By Will McKinley
There’s a secret ingredient in the kitchen at Balthazar, the Soho brasserie that’s been a Downtown favorite for more than a decade. But you won’t find it any cookbook.
“I have a yo-yo in my pocket on the line,” executive chef Riad Nasr admitted with a laugh. “In between pick-ups, I’ll throw a trick or two.”
If you equate the yo-yo with the hula-hoop or the pogo stick — quaint vestiges of an analog era when kids were kids and computers were for M.I.T. engineers — think again. Because the yo-yo is back. In fact, it never left.
“Yo-yos have been around for more than 100 years, and they show no signs of going away,” said the 42-year-old Nasr, who began a collection more than three decades ago that now numbers in the hundreds. “Yo-yos are heavily engineered devices now. They’re made from materials like magnesium, titanium and high-grade aircraft aluminum. And that has revolutionized the style of play.”
Yes, like so many beloved toys of our youth, the yo-yo has gone high tech, some would say even extreme. And, on Saturday, Aug. 11, the first-ever New York State Yo-Yo Contest and International Yo-Yo Open spins into the South Street Seaport for a day of world-class competition and gravity-defying demonstrations that make “walk the dog” look like a walk in the park.
“Yo-yos have always had the stigma of being a toy for geeky little kids,” said Pat Cuartero, who toured the world a decade ago as a pubescent pro and is the co-founder of event sponsor YoYoNation.com. “We’re positioning it now as an X Games-type sport, like skateboarding or snowboarding.”
No, he isn’t kidding. For Cuartero, a world champion whose one- and two-handed routines make him look like Spider-Man slinging a web, yo-yos are no laughing matter. He left a high-paying job on Wall Street last year to devote his life to Yo-Yo Nation, an online marketplace and bulletin board for what he calls “the yo-yo community.” And that decision appears to have paid off.
“We started the site to spread our love and passion for yo-yos here in New York City and it grew into something that supported us,” Cuartero said. “We ship to 49 different countries now and we’re expected to do $1.1 million this year in revenue. On yo-yos.”
Who knew? Like most Americans, I owned a yo-yo when I was growing up back in the 1970s. It was blue and orange, with a New York Mets logo, and it performed about as well as the notoriously awful Mets teams of that era. The string quickly became knotted and frayed and eventually broke, at which point my yo-yo morphed into a street hockey puck. The only trick I ever mastered was making it disappear down a sewer grating.
“All of the frustration that existed with simple yo-yos of the past has been more or less engineered out,” said John Marcantonio, Product and Marketing Manager for yo-yo manufacturer Yomega. “The tricks that players are capable of doing now were not physically possible with the technology that existed in the past.”
The yo-yo’s past stretches back hundreds, if not thousands of years, to ancient Greece, China and The Philippines. In 1928, Filipino-American Pedro Flores began hand-carving and selling an updated version of his favorite childhood toy to guests at the California hotel where he worked as a bellhop, later staging a contest that kicked off America’s first yo-yo fad. Soon after, entrepreneur Donald Duncan bought the rights to the product and dispatched trained yo-yo masters throughout a nation slowly sinking into the Great Depression.
“It was a traditional, grassroots campaign,” said Mike Burke, National Sales and Marketing Manager for Duncan Toys. “People in neighborhoods across the country would go to the local nickel and dime store and they would find a Duncan demonstrator.”
For half a century, the yo-yo continued to spin, it’s popularity rising and falling as each generation discovered it and out-grew it. But one thing remained constant.
“The yo-yo hadn’t changed for decades; it was a simple wood or plastic toy with a fixed axle and a string looped over it,” Marcantonio said. “Then in the early ’80s, Yomega created and patented some different concepts, like spool and ball bearing systems that allowed the yo-yo to spin for a long time and to return to a player’s hand automatically.”
That product — called The Brain — was a much-needed Botox injection to the yo-yo’s aging face. By 1997 the yo-yo had become the most popular toy in the world, thanks to increasingly inventive technology and marketing efforts by Yomega and Duncan (who, according to Burke, upped their game by hiring the brain behind The Brain). Coincidentally, that’s when Riad Nasr rediscovered his long-forgotten hobby.
“I happened to uncover one of my yo-yos and I played with it a little bit and I still had some of the tricks down,” Nasr said. “So I Googled ‘yo-yo’ and I discovered that this whole craze was beginning. I felt just like a kid again.”
Yo-yo marketers began scouring the country for prodigious players to promote the next-gen yo-yos across the world, as Donald Duncan had done so many years before. An 11-year-old in Hawaii was the first one they found.
“I was an only child and the yo-yo really entertained me,” said Paul Han, who is now a college student and the reigning US National 1A Champion (1A refers to one-handed tricks). “To me, yo-yo freestyling is just like figure skating. Our judging is just like any other sport. It’s based on performance, technical skills and style.”
Fellow champion Paul Yath, discovered at age 17 during the boom of the late ’90s, agrees. “Some people go to the competitions to be spectators or to buy stuff. I go to compete,” he said. “I definitely look at yo-yoing as a sport.”
Search for Cuartero, Han and Yath on You Tube and you’ll find them doing tricks with their former childhood playthings that look almost supernatural. Their performances (Marcantonio calls them “ ‘Cirque du Soleil’ with yo-yos”) combine punk and hip-hop with radically named tricks like Laceration, Double Suicide and Rancid Milk. Multiple yo-yos fly through the air, cross, un-cross and return, with mere flicks of the wrist. The result is a mind boggling of mix of skill and attitude that seems anything but dorky.
“It’s going to be difficult to change the way that people perceive yo-yos,” Cuartero confessed. “But it’s a challenge I’m willing to undertake. Once I show people a trick, they usually get hooked.”
And for those young turks looking for a way to stand out with the ladies, Paul Han adds the following incentive: “I’ve met so many girls playing yo-yos, it’s not even funny,” the 21-year-old said with a snicker. “They’ll come up to me like, ‘That’s so cool!’ And I’ll take them out for a drink. That’s how my last long-term relationship started.”
Of course this fringe benefit of modern yo-yo mastery is lost on older, less-single enthusiasts like Chef Nasr. “My wife rolls her eyes when I’m walking down the street and I pull out the yo-yo and start playing with it,” he said. “If she found out the most money I had ever spent on a yo-yo, she’d flip. I had to include a couple dinners as part of the payment.”
Luckily for Nasr, he spent his younger years developing some other skills as well.
