yo-yo #94: gold ronin

on my vimeo page today, a guy asked me a pretty tough question. he wanted to know how i'm sponsored if i don't really compete.

it's a great question when i think on it (which i don't often), because virtually every sponsored player out there is either expected to compete by the masses/company or else is naturally driven to do so. there are really just a handful of anomalies like me who either stink at competing or else have no desire to do so, yet remain sponsored by legitimate companies.

i do try to count my lucky stars. i absolutely recognize that i get a lot of perks and free yo-yo's and stuff for doing essentially what i would do anyway. that was kind of driven home yesterday when i caught myself looking for a 'perfect' bearing to replace a screechy one in my purple ronin. i was doing flick-tests when it occurred to me that i probably have about 50 extra bearings sitting around in various jars. some thin, some thick, some gold, some grooved. my mind flew back to several years back to when i had exactly one really consistent bearing and i would trade it out from one yoyojam to another. you don't mean to take it for granted, but somehow you don't fail to either.

i'm not altogether sure how it happened, or how it maintained itself. i'm fairly certain that i never did anything to deserve an amazing yo-yo covered in gold. (but hey, i'll take it!) spyy isn't really a 'competition team'... sometimes i wonder if we're not more like a 'band'. we all play different roles, and i'm sure we've all had very different conversations with steve about what we bring to the equation. i'm an anomaly in a team of anomalies, and there's no way i could adequately thank steve for seeing the value in a team like that.

i hear a lot of kids clamor about the idea of sponsorship like it's thor's hammer; seemingly unliftable, but 'man if i had it i'd be unstoppable'. the truth is obvious: if you're not unstoppable without it, having it doesn't mean a thing. there's no way a 15 year-old takes that kind of thing to heart, but it's true. a lot of guys seem to fade into oblivion right after aligning with this or that company. if you're expected to compete, the pressure can be extreme, and if you're not, your contribution always feels ambiguous at best. it's a bit like the advice i dread having to give my daughter in a few years - if you're not enough without some guy who wants to dangle you on his arm like a patek philippe, then you won't be enough with him either.

if you're prepared for all that (meaning you're ignoring it), and you still want to be sponsored, you have to do something to stand out. maybe you make neat videos with old dixieland jazz soundtracks. maybe you have 9 fingers on your left hand. maybe you dress in the loudest conflicting plaid imaginable. i've seen guys sponsored for lesser traits than any of those, but if you don't actively share your playing (or who you are) with the greater community, no 'pro scout' is going to show up at your high school looking for you... and if they should, do not - DO NOT - get into their van!

if, beyond that, you want sincere advice, here you are:

• look like you enjoy yo-yoing. better yet... ACTUALLY enjoy yo-yoing (it is enjoyable). would you hire someone to manipulate your toy and make it look like it steals your girlfriend and leaves shrapnel in your palms?
• don't talk about wanting sponsorships. if that's all you really want out of yo-yoing, you're pre-destined to fail as mentioned above, but the more you blather on about it, the more unlikely it is to even happen. it makes you look cheap.
• do something that no one else can do (or that no one else could give a crap about doing). this could be 'winning' or it could be something else, but chances are, whatever it is, you're going to have to work really, really hard to get close to it.
• be a nice person. i love how this one gets overlooked. i'm no math teacher (i am a math teacher), but by my count there are around 10 yo-yo companies out there that can offer a legitimate sponsorship, and since yo-yoing is still such a niche thing, virtually all of the players and owners are buddy-buddy. if you conduct yourself poorly on the regular, you'll be blacklisted like the hollywood ten.

above all, you have to serve your own interests. this spinny-toy thing that we do is an art, and though it be swathed in company logos and the occasional giant-check, you can't really make it something other than that. do not risk your own artistic freedom or fulfillment by misrepresenting yourself to get sponsored. it's just not worth it.



... unless they offer you a yo-yo like this, in which case yes, you should sell out right now.

yo-yo #'s 92 & 93: spyy garagecraft woodies

when i look at my life honestly, all of the most memorable and significant periods - the times when i truly grew and changed as an individual - were when i had it comparatively rough. understand, i never 'actually' had anything rough. i've never been abe lincoln carving out an austere, frontier existence while self-edumacatin' in a cabin. my home has never been torn apart by war or famine or disease (knock on wood).

regardless of one's background though, we all 'have it rough' sometimes. within the context of one's life, you can only compare against your own experiences, and it seems only natural that the times in which we are most hard-pressed are often the ones from which we take the most valuable lessons. there's obviously a tipping-point: if one's challenges are so great or so many that you can't progress at all, it's a different matter. in general though, we need a bit of newton's 3rd law in our lives, lest we spin our wheels (so to speak) in stagnant, boring complacency.

this summer, i took a welcome retreat from nc's 3-digit early july, touching down in calgary, ab to judge the canadian national contest. though the experience was filled to bursting with memorable anecdotes, i might have taken the most joy from the hour or so spent carving and sanding these yo-yo's out of strips of oak in steve's garage. when steve (the proprietor of spyy) married his wife, suzanne, he was already into yo-yo's. as such, crafty dude that he is, it seemed fitting that he should put together some nice DIY yo-yo's as gifts for the guests. i had the pleasure of throwing one of these ink-stamped beauties, too. i'm not sure what kind of wood it was (pine maybe?), but it weighed in around 40g. it was like playing a yo-yo made from gaseous helium.

steve, gary longoria, and i just kind of fell into a pattern with his press and power tools, and at the end of an hour or so, had somehow etched a quintet of slick-looking wood butterflies from his oaken stock. (i love that, depending upon how gary operated the press, they each have distinct scorch-marks along their profiles.)

we were able to cajole the yo-yo's into playing well enough. the narrower of these two has a fairly deep gouge which gives it a bit of a rattle. we later shot lasers at them, etching subtle logos and messages into the wood, and inducing a wonderful scent which i'm sure still pervades steve's basement. the wider butterfly (etched 'supersonic' on one side) ended up perfectly smooth - rare in a wide[ish] gapped butterfly woody. i spent at least 20 minutes hand-sanding it, and the unfinished oak feels softer than teflon.

it wasn't until much later that it occurred to me that it's actually TOO soft.

since these are glued together, we basically had to set the gap using a popsicle stick tool and then pray we got it right. the gap isn't too wide, but the profile of the yo-yo and the smoothness of the inner wall are such that virtually no string will hold a decent bind (much less a tug), and unless the tension is positive to the point of kinking, i can pull the string right through the gap from a full wind - not what i look for in a wooden yo-yo. it's still fun, but i get pissy if i can't set a wooden yo-yo up to do decent moons, and this guy is just too slick & loose.

a few weeks ago, i tried an experimental surgery that had never occurred to me. dead duncan stickers can work wonders in a no jive if the gap's too large, so i surgically cut a line down the radius of one and used tweezers to set it [ever so carefully] around the yo-yo's gap. alas, i was not born to be a surgeon, and the slightest movement of my hand established a 1mm gap in the sticker, causing, in turn, an irregular whir.

beyond that tolerable side-effect? perfection. tight binds, crisp loops, late fly-aways into smooth string-stalls. it's incredible what a little friction can do.

the metaphor holds true for our lives as well. when we're just coasting along, everything going our way, life rarely feels as meaningful as when we're pushing against it to a degree. we need that push-back; it gives us context for our lives - a frame of reference. everybody's different, but i think we all share this universal need; not for hardship so much as something to lean on - something to feel sliding against us as we spin. having that metaphorical traction is what enables us to move.

in yo-yoing, we call it 'response', but i rarely consider how apt the term is. my kids at school want massive gaps so they can get away with any kind of sloppy throw or flailing laceration. they're honest at that age, too. they'll tell you they don't want response because it makes whips hurt. but in our lives, if we're out of control, we SHOULD get that response. we SHOULD get a knuckle-whack, or a speeding ticket, or a dear john letter. when we screw up, our lives should snap back and make us untangle and wind back up before trying again. that cause and effect helps clean us up and give us a handle on where we went wrong.

we live in an era of minimal response. we want it to be easy, but we aren't always wired for easy to seem meaningful. we can design yo-yo's to make tricks more blissful and forgiving, but applying a perfect takeshi recess mod to your life can be a bit trickier. in a world where, more and more, people seek to distance themselves from negative consequences, the idea of inserting some augmented response - of holding oneself to a higher or tougher standard - can feel almost heretical. but it's not always a matter of being hard-headed or artificially going against the grain.

sometimes you just need that extra friction to feel right.

yo-yo #91: luke hildebrand 1-piece looper

luke hildebrand is a good friend from eastern virginia. he goes by 'the wood dwarf' on the boards, and i've been fortunate to have known him for years. like a lot of our community (or at least the most interesting cross-section thereof), yo-yoing isn't the alpha and omega of his life; it's just one more interesting thing that he does. a talented visual artist and sculptor, his art always seems to exude a kind of 'rough-hewn' texture with bold 'woodblock-print' contrast. so i found it kind of amusing when i unwrapped this yo-yo, which he sent me this summer.

it is tiny - among the smallest yo-yo's i own. luke carved it from a single piece of cocobolo, the density of which is ample to provide it comparative heft, but it still feels delicate and fine.

i've just got the one, so despite the fact that it's obviously designed in the style of an archaic looper, after a few minutes of 0a, i tend to gravitate to some of my standard fixed axle string tricks. i've spent a lot of time trying modern 1a on old-timey yo-yo's. sometimes it feels like an appropriate challenge, and other times it just feels obscene. maybe it's the fact that this yo-yo is about as thick as my middle finger, or that the gap is about 2 string-widths, max, but trying to force technical string tricks on this guy feels decidedly silly. it IS fun to work on basics with it - trapeze, eli hops, boingy. the gap is so hilariously unforgiving that flying away out of a clean combo feels decidedly satisfying; as though you've somehow 'attained something'.

it occurs to me that, on some level, this is always our approach, in virtually every pursuit. sometimes we feel it after hacking our way through a particularly dense 1a jungle or after having finally mastered a concept that's eluded us for years. invariably though, after we 'level up', the experience feels less significant to us than we expected. we break through a creative ceiling only to discover that the skill-set that kept us up at night is really nothing so special at all. it just becomes a part of 'where we are'. before we can do it, it's something intimidating and awesome - afterward, it's been pulled into the gravity of our personal sphere, like a possession we couldn't previously afford.

in some cases, our response is innocuous enough. just a pleasant exhalation or a fist-pump in an empty room. to work hard and then delight in the result of our efforts is the natural rhythm of how we progress through most every endeavor. however, to begin to EXPECT reward or recognition outside ourselves - to crave it to the point of belittling others or perpetually self-aggrandizing - is to mutate the natural into a sort of compulsive illness.

i find it disconcertingly funny when members of our community put on airs as though what they're doing is so phenomenally hard or so incredibly inventive. i have nothing against personal challenges. i don't even take issue with the ephemeral glory that follows overcoming them. there's a lot of insecure self-obsession in our little community though, which i think is counter-productive and best rooted out. (it's worth noting that if you have to ask whether you have an ego/insecurity problem, you probably do... and if you're sure you don't, you almost certainly do.)

i don't think you should ever develop a big head about your yo-yoing. is there anything more ridiculous than some child (adult or otherwise) blathering on about how they're going to dominate in 2012 or set the yo-yo world on its ear with their new video? that's about like setting the 'cake-baking world' on it's ear (actually that would be substantially more lucrative). pretty much all the yo-yoer's i know treat their art as a deeply personal pursuit. you might have outward goals (especially if you're competitive), but you don't work hard to attain something without so much as within. so, who can you dominate, really? what do you think you deserve? whose attention do you crave?

make-believe swagger is not strength, and momentary self-deprecation is not true humility (especially when its actual objective is to elicit the predictable reaction of 'no no, you ARE amazing!' from one's 'yo-yo fans' - please).

i think we need to escape this cycle within ourselves. it's hard, because how do you push yourself if you're NOT actively trying to attain something of value ('mastery' of a trick, ca$h-money, slaps on the back from collectible internet-friends)? is the yo-yoing itself EVER powerful enough to be its own reward, or is there always something ulterior attached to it? i reiterate a question i asked much earlier: would you continue to yo-yo if you couldn't get online?

i wish we could play yo-yo without the implied carrot of the golden loving cup or recognition-as-vindication. i feel as though these two [generalized] archetypes of playing for extrinsic 'attainment' attach to essentially all of the darkest and dumbest behaviors in our community. you're playing with a yo-yo. you're not curing disease, comforting sudanese refugees, or even wiping down someone's lunch table. if anyone, ever, happens to see your playing, take something positive from it, and relate it to you, that one instance should surpass your expectations for recognition (and you should let it fly off of you the moment it touches your ears).

there are a thousand brilliant, wonderful reasons to throw down, and virtually all of them happen within you.

thanks again, luke.