Yo-yoing | Thus have I heard

Fun fact: when I was ten years old, I picked up a yoyo for the first time. It was a red glitter Duncan Imperial pried off the crowded shelves of an Oklahoman Wal-Mart. I remember when I peeled away the shrink-wrapped plastic (which I think is still used for the lower-end Duncans) and slid the string on my finger I felt like I was holding some kind of tethered crimson acrobat that would eventually become more than a nuisance to my mother and father…it was a clear and present danger.

Bloody noses. Broken lamps. String-burned fingers. Near-certain infertility (mostly due to my inability to catch something I could not control, not to mention the yo-yo’s bloodlust for my pre-pubescent genitals).

Growing up with ADD (which went undiagnosed, as it was the early 1990s and attention-span-altering drugs were still too taboo for my conservative parents) meant that I constantly jumped from strange hobby to strange hobby in the hopes of finding something my twitchy little brain could nest in and find some sort of ambient peace. As it turns out, giving me a spinning piece of plastic that proved to be an endless source of both delight and frustration was precisely what the doctor ordered. If my parents had taken me to a doctor for that sort of thing…

18 years. If my yo-yoing practice was a person, it could vote, buy tobacco, and buy lotto tickets. And porn. It could totally buy porn. It’s even stranger to think of the proportion of that time that I spent in and out of competitions (12 years, if anyone other than myself is keeping track). In fact, there’s probably a good chance that if you’re reading this you’ve been to a competition that I’ve either completely bombed or shone brighter than ten Really, Really Shiny Things.

A little over a year ago, I finally achieved a major milestone sought out by every competitive yo-yoer: sponsorship. Here in Colorado, we have the good fortune of turning out a copious amount of really neat little businesses. Beer. Mountain bikes. Beer. Wine. Beer. And, as of late, a yo-yo manufacturer by the name of Rebel Yo-Yos (used to be called Yomerica Spindustries, but good fortune delivered a much-needed name change after a bit of a business restructure).

Aman Sircus, owner of Rebel yo-yos and all-around hoopy frood, came to Denver one fateful Sunday and watched me freestyle for a local yo-yo club. Next thing I know I’m representing the company at the Rocky Mountain Regional Contest and getting lots of new and delightfully free yo-yos.

As one of Rebel Yo-Yo’s sponsored players, I began to take my yo-yoing very seriously. More serious, in fact, than I had ever taken it in all those years I’ve been throwing spinning things around. But, as they say in the yo-yo industry: what comes up must come down.

Okay, so maybe no one really says that. Maybe that’s what people say when they walk past a bunch of kids yo-yoing in the street, but it does get the point of this announcement across…

I’m retiring.

Now hold the darn phone, you might be saying to yourself. Then again, you might not be holding a phone, so you might instead say something like:

“Now hold the darn sandwich!”

“Now hold the darn colostomy bag!”

or my personal favorite,

“Now hold the darn box of baby teeth!”

The way I look at it, my yo-yoing career has grown up. It’s an adult now, and just like the spastic little kid that fostered the love of the hobby, it’s time to move on. That said, I do want to make something perfectly clear:

I will never stop yo-yoing.

All I want to do is step back from my role as professional competitor. The way I see things, I’m growing older and my competition seems to be staying the same age. I have a career now as a teacher, a maddeningly beautiful wife, and a passion for writing that can’t really be stopped, so I asked myself, where does my training fit in? Ask any one of my close friends and they’ll tell you about the amount of time it takes to prepare for a contest.

Fine, I’ll tell you how much it takes. After all, you aren’t reading this just so you can go ask follow-up questions to my homies, right? During contest season, I yo-yo on average between two and three hours each day. Right now, if I were to commit that much time to preparing for this season, I’d have to let one of these four things suffer: my career, my marriage, my writing, and my fitness. As of right now, I think I’m old enough to make the hard decision to step back and let these kids take home some trophies. It’s time to rethink my role as a yo-yoer.

My idea is that I will take a bit of a spell off of the sport and focus on the rest of my life for a bit. Once the proverbial ducks are in a row, I want to step back onto the scene and judge/host contests, coach kids, and teach classes. At 18, most kids are kicked out of their houses to learn how to be adults, so I figure it’s about time to do the same with competing for trophies and medals.

Anyway, I think it’s about time to get back to yo-yoing for me, not for anyone or anything else. All of these years of serenity and mental challenges shouldn’t be thrown away on contests that amount to little more than bragging rights that are only valid to a small group of people.

Still, I’m the best yo-yoer you’ve ever met, and I have no intention of letting that change.

-B