NORTHAMPTON — Elias Smith is 13 years old, and on this day, he becomes a pro.
He’s standing in the grass in front of the Academy of Music, where the Massachusetts State Yo-Yo Contest – MA States, as it’s usually called – will take place on this rainy Saturday. A swarm of yo-yos flies around him. They’re attached to the hands of his friends, all of whom he introduces as “great yo-yoers,” warming up for the competition.
Yo-yo has a place as one of the most recognizable toys of the 20th century, but there’s also a thriving, if relatively small, competitive community. The modern competitions – with state, regional, national and world levels – stem from the 1992 World Yo-Yo Contest, though occasional world championships had happened in the decades before.
Of the five divisions of yo-yo – which vary in the types and numbers of yo-yos used – the most popular, and Eli’s specialty, is 1A, where players perform tricks with an unresponsive yo-yo, meaning it doesn’t automatically return to the user’s hand. That division offers “Sport” – or beginner – and “Pro” subdivisions. For the first time, watched by a crowd of friendly competitors, Eli will compete in the Pro division.
At 13, Eli, who lives in Belchertown, is the same age Harvey Lowe was when he won the first ever World Yo-Yo Contest in 1932.
He’s also found himself on the border of childhood and adolescence, the temporal spot where kids start to form their own social groups. In yo-yo – a child’s toy to some, a sport and community to others – he’s found an axle on which he can spin his world.
To Eli, it was the best kind of peer pressure.
At the beginning of sixth grade – which, to him, feels like a long time ago – he ended a couple of years of homeschooling and started at Pelham Elementary. To his surprise, he said, he discovered the prevailing fad among his classmates wasn’t a video game or a toy based on a TV show – it was, instead, yo-yoing.
“I was amazed by all the guys doing tricks,” he said. “My now-best friend said, ‘Try it. You’ll get into it.’ I went, and I fell in love.”
Eli had grown up going to A2Z Science and Learning Store, the Northampton toy store that’s produced several high-level yo-yo competitors, and though he’d heard about its yo-yo classes, he’d never thought much of them. He started going to the classes in September 2014, and as he started to grasp the basic tricks, he realized the other players were part of what kept him coming back.
“It’s … the most accepting and supportive group of people ever,” he said. “If I’m stuck on a trick, I’ll say, ‘Can I show you something?’ and they’ll give positive feedback.”
His skill set developed quickly. Eli said he thinks some of that comes from his athleticism – he plays ultimate Frisbee and has a black belt in tae kwon do, and he learned to juggle from his father, a former professional juggler.
But much of Eli’s skill and style draws from the people around him, he said. YouTube and Instagram have become popular vehicles for yo-yoers to showcase tricks, but he came late to those aspects of the community. Instead, he learned by watching other local yo-yoers.
Then there’s the simple fact of yo-yo’s portability. It can easily fit in a shorts pocket, and anywhere with a few square yards of open space can turn into a practice area. Eli only does two things every day – play his ukulele and yo-yo.
Last year, he missed MA States for his brother’s high school graduation, but he competed at the Northeast Regional Competition and came in second in his age group in 1A Sport. He’s also competed in “throwdowns,” smaller-scale competitions at Eastworks in Easthampton.
There’s something that Eli wants to happen in every competition performance. He calls it the “Oh Moment.” As he defines it, the “Oh Moment” occurs when he nails a trick that surprises and thrills everyone in the audience.
“It’s a little distracting, because you’re like, ‘Whoa, I hit it,’” he said. “But at the same time, it’s one of the best things in the world. You’ve practiced this for a long time, and you got it perfect … You do something that impresses your idols, and that’s something you can really only dream of.”
The competitors of MA States are mostly teenage and overwhelmingly male. They wear shorts and T-shirts, most of them black, many emblazoned with logos of yo-yo companies like Caribou Lodge and Recess Intl. Some of the players here are sponsored by those companies. They almost always have their yo-yos out and in-hand.
In between performances, Graeme Steller – a long-time yo-yoer who’s become an emcee for events like these – cracks jokes, urges the audience to “make some noise” and, when a routine is about to start, runs or bounces off-stage, like the Mad Hatter if he was sponsored by an energy drink.
Eli splits time between watching the divisions competing before lunch – everyone except for 1A pro – and practicing in the lobby. The first time he returns, he’s holding a red-splotched napkin against his hand. His yo-yo had rebounded and cut open his knuckle. He hopes it doesn’t hurt his performance. A few minutes later, he returns again with a second napkin.
“I hit myself in the mouth,” he says.
Western Massachusetts is something of a yo-yo hotbed. A2Z has fostered that environment since former owner Jack Finn started giving classes around the turn of the century. André Boulay owns the store now and has organized MA States since it began in 2005, and he said the contest has become one of the preeminent ones in the country.
“A lot of people in yo-yoing hold it as a really solid contest,” he said. “Whoever wins that is seen as a contender at the national level that year.”
And some of the region’s yo-yoers have made names for themselves outside of New England. Tylor McCallumore, the defending state champion, went to Tokyo last year for Worlds. Daniel Dietz traveled the world competing and performing, then became a co-owner of locally based yo-yo producer Spin Dynamics.
Eric Koloski placed third in the world in 2006 and now teaches at A2Z. Before the competition Saturday morning, he stood in front of the Academy and tried to snap a picture of a yo-yo emblazoned with a design inspired by Joy Division’s “Unknown Pleasures” album art.
“My closest friends are through yo-yo,” Koloski, 26, said. “I kind of think of it as a fraternity in a sense … The people who do it are all really close, even though we live all around the world.”
The players are yo-yoing everywhere. They’re yo-yoing in front of the Academy, and they’re yo-yoing in its lobby. They’re yo-yoing in the aisles of the auditorium. They’re yo-yoing on the stairs leading up from the bathrooms.
Even Steller, on break from emceeing, is yo-yoing. He does so in front of the stage as he chats with Andrew Maider and Michael Kurti, who happen to be the second- and fourth-ranked players in the country.
Maider, 18, is from New York and Kurti, 19, is from New Jersey, but both enjoy the atmosphere of MA States. Steller, 21, says it’s probably the best competition for younger players, especially compared to competitions in places like California and Japan, where a premium is placed on elite ability.
Kurti says community-focused competitions like these have been instrumental in his and other players’ development.
“Back in the day, we spent so much time yo-yoing on our own,” he says. “I was so eager to go to these contests and show people what I’d been doing.”
The three men agree young teenagers these days develop skills faster than they did just a few years ago.
Kurti suggests it might be because of the connections and resources the internet offers, or because the yo-yos are better quality.
“Ask him,” Steller says, gesturing to Eli as he walks by. He turns to the boy. “How did you get good so quickly?”
A tethered yo-yo never goes far from its owner’s hand, but the objects have come a long way.
Depictions of yo-yos date back to Greece circa 500 B.C., and they’ve also been traced to ancient China and Egypt. One of its lasting pockets of popularity was the Philippines, and in the 1920s, a man named Pedro Flores introduced the wood-carved toys to the United States.
The yo-yo’s American popularity grew, and though it fluctuated throughout the 20th century, manufacturers continued to create new variations. In the 1980s, the Swedish company SKF introduced yo-yos constructed with ball bearings, which let them spin longer and faster. That type of yo-yo caught on in the 1990s, and now competitors use carefully engineered yo-yos, made with aircraft-grade aluminum and grooved axles that reduce friction. Brands like Caribou Lodge and YoYoFactory sell for more than $100 apiece.
And the tricks go far beyond the classics – making the yo-yo “sleep” or “walking the dog.” The best pros create spider webs out of the strings and use all the space the stage allows. They’re showmen as much as they are sportsmen. They win points for the rarity of tricks and for how well they time them to their music selections. Dubstep is the genre of choice.
In “Roger Federer as a Religious Experience,” David Foster Wallace’s 2006 essay-cum-love letter to tennis, he argues that televised tennis can’t hold a candle to the live game for one reason: only while watching a match in person can spectators understand the pure speed of the sport.
The same is true of yo-yo. It’s fast, to say the least. The string is a blur. The disc is all over the place. The best players think many steps ahead, but an uninitiated audience is sure to be left a few steps behind.
But the lexicons of sport – or art, or hobby, for that matter – lack most of the language to describe what a Pro-level yo-yo routine looks like. It’s like a puppet-master interpreting pin-ball. It’s like a pizza chef deciding to use his dough-tossing skills to demonstrate particle motion. Sometimes, the yo-yoer appears to dominate the device; sometimes, it looks like the yo-yo might fly into space, carrying its master along by a finger. Who’s walking who?
Fifteen on-stage whirlwinds, and then Eli. His hands and fingers dart in small, intricate patterns, and when he hits a groove, his yo-yo bounces and dives as if it has free will. He’s not as much of a showman as some of the older players, but when he pauses for a split second to beckon to the crowd, they cheer.
He stumbles a few times, and when the yo-yo clangs against the stage, he grimaces like his own body had slammed to the ground.
The judges tabulate his scores. By the standards set throughout the day, his performance appears to have been neither spectacular nor disastrous.
Eli’s self-evaluation skews toward the latter. Steller is on stage telling the crowd how MA States has never seen a higher level of competition, and Eli is out of the auditorium, leaning against a wall in the stairwell, eyes red and puffy. Doug Kapinos, Eli’s 17-year-old friend and mentor, stands close to him and tells his younger friend how we all have bad days.
Eli thinks he’s blown it. He had two stops, and they’ll sink his score. He’s disappointed himself.
“I hated it,” Eli says.
“I loved it,” Doug replies.
More boys gather around Eli. They huddle close. They tell him he performed well.
Maider comes up the stairs. In a few minutes, he’ll give a performance that wins him the competition. The top seven 1A Pro finishers will be from out-of-state, and McCallumore will come in eighth and claim the state title. Eli will wind up in 22nd place – a dozen spots ahead of the last-place finish he dreaded.
But now, Maider stops at the top of the stairs and extends his fist. “You’re a killer,” he says.
Eli looks up. Surrounded by people with a bond forged in nylon and aluminum, he smiles. He raises his own curled hand and reaches out.
The fist-bump connects.