t until you attended your first contest? Was there a particular precipitating event/moment?
I was very interested from the start. Something about making the yoyo go up and down was just fun to me 
I would say I got hooked and knew this would be something I’d really be doing for a long time was when I could start doing basic combos and my yoyoing was smooth and not choppy anymore which was maybe like 3 months in.
I bought all of the Dennis McBride VHS tapes in the mid 90’s and thought “I wanna he able to do some of that…”
In 1998; I walked into Goldenapple Comics. They sold:comics, action figures, surrealistic art, various skill toys; including yo-yos.
As I entered the store; a girl was just stepping back from a locked glass case filled with yo-yos.
I asked to see one. She said, ‘give it a throw’.
In less than one minute; I knew I would always have yoyos to throw.
No kidding.
Once I got past and wall of learning general tricks and started to incorporate original elements into my own combos. Took me about 2 years, there were some points where I thought I was gonna quit since a lot of people from my local community were quittting and I was losing the drive to continue. However now I’m more into yoyoing than ever.
It went a little something like this…
I had a Coke yoyo as a kid like many kids did in Australia. I didn’t get into all that much then. I even bought myself a Yomega Fireball in '97 from a hobby store, which cost me $40 back then!
One day about 20 years later, my wife and I were sorting through our things and she found an old box with my old yoyos in it and she asked if I still wanted them. I said, “Yeah, don’t chuck that out!” So I threw an Eiffel Tower and a Walk the Dog and thought to myself, “I wonder what yoyoing looks like today.” I gave it a google and was blown away by the tricks I saw people doing.
I bought a yoyo immediately and haven’t stopped throwing since.
So I started playing around with very very simple responsive yoyos as a young kid; I always had one around the house. But I got hooked onto unresponsive yoyoing last year when a friend held me spellbound with what had to be magic. I can now do advanced “magic” and enjoy capturing people’s attention with any of the five styles.
My friend and I were at a Christmas party and I had bought this yoyo for secret Santa, but the only problem was that I REALLY wanted the yoyo for myself so I kinda just took it. ƪ(˘⌣˘)ʃ. Then my friend and I started throwing it. But after that we both got yoyos for Christmas and watched some yotricks and that was it! Oh, btw I’m not sure if u know him but my friend is blahmin he’s on instagram and reddit.
That kid is nuts lol. Those lacerations tho
Ikr! He gave me some of his signature string and it’s basically this thicker version of this the whipy string. And o my goodness! I have some battle scars from that string. It’s so whipy, quad Brentstole and double slap stuff become easy as pie!
I got a Yomega brain in a Happy Meal when I was a kid back in the 90s. I threw that thing constantly, but always to space in to learn much of anything past around the world, Rock the baby, and walk the dog. I lost it after I moved and yoyo just kind of died for me.
Fast forward to 2016, I was in a toy store buying a Christmas present for my son, and at the last minute I bought a Duncan butterfly for myself. I took it home and quickly pick up where I left off. Got on Google to see if I could learn more tricks and instantly my mind was blown at how far yoyo had come. Stumbled onto the Reddit community and found my people lol. I bought myself a sage pro pack, and then a shark’s honor and haven’t been able to put it down since. I’ve literally thrown every day since then lol.
I’m stoked that he got picked up by Duncan. That kid is going places
Haha yea I’m realy happy for him!
I yoyoed when I was younger, and then about 2 years ago I saw the video of Gentry winning nats with the replay pro, and then a week later ordered one myself. Havent looked back.
I got hooked a few times.
I was hooked in middle school first. My dad bought me one of the early Yomega Brains from his hometown of Fall River, MA. A kid at school liked it and I couldn’t do anything with it, so I traded him for a Duncan Midnight Special (just a black Imperial lol) which I loved because I could make it come back. I learned Rock the Baby on it but broke it. Every time I saw one in toy stores after that though I’d buy one and have it in my pocket for a few weeks.
In college, the late-90’s boom hit, and every kid at the summer camp where I was a counselor had a Yomega Fireball. I bought one and learned the stuff they were doing so they would listen to me. The last day of camp, two of my kids gave me a THP Raider as a parting gift. I learned my first “decent” tricks (i.e. Split the Atom), took it back to school, and made up some fun stuff, but I forgot about it again.
After college, maybe in 2001-2(?) when I was teaching, one of my kids brought in an old Yomega X-Brain. I borrowed it and did some stuff I remembered and the kids were blown away (even though by any measure, this was NOT good yo-yoing at all). Feeling inspired I went out and bought a new yo-yo, a blue SuperYo Renegade. I found Ken’s World On A String, and learned some more stuff. I was into it, but after a month it collected dust in my teacher desk.
UNTIL, a couple years later when a different 5th grader, Ace, came in with a yo-yo and he knew some stuff. I had a yo-yo in my desk ( I think a Custom Mag?) with no string, and we traded the string back and forth showing each other stuff. For whatever reason, like in The Lion King, IT WAS TIME… I found a FH2 marked down at Target, found yoyoing.com/news, bought my first 100 pack of string, and I literally have not gone a day without playing yo-yo since May 22, 2005.
Safe to say the last one hooked me.
Ya man thanks for getting me into yoyo!
I’m just getting started (again), so I can’t say I’m hooked just yet. Everything interesting (i.e., string tricks) is still a struggle. I’m just hoping my interest won’t fade completely before I get to the point where I’ve mastered enough tricks to become hooked. Part of the problem is limited available practice time, which stretches out my progress curve considerably. As someone who rarely gets hooked on anything new for more than a few months at a time, that could become the critical issue for me.
As for my history with yoyos, I played around with them a bit when I was a kid back in the mid-late 1970s. At that time, the ProYo was the new-fangled innovation, and my two Duncan Imperials (which included a white glow-in-the-dark model) and one Duncan ButterFly got more or less permanently sidelined in favor of a brand new ProYo. I never could do anything more than Walk the Dog, Rock the Baby, Around the World, and some inside and outside looping. Eventually other teenage interests took over and yoyoing became a distant memory.
But then about a month ago I was browsing recently completed drops in MassDrop’s “Hobby Shop” area and saw a couple of Yomega yoyos (one was the Glide). I was struck by their appearance and so I did some googling to see what the current state of yoyoing was and was impressed and entranced by how far it had come, both in terms of the tricks people were doing and in terms of the advancements in yoyo design and manufacturing.
I can honestly say that I would not have bothered to try yoyoing again had it not been for the abundance of yoyo-related videos on YouTube and online communities like this one. Without you guys helping me with valuable tips and advice, and helping to keep the fires of interest stoked in me, I’m pretty sure I would have given up in frustration two or three weeks ago.
I remember getting the Mcbride vhs tapes in the 90’s as well, and this is where I started. I still have my sleep machine, but don’t use it often.
I’ll summarize, as my yoyo life has pretty much been shared across the course of several threads. I was first hooked by yoyoing due to my grandmother when I was quite young. She had grown up in a time when you entertained yourself. In fairness, she taught me how to make my own toys, how to create my own fun, and how to chase my dreams. Yeah, she taught me how to make simple yoyos. As time pass and I reached the big boy age of five, I scored a red imperial, hooked again!
The story could go on but………….you should and could be getting hooked on yoyoing. Go yo!