Liam Adkison stands up from his table in Starbucks to demonstrate what “mounting” is. The girls sitting at the table next to him turn and stare as Adkison moves his yo-yo through the air, catching it on the string at brief intervals. Like a magician, he moves his hands and fingers in controlled, quick motions, intertwining them with the string and sending the yo-yo soaring across the space in front of him.
This is not the first time Adkison has received attention for his hobby. He remembers going to Little Caesar’s in high school and putting on an impromptu show with his best friend, Brian Martinez. One of them pulled out a yo-yo, and it was not long before they accumulated a small audience and got their pizza on the house.
“One time we actually put out a hat and made $20, just for throwing yo-yos,” Adkison said.
The freshman, studying international studies and German, does not leave his dorm without his yo-yo. As he steps into the elevator at Ridgecrest West, anyone waiting on the first floor can hear him coming. That hissing sound they hear is not a result of the elevator. When Adkison walks out, he sees strange looks on the faces of students, and the looks do not stop there. He walks across the Quad, and people stop to look, mesmerized by the combination of tricks he does and the hypnotic movement of the yo-yo.
“It’s funny because some people will just kind of glance over, and then some people stop and are like ‘What?’” he said. “One guy was actually like, ‘I want to tip you right now!’”
Simple yo-yos have been around for centuries, but the toy was first recognized as a “yo-yo” in the U.S. in 1916 when the Scientific American Supplement published an article titled “Filipino Toys,” according to Spintastics, a yo-yo manufacturing company. Some of the earliest yo-yos were made of wood. Now they are made of plastic, metal or aluminum. Prices range from cheap plastic for $7.99 to a titanium yo-yo for $500. Adkison said the average price for a yo-yo is $100. He began yo-yoing with a $40 Northstar yo-yo. He now owns four different yo-yos, one being more than $70.
The Duncan Toys Company, one of the first major yo-yo manufacturers, created competitions in the 1920s and 1930s as advertising to promote sales, and competition is still prominent today.
Adkison has competed in one small competition in Birmingham, but yo-yoing is more of a hobby for him. For some people, though, yo-yoing is a competitive sport. Although it is an obscure sport, Martinez said interest may be growing.
“There is a large Internet following, I think,” he said. “Liam is the only other person I know personally though.”
It is through the Internet that Adkison and Martinez learned many of their tricks. Websites like YoYoExpert.com and Youtube have tutorials for different tricks.
“There is a surprising number of professional yo-yoers out there,” Adkison said. “I used to get trading cards with some of the yo-yos I ordered online.”
Though he said he is far from a professional, Adkison has been yo-yoing as a hobby for three years now. During his sophomore year at Mountain Brook High School in Birmingham, he became friends with Martinez, who has been throwing yo-yos since he was 13 years old. Martinez brought his yo-yo to school a couple of times, and when Adkison became interested in it, he continued to bring it. Together they would work on new tricks during breaks in class.
“It was awesome, because no one else was doing it, so I felt really cool and unique,” Adkison said. “[When I first started], I was terrible at it and pretty much did it relentlessly until I got good.”
Adkison and Martinez became well-known around their high school for yo-yoing. One of Adkison’s teachers would yell “Yo!” down the hallway whenever he saw Adkison. A physics teacher would use Adkison and Martinez’s yo-yos as examples in class.
“It was cool because [Brian] would do a trick, and she would explain the physics behind it,” Adkison said. “It was always fun.”
Matthew Byrd, a freshman on a pre-med track, has been friends with Adkison for a long time and is one of his roommates. Byrd said he has seen Adkison improve a lot since high school.
“He does it whenever he just needs something to do,” Byrd said. “Like if we are walking to Lakeside to get something to eat, sometimes he will do it while we walk. One time we were waiting for a friend to get lunch, and some guy stopped and said, ‘Hey man, that’s pretty cool.’ [Yo-yoing] makes him stand out.”
Adkison said he likes standing out with his hobby and being part of something that is different on campus.
“I think that some of the more obscure hobbies are coming back,” he said. “Things like juggling or unicycling are sort of becoming more popular again. But I have only seen one other guy on campus with a yo-yo.”
