LIFE'S UPS AND DOWNS

Chances are you've played with a yo-yo. (Otherwise, you wouldn't have picked up this book!)

Well, join the crowd. Unlike most sports, which are popular in one place but not another, yo-yo is truly international. In most of Europe, for example, nobody knows or cares whether the Yankees or Braves or Dodgers are the World Series baseball champions. And even Michael Jordan isn't a folk hero all over the globe.

But yo-yo. That's something else. While the first baseball World Series was held in 1903, and the first Super Bowl was played in 1967, yo-yos date back thousands of years.

Most history books say yo-yos were invented in China. They were made of two wooden disks with a wide space between them. A string was knotted to a shank joining the two disks, so all the yo-yo could do was go up and down. Forget Walking the Dog or Shooting the Moon.

Yo-yos made of wood, metal, and stone were also popular in ancient Greece. In fact, on one piece of pottery in an Athens museum there is a picture of a young man playing with a yo-yo. According to historians, the pottery is about 2,500 years old.

The yo-yo wasn't really popular in Europe, though, until the late 1700's. Then, yo-yos became the favorite toys of the royal families of England and France. If you visit the British Museum in London, you'll see a two hundred year-old painting of the Price of Wales playing with a yo-yo. As a result, yo-yos were often called the Prince of Wales's toy." They were also called quizzes or bandalores.

The French refused to be outdone. The son of Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI was also a big yo-yo fan. So were many French noblemen, who owned yo-yos, made of ivory and other expensive materials.

But the yo-yo we know today can be traced to the Philippines. Legend has it that as far back as the 1500s; Filipino soldiers were using versions of today's yo-yos as weapons. Of course, they were a lot larger than modern yo-yos-the string was replaced with heavy rope, sometimes as long as 20 feet. But gradually the yo-yo turned into a toy. Filipino fathers carved yo-yos out of fine wood or animal horns. It didn't take long before almost every child in the Philippines was playing with a yo-yo.

Even the name yo-yo started there. In Tagalong, the native language of the Philippines, the word for comeback is-you've got it-yo-yo.

The yo-yo eventually made its way to the United States. But it took a long while for it to become popular. The first U.S. patent for yo-yos was awarded in 1866 to two Ohio inventors who called their toy a "better bandalore," using the old English name. Through the next decades, more and more patents were filed. One man owned a patent for a bandalore made of hard India rubber, like a hockey puck. Somebody patented a one-piece bandalore, and someone else registered a bandalore made with removable bells. One inventor believed that wooden bandalores were hazardous to the health of young yo-yoists. So he got a license to make glass bandalores. Believe it or not, a patent was even awarded to a man who wanted to make a bandalore that, except for the string, was entirely edible! Imagine doing that to a football!

The YO-YO YEARS

Yo-yos finally took off in the United States with the help of a man named Pedro Flores. In 1927, he worked in the dining room of a hotel in Santa Monica, California. He loved to spend his spare time whittling yo-yos-they had been his favorite toys when he was growing up in the Philippines. And once he made them, he played with them, much to the amusement of some of the guests at the hotel.

They asked him to make yo-yos for them. Pedro Flores was happy to do it.

The guests took Flores's yo-yos home. Before he knew it, Flores was getting requests for the toy from all over the country.

Within a couple of years, he was in business. He opened the Flores Yo-Yo Corporation and began shipping his products to customers everywhere. Yo-yos were hot in Los Angeles as well as in San Francisco. Folks in Denver and Dallas and New Orleans loved yo-yos. And yo-yo fever also moved in to the big cities in the Northeast.

To promote his yo-yo, Flores hired other Filipinos to tour the country demonstrating the old "new" toy. Yo-yo contests began, but nobody did tricks in them. The contests were tests of endurance.

While Flores was cranking out yo-yos in Los Angeles, the most important step in the yo-yo revolution was taking place in San Francisco. Somebody showed a yo-yo to a businessman named Donald Duncan. It wasn't a Flores yo-yo, because all it could do was go up and down. (Flores's yo-yos had a nonfixed string, so they could sleep.) Still, Duncan was fascinated, and he began to research the new toy.

Eventually, he met Pedro Flores and bought his company. Duncan opened a factory in Chicago and began turning out Flores yo-yos. Within a year, he was calling them Duncan yo-yos, and a great American tradition was underway. The brilliant Duncan made other advances, too. He rounded and smoothed the outer edges of the yo-yo so that they wouldn't hurt the yo-yoist's hand when the toy came spinning back. Duncan also developed a new string that wouldn't unravel or break very often. It was so smooth that the yo-yo would spin longer, and the yo-yoist could perform more difficult tricks.

Duncan hired Flores and his friends to demonstrate the Duncan yo-yo. They were called Duncan Yo-Yo Professionals, and they toured the country, teaching young people the newest tricks. Duncan gave memorable names to the tricks-that's where Walk the Dog and Rocking the Baby started. And he started the first Duncan yo-yo contests. These contests crowned state and city champions. Youngsters competed hard to win the big prized, a sweater with an emblem that read Duncan Yo-Yo Winner! Later, the prizes increased in value and often included bicycles, trips to exotic places, even cash.

The yo-yo was on its way.

Duncan worked with newspapers around the country to publicize his contest. The famous publisher William Randolph Hearst was one of the first to jump on the Duncan bandwagon. When Duncan showed Hearst that yo-yos could sell newspapers (contestants had to sell subscriptions to qualify for the contest), Hearst had many of his papers participate. There's a famous ad for a Duncan yo-yo championship in Chicago, signed-believe it or not-by the yo-yo editor of Hearst's Chicago Herald-Examiner.

Well-known politicians, actors, actresses, and ballplayers had their pictures taken playing with Duncan yo-yos. Bing Crosby, one of America's top popular singers, sang a yo-yo song. A well-promoted yo-yo contest in a fairly large city could sell millions of yo-yos. The yo-yo craze had begun.

The canny Duncan knew he had the world on a string. He repeated the yo-yo's American success in Europe, using the same promotional techniques. He sent demonstrators all over the Continent. The yo-yo fascinated Europeans, particularly the French. Even people vacationing along the French Riviera played with yo-yos. One Duncan yo-yo contest ended when a yo-yo slipped out of a competitor's hand and conked one of the judges on the head, knocking him out. Not to be outdone by the Americans, the French also wrote a yo-yo song. The little Filipino toy had taken over the world.

Why was the yo-yo so popular? Maybe it was because the yo-yo craze happened during the Great Depression. Few people had much money. But it didn't take a lot of money to play yo-yo. Duncan had three major models. The first, a junior yo-yo, cost a nickel. The beginner's Return Top cost a dime.

And the top-of-the-line model cost only a quarter. The No. 77 Tournament Yo-Yo was made of fine northern hard maple wood. It was the yo-yo that every aspiring champion had to have. And then you only needed to buy two more things. The top strings came in a little clear bag and were two for five cents. And, for a dime, you could buy the official book that showed all of the tricks. With that tiny investment, the yo-yoist had everything he or she needed. And that was probably one of the reasons for the yo-yo's success.

The yo-yo stayed hot until the start World War II. Then, because it was wartime, the Duncan Company couldn't easily get the lumber it needed to make yo-yos-and it didn't try very hard to get it, either. The company cut out the contests and the demonstration tours, and newspapers didn't have space to promote them in any case.

Realizing he needed to improve production, Duncan decided to move into a new factory-in Luck, Wisconsin. It became the unofficial world yo-yo headquarters. But as Donald Duncan would later admit, "It was too far away from the action."

By the late 1950's, the Duncan Company was in big trouble. Sales were down, expenses were up. The company decided that TV advertising would solve the problem. The investment paid off-too well. Sales zoomed quickly from around $650,000 a year to nearly $7 million a year. The factory worked around the clock. Labor costs zoomed ahead of the sales numbers. Duncan fell behind filling orders and had to use expensive air shipments to make deadlines. In spite of the yo-yo's popularity, Duncan was losing money.

Then Don Duncan spent a fortune on a court case. He was trying to prevent other companies from calling their toys yo-yos. But the court decided that the word yo-yo applied to any spinning-top toy and not just to Duncan's toys. Shortly afterward, the company went bankrupt-and out of business.

The Duncan name was bought by Flambeau Plastics. Flambeau still makes Duncan yo-yos, but they're all plastic now. They sell dozens of other brands, too.

And the days when Duncan Yo-Yo Professionals could be found at candy stores everywhere, distributing patches to young yo-yoists and performing tricks, were gone forever.

JUST DO IT!

Yo-yos come in many sizes but only a couple of shapes. The traditional yo-yo looks like a sliced bagel-the two halves are separated by the yo-yo axle, the thing the string is wound around. The butterfly yo-yo is a variation of the traditional shape-the two halves of the sliced bagel are attached the wrong way, so they look like they're upside down. The butterfly yo-yo helps some tricks work more smoothly.

A loop of string is tied around the axle of most yo-yos. When the yo-yo "sleeps," it stops going up and down and just spins around on this loop. A fixed-axle yo-yo can't sleep at all, because the string is permanently glued to one spot on the axle. But the new transaxle yo-yo can sleep for up to a full minute-its string is guided by tiny ball bearings. Lots of new tricks have been developed for transaxle yo-yos. But they are forbidden in some yo-yo competitions.

YO-YO: IT'S BACK!

What makes a sport successful? It's people. In baseball, Yankee Stadium is known as the House That Ruth Built. That nickname salutes Babe Ruth, the Yankee star of the 1920's and 1930's who brought the fans to the ballpark. They don't salute equipment in any sport's hall of fame. They honor the great players who made the game famous.

That's the way it is in yo-yo, too. In the yo-yo set, the household names are the national masters, four men in their fifties who've been associated with yo-yo since the late 1950's. Call them the Babe Ruths of yo-yo. Each of them-Dale Oliver and Bill deBoisblanc of San Francisco, Dale Myrberg of Salt Lake City, and Dennis McBride of Buelton, California-is a superstar in his own right. And though they've competed against one another for decades, there's no real rivalry among them. In fact, you're likely to find several of them together at any time, bringing the message of yo-yo to young audiences of future champs.

If there's a Babe Ruth, then there must be a Michael Jordan, too. In yo-yo, it's national champion Jennifer Baybrook of St. Albans, Vermont. The U.S. titleholder at age seventeen, she actually turned pro at age eight, when she began getting paid to demonstrate yo-yo to young people, most of whom were older than she was. In fact, she finished third in the first modern world championship tournament in 1992-when she was only eleven!

And, in any sport, if there are old veterans like the national masters and current superstars like Jennifer, there must be up-and-coming talent as well. And there is. It's Hawaii's Alex Garcia, who became a world-class yo-yo player at age ten. His family originally came from the Philippines, homeland of the original yo-yo superstars.

How did the great yo-yo players get their start? Some of the game's superstars share their stories here.

DALE OLIVER

A native of Kansas City, Dale was born in 1940. Like so many other youngsters, he was given an inexpensive Duncan yo-yo to play with. (Remember that those were the days when Duncan was sending its Duncan Yo-Yo Professionals to toy and candy stores everywhere, running all sorts of neighborhood contests.)

The contests turned Dale onto yo-yo big-time. He got interested in the sport and started learning new tricks. Then he quickly became a champion, capturing one Duncan contest at age twelve and two more in the two following years. When he showed up for the contest the fourth year, the pro invited Dale to drop out of the contest. "Would you like to do this for money?" he asked.

"I didn't hesitate for a minute, " Dale remembers. So he started working for Duncan, performing, teaching, and running contests at dime stores for two to three hours a day after school and on Saturdays. "It was a lot of fun," he says.

By age seventeen, he was working full-time for the Yo-yo Company. "It was exciting. We'd go to one area for eight weeks at a time, doing our thing. Then we'd move to another town. I did that until I was twenty-four. That was about the time Duncan went bankrupt."

It looked like that might be the end of Dale's yo-yo career. But then Flambeau bought the Duncan name and started making Duncan yo-yos out of plastic. Yo-yos became a trend again in the late 1960s.

"Flambeau called me in 1969, and I went back into the yo-yo business, making personal appearances all over until 1974," says Dale. "Later on, I heard from Don Duncan, Jr., the son of Don Duncan, who started the whole thing. He had come up with a new rim-weighted yo-yo and needed my help. I went to work designing yo-yos and found it fascinating."

And now, approaching age sixty, Dale is busier than ever. In February 1989, he began doing school programs, teaching yo-yo fun and safety, and selling yo-yos. Parent-Teacher Associations at each school sponsored the programs, raising funds by sharing in the profits of the yo-yo sales.

The Pacific Science Center in Seattle, which was preparing a special program on things that spin, asked Dale if he could use the yo-yo to teach science. "No problem," said Dale, who produced a physics lesson called the Science of Spin.

"I'm still doing it," says Dale. "And I'm training others to teach it too. It's both entertaining and educational."

Perhaps Dale's greatest contribution to the current yo-yo craze is the world championship. From 1932 to 1992, England's Harvey Lowe was the reigning world yo-yo champ. That's because no world championships were held for sixty years! Dale arranged to bring back the tournament.

Dale went to Montreal to serve as the judge and was somehow persuaded to enter the contest. So he taught the best-ever-female yo-yo player, Linda Sengpiel, how to judge. Then he became one of the twenty-two contestants, and he won, finally succeeding the long-forgotten Lowe as world champ.

Dale is thrilled to see how yo-yo has grown over the past few years. "It's a combination of technology and marketing," he says. Transaxle yo-yos, in which only the outside ring touches the string, are extremely popular. These yo-yos can sleep longer, sometimes as long as a minute, allowing young players to learn more easily and to do all sorts of new tricks. "That's one of the major reasons why the yo-yo growth curve really jumped ahead in 1996, and we haven't looked back."

The growth has been worldwide, too. When Dale and the other U.S. national masters appeared at National Yo-Yo Day in Japan in April 1998, more than 40,000 spectators packed a Tokyo stadium.

"The availability of yo-yo videos has really aided the boom," Dale says. "The first one, called Vide-Yo, appeared in the early 1980s, and now there are dozens." Many yo-yo manufacturers have produced their own videos. Tommy Smothers, a great yo-yo enthusiast who uses the yo-yo in his comedy act, also has one. But Dale, not surprisingly, recommends his own-and those done by Dennis McBride.

"I suggest that youngsters learn the twenty-eight tricks used in American Yo-Yo Association competitions from my videos," says Dale. "Then they should add Dennis's, which are great for two-handed routines with both front mounts and side mounts."

DENNIS MCBRIDE

Dale Oliver has spent most of his adult life involved with yo-yos, but national master Dennis McBride has answered to a higher calling. He is a full-time Christian minister. But he hasn't been far away from yo-yo. "I've been using the yo-yo to help teach goal setting and anti-drug lessons to schoolchildren," says Dennis.

Like many of the sport's superstars, Dennis started early. One of his neighbors was the California State girls' champion. She and a few other youngsters taught Dennis some of the basic tricks. "I probably took it a little more seriously than the rest," he says. He quickly began winning local Duncan contests and continued to dominate until the mandatory retirement age (at that time) of fifteen.

When he finished his religious training in 1988, Dennis called the Duncan folks for an update on his sport. They hired him to train college students and perform promotions at Disneyland. Dennis has never competed in the world championships that began in 1992. "When the worlds first started, they weren't nearly as big as they are now," Dennis says. "And I really didn't want to compete against some of the kids I'd taught. The world title has a certain commercial value. But the national master title gives me all the prestige I need. It's really the highest honor in the sport."

These days, Dennis is traveling and promoting yo-yo everywhere. He's involved in Alan Nagale's High Performance demonstrating team and in making yo-yo commercials. He spends some time in Japan, where the Bandai Corporation, the world's third largest toy maker, had turned yo-yo into the hottest sport. "Yo-yo is really getting hot elsewhere in Asia and in Europe, too. It's tremendously exciting," says Dennis.

DALE MYRBERG

Dale Myrberg is excited, too. He has finally retired from Utah Power, the utility company, where he was a senior project sponsor.

Now he's into yo-yo full-time. Like the other national masters, Dale started young. "I was only five or six when my brother brought me home a pink-and-white Duncan," Dale remembers. "I was so small, I had to stand on a chair to make it work properly."

Dale was around ten years old when his interest in yo-yo really took off. "There was a Duncan contest at Jimmy Doyle's store across from Jefferson Elementary School. That got me going," he says. By the time he was thirteen he was hired as a Duncan demonstrator, which, he says, "eliminated me from competition. But I made a deal to enter again at age fifteen, so I could beat my friends for the unofficial state championship."

Again, like so many of the older champions, he retired after that. But he picked it up again in his early thirties when his buddies on a surveyor crew challenged him. "I told them I had been a yo-yo champ as a kid, and they didn't believe me," he says. "We got a couple of Duncan Satellites, and that got me started again."

Yo-yo success came fairly quickly after that. Word of Dale's ability spread, and he became a highly sought-after entertainer in Utah. He did Duncan promotions and school assemblies. With the help of Brad Countryman, he landed a couple of spots on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Tommy Smothers is known as Yo-Yo Man and, according to Dale, "is a pretty good one-handed yo-yoist."

In fact, Dale credits Tommy Smothers as a major factor in the current yo-yo boom. And Dale's part of it, too. He frequently performs in a clownlike costume with a flashing tie and baggy Dockers, which enable him to do all sorts of in-the-pocket tricks.

Dale is an old-fashioned yo-yoist. "I use fixed-axle wood yo-yos. I'm not a big fan of the new transaxle ball-bearing models." And his approach must be working: Dale's 1998-travel schedule included demonstrations in Japan and Australia, with stops throughout the United States as well.

JENNIFER BAYBROOK

If the national masters are the hall of famers of yo-yo, then teenager Jennifer Baybrook of St. Albans, Vermont, is the sport's Michael Jordan. In a sport dominated by men and boys, young Jennifer has been prominent on the world yo-yo scene since she was eight. In fact, she won the U.S. National Championship in 1997.

"I was six and a half and on a family camping trip," she recalls. "One of the other campers had been a yo-yo demonstrator for the old Cheerio company. He was giving yo-yo lessons, and I just sort of picked it up. I started out with a Duncan Imperial."

Jennifer was a natural. By age eight, she had turned pro, getting paid to give demonstration at libraries and recreation centers. And by age eleven, she was competing at the first world championships, finishing third to all the fifty-somethings who were yo-yo's superstars.

Jennifer graduated from Bellows Free Academy in St. Albans in 1998. She will devote herself full-time to yo-yo playing and teaching before going to college.

"I'm involved with a company called High Performance Marketing in Honolulu," she reports. "The boss, Alan Nagale, is a marketing genius. Our team took the first four places in the national championship in 1997. We're always finding great young talent in our training camp."

Most of the time, that talent is male. "I guess boys have more time to practice yo-yo," says Jennifer. "Girls are sort of closet yo-yo players."

What advice does the national champ have for youngsters starting out in yo-yo? "To be successful," she says, "you need to practice a lot, work hard, and, most important, have fun. And you don't need to start out with an expensive yo-yo. Something under ten dollars will do. The average yo-yo costs twenty dollars now. Some cost as much as a hundred dollars.

"The Yomega Brain was a major step forward in yo-yo making," says Jennifer. "With its built-in clutch, it could sleep for a long time."

Although there are one-handed and two-handed divisions in most yo-yo championships, the real champion is one who can use two hands at one time. "For me," says Jennifer; "my left hand does the straight out or looping tricks. My right hand does most of the work. Yo-yo became a lot better when freestyle competition came along. I have fun designing my routines, which, as in figure skating and gymnastics, are accompanied by music."

How does she come up with her three-minute routines? "First, I think of all my tricks. I know which ones I'll have to do to score with the judges. Harder tricks earn higher scores. I match the tricks to the music I've picked, and unlike most of the men, I add a few dance moves to my routine."
Jennifer loves to travel. Yo-yo has taken her lots of places, including eight trips to Japan for contests and demonstrations. And she's looking forward to her first trip to Korea.

THE COLLECTOR

Virtually every sport has a hall of fame containing historical souvenirs of the game. Yo-yo is no exception. The unofficial "keeper" in yo-yo is a dermatologist in Orlando, Florida. His name is Lucky Meisenheimer.

Lucky played with yo-yos as a kid, then picked them up seriously while in medical school. He has competed, though not at the level of the national masters. Instead, his big sport has always been swimming.

"Swimming gave me the opportunity to travel," he says. "And during one of my trips, I visited an antique store and found some old yo-yos. That got me started."

Now he owns more than 2,000 yo-yos. The rarest one in his collection is an experimental model made by Duncan for the Coca-Cola Company. "It's an all-white yo-yo, using Duncan's new (at that time) pearlescent paint," says Lucky. "Coke rejected the idea of putting its name on that yo-yo because their colors were red and white. Only six were made for the experiment, and it seems the other five have disappeared. So mine is one of a kind." Lucky has no idea what it's worth, but he's not about to sell it anyway!

However, even that yo-yo is not in the class of the yo-yo given to country singing legend Roy Acuff by Richard M. Nixon right before his resignation as president of the United States in 1974. Nixon used the yo-yo during an Acuff show at Nashville's Grand Ole Opry, then signed it and presented it to the star. Following Acuff's death, his estate packaged the yo-yo with a film of the presentation and auctioned it. It brought $16, 029, the most ever spent on a yo-yo.

Lucky's oldest yo-yo is the original made by Pedro Flores in 1928. "That's the first use of the name yo-yo," he says. "Before that, yo-yos were called bandalores. And I've got some of them, too." He owns some unusual models, yo-yos that make sounds, bubbles, even sparks. He has some that fit on the ends of pencils. He collects string packs; the glassine envelopes that contained strings and were originally sold two for a nickel. And he owns yo-yo earrings, yo-yo bracelets, and other jewelry. "If it has something to do with yo-yo, I look for it."

Does Lucky see his collection being completed anytime soon? "No way," he says. "I'll never have them all, but I'll always be looking." In fact, he's now finishing the first really authoritative book on yo-yo collecting. "It has taken about four years, and I'm really pleased with it."

What does it take to be a yo-yo champion? According to Lucky Meisenheimer, skill, training, and a little bit of luck. "On any given day, any of the superstars may be number one," he says.

The biggest change in yo-yo these days? It's the Internet. "There are now so many sources of information," says Lucky. And it's easy to find all of the best sites. Bob of Bob's Land O'Yo catalogs them. You can log on with Bob at http://www.intergate.bc.ca/personal/Bobby/yo.html.

LEARNING MORE

Yo-yo is a great sport. Anyone can play. Unlike many sports, size plays no role in yo-yo. Neither does age. There are champs in their sixties and champs who haven't reached their teens.

There are few secrets. Football coaches never reveal their team's newest plays to anyone. Baseball managers have been known to have an extra pitcher warming up out of view. But yo-yoists are ready and eager to share their tips for success with anyone.

If you want to find out more about yo-yo, there are loads of ways to go. Yo-yo trick books are plentiful. With the current yo-yo boom, there should be an equal boom in your local bookstore. But you'll probably find an even better selection at yo-yo specialty stores. They're frequently located within big kite stores in your area.

More information about Dr. Lucky Meisenheimer's new book is available from Lucky at 7300 Sand Lake Commons Boulevard, Suite 105, Orlando, FL 32819.

Lucky is a member of the board of the American Yo-Yo Association. AYYA members include most of the major manufactures, big collectors, players, and fans. You can join AYYA for as little as three dollars, though for just a little more you can also get a subscription to the AYYA newsletters. Discount subscriptions to the five-times-a-year Yo-Yo Times are also available. Write to the AYYA at 627 163rd Street South, Spanaway, WA 98387.

If you want to see how to do some tricks, your best bet may be a yo-yo video. Former world champ Dale Oliver has some great ones. Write to him at 439 Northwood Drive, San Francisco, CA 94080. Dale suggests following up with Dennis McBride's awesome videos. Write to Dennis at 2383 California Street, San Francisco, CA 94115.

Yo-yo manufacturers have always made instructional videos. For twenty dollars, Duncan will send you an Imperial yo-yo, strings, and a good video. Write Duncan at P.O. Box 5, Middlefield, OH 44062. Yomega, which makes great transaxle yo-yos, will send one-and a power spin video-for $23.45 including shipping and handling. Yomega Corp. is at P.O. Box 4146, Fall River, MA 02723. Don Duncan, Jr., son of the founder of Duncan Yo-Yo, has a fine one-hour video. Don, Jr., is with Playmaxx, 2900 North Country Club Road, Tucson, AZ 85716.

You can get good yo-yo instruction and a few laughs with the Smothers Brothers Yo-Yo Man Video. Comedian Tommy Smothers has long been the sport's unofficial spokesman and has used a yo-yo in his comedy act. Write to P.O. Box 789, Kenwood, CA 95452.

Another great source is the National YoYo Museum at 320 Broadway, Chico, CA 95928. The head honcho is Bob Malowney, who directs the national championship tournament on the first weekend of every October. Bob is also the "greatest yo-yo announce in the world," according to national master Dale Myrberg, who should know.

Big-Yo
The worlds largest working wooden yo-yo on display at the National Yo-Yo Museum

Weighing in at 256 pounds, Big-Yo is the worlds largest working wooden yo-yo. Designged by Tom Kuhn, the yo-yo now resides in Chico, CA.