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Bill Liebowitz Classic
451 Plays1 year ago
Mark & Steve discuss the Bill Liebowitz Classic, known as the BLC, a former regional yoyo contest held in Los Angeles, California. They talk about contest culture in general, an old beef from when the two of them didn't agree on something for like 10 years, and where they think contests should be heading.
Apologies for the audio quality. We know a lot about yoyos but we have no idea wtf we are doing with this podcast.
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Transcript
Introduction to Yoyo Community and Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
If you want to buy yoyos and yoyo accessories, you should probably check out yoyoexpert.com. They have a shit ton of yoyos and yoyo accessories. They have all the yoyo things that you could possibly want. And yoyoexpert.com is run by Andre Boule, who's a national yoyo master and a sweet fucking dude. So you should probably, you should probably just buy all your yoyo stuff from them. Just the sweetest guy. He is the sweetest guy. He's adorable. So sweet. Just lovely. He's a lovely, beautiful man.
00:00:29
Speaker
It's beautiful, man. But yet soft and firm. He's a very firm handshake, and he looks you right in the eyes. Right through your soul. It's great. Beautiful. Yeah. So yo-yo-expert.com is where you should buy things.
00:00:44
Speaker
Please. I'm Steve Brown. And I'm Mark McBride. And this is a podcast about that time we made up two whole new styles of yo-yo play and at the time nobody cared and now a few people care maybe.
00:01:21
Speaker
All right, here we are. So this will be the very first episode of Yoyo Player that Mark and I are recording in the same room. Amazing. Amazing. God, it's so much easier to do when I don't have to look at your ugly mug. Nice. Yeah. So Mark is visiting the mighty Midwest, visiting some family with his kiddos.
00:01:46
Speaker
And he drove down for the day and we are going to actually record live.
The Role of Contests in the Yoyo Community
00:01:51
Speaker
Yay.
00:01:52
Speaker
Oh, fun. So yeah, we're going to like, um, building off of the, what is it that we have the triple D episode, which built off of the Philippines episode, just on this, like still talking about the issue de jour of contests. I mean, it's so much of yo-yoing and man, did this become real fucking clear during like lockdown, but so much of yo-yoing revolves around contests.
00:02:21
Speaker
And as soon as you pull them out of the equation, man, shit really falls apart quick. It's true. It's true. I early on was very critical of like, you know, as early as the onama con, we would mock people who were just in it for her to win. But yet I ended up getting pulled into supporting contests because
00:02:48
Speaker
win or lose, that's where everyone came together. You had to give people an excuse to travel and turns out that 30% of people needed the excuse that I could win something and then the other 70 could use the excuse that those 30 people are going to be there. It's true. I mean, and remember like we had, so there was that brief moment, I think it was like late, it wasn't even late nineties. It was like early two thousands.
00:03:12
Speaker
where spinning grills became a thing. Do you remember this? I remember the name and that was definitely when we were trying to, you know, get events together that did not have to be giant sanctioned contest. Just get together with your buddies. Yeah, it was, it was an attempt at that. It was literally an attempt at like kind of semi formalizing the idea that we could all just hang out together and it not be a contest. So people would basically throw,
00:03:39
Speaker
you know, like the yo-yo equivalent of like a backyard or park barbecue for a bunch of yo-yo players. In the early days, the after contest barbecue, or maybe that was, was that just Southwest Regionals?
Evolution of the Southwest Regional Yo-Yo Contest
00:03:53
Speaker
No, honestly, Midwest Regionals was like the best. Oh, oh, you think so? You think so?
00:04:00
Speaker
Well, okay. Not the best, but it became the one that really encouraged everybody to do it. And Dave Schulte, the hoistest white man in the history of white, so white you can hear the H. But Dave Schulte had nice house in the burbs and a big ass backyard. And that man loves nothing more than standing at a grill with an apron that says, kiss the cook and handing out burgers to yo-yo kids.
00:04:28
Speaker
So this episode, though, I think we're going to do a case study of the Southwest Regional Yo-Yo Contest, which was the one that I got sucked into putting on. I should say, I shouldn't say sucked into like it was a negative, but it was it was something that I did for many years, but had never and never planned on before kind of thing. But it's a great case study. And the reason I want to talk about it is it's
00:04:55
Speaker
You know, it's like I said, a great case study and anyone can do this. There's a, and if you're going to fail, fail spectacularly. Well, I think it's also, it's a great case study in that it started off, the event started off as something that was like a formalized part of the National Yo-Yo League.
00:05:13
Speaker
Like this was an event that's seeded into the US Nationals and then it stopped being that. And I think it's a great kind of story because what you got to do is you got to see both sides of organizing a contest at that scale. Because I'm not going to count Triple D because it was a one-off and we didn't know what the fuck we were doing.
00:05:37
Speaker
But you got to do this at scale, at a larger, more professional quality level, but as both kinds of contests. So you've got really good insight, more so than a lot of organizers, even me, as to what works and what doesn't. It's also a great case study in how to keep moving forward and saying, go fuck yourself to your friends, even when they're right across the table from you. It's true. It's true.
00:06:03
Speaker
I mean, let's be honest here, a solid 65% of our friendship is us telling each other to go fuck themselves. Maybe 63. Maybe 63. The story begins with the man that you will hear us talk, we've talked plenty about is Bill Liebowitz, really doing a lot to support Southern California, West Coast, the whole thing. There was a point, and I can't remember what year it was, and what we'll say is like,
00:06:31
Speaker
2001. For those who don't remember, Bill Leibowitz was the founder and owner of Golden Apple Comics in Los Angeles. Golden Apple Comics had a yo-yo team in the late 90s, early 2000s. And they were, Bill was instrumental in helping to form and hold together the SoCal yo-yo scene during a really formative time. Absolutely. And he really gave it
00:06:59
Speaker
the human venue apart from a physical venue just kept going. There was a point where Bob and Thad decided that nationals needed to have regionals to feed into it. Nationals had been around for a while, but whoever showed up got to compete. Then somewhere around 2001, maybe 2000, there was a point where they decided that there needed to be regionals that fed into
00:07:27
Speaker
nationals and to explain why they came to that decision. You had to remember at that point that like some states had state contests and technically those state contests could feed into the lower rounds of nationals, but not every state had one.
00:07:42
Speaker
None of the contests were using the same rules and scoring systems. It was really hodgepodge. It was really slapped together. It was one of those things that you could very easily just skip the harder contests and go win a bunch of easier ones. Were people doing that? Were people jumping between states to try and get seated into nets?
Prestigious Contests and Influential Figures
00:08:06
Speaker
Oh yeah. I mean, people still do it. Like if you look at the regional winners this year, like Hunter Fewerstein, like won like three regionals and he doesn't even have to, but still again, because yo-yoing focuses and centers so much around contests and the contest experience, like that kid's a serious competitor. So he went, competed in and won like three fucking regionals. Crazy. So.
00:08:31
Speaker
they announced it. They announced the regional, like they break the regions up. Now at this point, BAC, Bay Area Classic, is the premier yo-yo contest. It was, yeah, BAC was like, it was the contest that every yo-yo contest wanted to be.
00:08:47
Speaker
Well, everyone went to, everyone went to Chico. You knew everyone went to Chico, but BAC was the cool one that did great stuff and had a lot of history. And Dave Vazan put a lot into it. And Chico, Chico at the time was where the exclusive home of U.S. Nationals. The U.S. National Contest was in Chico, but it was arguably more prestigious to win the Bay Area Classic. Bay Area Classic was in San Jose, which is, you know, San Francisco Bay Area. Bob made it the West Coast Regional.
00:09:16
Speaker
But he did it. He announced it with. So little time like he announced it will say like if Bay Area Classic was in May, they announced it in like a March, April. So let's let's real quick. Let's let's introduce the cast of characters here so that I don't have to keep clarifying who is who.
00:09:36
Speaker
Bob Maloney is the guy who basically started the US National Yo-Yo Museum, the US National Yo-Yo League, the original organizer of the US National Yo-Yo Contest.
00:09:49
Speaker
Um, he is the guy that's, you know, he starting in the early nineties with the return of the yo-yo exhibit, which was a traveling mall exhibit across the United States. He revitalized modern yo-yo. We, we should, we need to do an episode just like about Bob and it's, it's, you know, it's actually, I don't know if, I don't know if a lot of people are aware of this, but you know, we're, you and I being devotees of yo-yoing or
00:10:15
Speaker
completely aware that it is actually a holy obligation of all practicing yo-yoers that are capable once in their lifetime to make the pilgrimage to Chico and shake Bob's hand. Right. Yeah, you've got to make it to Chico at least once you got to shake Bob's hand, you've got to marvel at what a beautiful little city it is and how shitty it is to get there.
00:10:35
Speaker
And yeah, okay, so when we say Bob, we're talking about Bob Maloney. His son-in-law Thad Winzenz is also now like kind of an elite position in the U.S. National Yo-Yo League.
00:10:47
Speaker
So that's the THAAD that we're talking about. And of course, Bill is, Bill Leibowitz, the baddest motherfucker ever what was. So Bob announces the regionals. Bill says, you're killing me. My guys can't get to, my guys can't get to BAC. We got no time. We need to, West Coast needs to be two regionals. Right.
00:11:08
Speaker
Well, and in fairness, like LA to San Francisco is like a fucking hike. Like that is not like an easy little jaunt from Cincinnati to Cleveland. Like that is some shit. And so Bill is larger than life. Nature convinces Bob probably on one phone call that there's got to be a Southwest regional. So we carve out the Southwest regional, which is
00:11:36
Speaker
Vegas, Arizona, Southern California. Bill puts it on. Bill puts it on down the street from the comic book shop at some point at the Jewish Women's Center. It was just a community center in the middle of Los Angeles where Bill's got a relationship with them and their niceness. It's like a school gym, not even. It's that kind of
00:12:05
Speaker
that kind of hall. I remember it. It was pretty bad. It was, it was the kind of venue where you came in and all the people competing had to like pull the chairs down. Yeah. But it was like, but that's the, that's kind of thing where that's where people would look at those venues now and be like,
00:12:22
Speaker
I can't throw a contest here. It's not cool. There's not a stage. Nah, man. Have your grandma bake snacks and give you the space. And that's what it was, man. It was associated with a thrift store.
00:12:36
Speaker
I mean, it was very like, and the great thing about it, it really did remind me a lot of like, like late, mid to late eighties, like LA punk scene type stuff where it was like, you know, they were like black flag was playing like VFW halls and like church basements. Like it was that exact vibe. It was just like a random,
00:12:56
Speaker
And here's the thing, most stories always come out and they sound like so cool and hardcore as a church basement. There's always emphasis on the basement and they'll miss the emphasis on like, no, it's a church.
00:13:08
Speaker
We went right by Gladys and, you know, like high fived her and she was nice enough to give us the keys and walk us in and there was the hardwood floors and you know, over there. Yeah. I mean, it was a dumpy, shitty little venue. It was too hot. The AC was terrible. Like the yo-yo players had to like file in, set up the registration table, pull out chairs if they wanted to sit in chairs. Oh, and we didn't. I mean, there definitely were, but the most epic thing that came from that contest is that's actually where
00:13:38
Speaker
Better off alone the song better off alone by Alice DJ like like enters yo-yo cannon Nobody's coordinated this point again. This is a this is the region that we throw together Just because we needed to bang one out. It's pretty much like it's DXL crew and I in Arizona I think like the pro-yo gang came in and
00:14:01
Speaker
Yeah. The golden Apple crew and DXL. So this is one of those things where like in my head, I'm like, I really feel like it was very, very Southern Cal and there may have been like one or two people, but barely anyone Northern Cal showed up. But at the same time, like I'm now at a point in my life where I realized like I've been to too many yo-yo contests to remember anything specific about any of them. The person we needed to mention when we were talking, when we first mentioned spin docs, that's worth mentioning now is David Capuro.
00:14:30
Speaker
And he was great at showing up at these things. So I would really believe that he was there. Yeah. Like, cause he was amazing at showing up for all these things. Really dead. He showed up for a lot. So doesn't matter that.
Development of Contest Practices and Technology
00:14:44
Speaker
So.
00:14:45
Speaker
point being is it ended up being it's Yeah, but to fucking know your players showed up at a rec center. So no coordination. So it was just like, hey, you got a song, like you handed your, your disc man to the
00:15:01
Speaker
to the DJ and we were literally plugged into either a large boondocks or I think Bill had like a small PA system that he used for his general event. So we were literally like, here's your CD. And you would tell the DJ track five and Bill would press track five as he announced you. Yeah.
00:15:21
Speaker
This was, uh, I just want to point out this weird little detail. So like during this era of yo-yo contests, you would literally show up with a random CD and then tell the DJ, which are the, the DJ, the sound person, uh, you would literally tell whoever was running sound, which was very frequently just like somebody's girlfriend or boyfriend. You know what I mean? It was just like some, some random non-player that had gotten roped into helping out. Um, you would just hand them a CD and be like, Oh, track, track 12.
00:15:51
Speaker
Um, and then they would play the track and then you'd realize the track was wrong cause you were a dumbass. We all wait, hang on, hang on. And then someone would always like run over to the DJ and go, Oh no, no, no. And they're like, look at, okay, wait, wait. And then the player would run back out on the stage. Okay. Okay. And they give you the, then you seem to give the thumbs up. Okay. That one. Which then gave birth to the rule that you had to burn a CD and it had to have a single track only on it. And the disc had to have your name, your division.
00:16:22
Speaker
the name of the song, the length of the song, and all written on the actual disc. We'll get to this as we get into this, but I quickly moved away from that stuff so fast. Whenever I took over, we went to MP3s immediately. I never had to deal with that, but that sounds so par for the course. I remember seeing the Chico and that's the binders of discs.
00:16:50
Speaker
I mean, you know, my first yo-yo contest, like half the people competing used cassettes.
00:16:57
Speaker
So, I mean, that, you know, and we went from that to CDs. We went from CDs to burn CDs, one track only. Then we went to upload MP3s. Now, like as an organizer for like the world yo-yo contest, when people upload their music, I've got a script running that like retitles the track to player first name or player last name underscore player first name underscore division underscore round dot MP3.
00:17:33
Speaker
Like, I literally have them in my iPod. Like, they will come up because I loaded into my iPod for the playlist for the contest. So all of a sudden, a song, I'm like, what is this song? And I was like, oh, it's somebody who competed in BLC like some random year, some terrible pop song. And they're like, man, but I kind of like enough that I won't delete it.
00:17:49
Speaker
I still have people in my iPod. Alex is in there.
00:17:57
Speaker
Yeah, I definitely like every once in a while I will still run across like random fucking yo-yo tracks Like I mean I honestly this is a huge reason why I switched over to just like listening to all my shit on Spotify Because my own iTunes like playlist had been so corrupted by fucking other yo-yo players music Then I hit the point where I was like it is no longer worth the effort for me to clean this shit out I give up I'm declaring music bankruptcy moving to streaming
00:18:25
Speaker
So, we didn't have the one person that did come in that was an exotic person for the contest for the first Southwest region was Dale Oliver. And he was in there and he was kind of MC. Again, Bill was always, you know,
00:18:42
Speaker
larger than life. So he was talking to somebody. I remember Dale was the head judge. So now for all you youths, Dale Oliver. Dale Oliver is actually the guy who revitalized the world yo-yo contest. The world yo-yo contest basically was originally held in like 1928, uh,
00:19:01
Speaker
You know, and held, they, they held a few more like through like the fifties, you know, as like a promotional event. But then the whole thing just kind of went away when the yo-yo boom died. And then Dale Oliver brought it back in, I think it was 1992.
00:19:16
Speaker
And Dale was the one who brought the World Yoyo Contest back as like a sub-event of the International Juggler's Association yearly festival. He started Spintastic. He was a Duncan demonstrator all through the 1950s and 60s. But Dale went on, went from working for Duncan to working for the original Playmax company when it was founded by Don Duncan Jr.
00:19:39
Speaker
Anyway, so Dale Oliver showing up was like, it was sort of, you know, weird, weird, like, S tier celebrity. So it's like, like, certain legitimizing. So you got the old guy who's trying to be very legit about how you run a contest and stuff. But you've got again, it's the DXL crew, these guys that are just like, Oh, we're doing our own contest now. Cool. We're sitting, we're sitting like in a semicircle.
00:20:05
Speaker
around the floor because for some reason... Because nobody wanted to deal with the fucking chairs. Yeah. But I have this weird memory that somebody could correct me on that. I feel like there was a stage, but we weren't on it. There was something else on it, but I just remember... There was a stage. It was set up for something else, and so we technically couldn't use it.
00:20:26
Speaker
like we had use of the space. And if I remember right, the backdrop that we were basically playing against was the stacks of chairs that nobody wanted to disassemble and set up. And so we're down on the floor. The reason I remember Dale being there and getting pissed was that
00:20:43
Speaker
who was somebody was doing their routine will say Jason Gallagher, but I don't think it was him messes up the root messes up the yo yo. And they get like, Oh gosh, you know, guy find out the yo yo. And then somebody throws you yo yo. Oh, cool. Grab it starts doing the trick. Do not messes up again. Two more people throw him replacement yo yo. Because everyone no one no one wants to see somebody fail. So every time some people throw so by this point, well, nobody wants to see somebody fail. And at the time,
00:21:11
Speaker
Like most of us didn't have much in the way of backups. Like we could afford a yo-yo or two. Like who, nobody could afford to just have like six fucking renegades like set up and ready to go.
Community and Camaraderie in Yoyo Contests
00:21:22
Speaker
Yeah. So it was, people were just throwing yoyos.
00:21:27
Speaker
I feel like it was Jason Gallagher, but maybe it was one of the other guys. It started as people tossing yoyos up for him to use. And then after the third one, then it just became people hurling yoyos at him because everybody was just like, well, I mean, he hasn't fucking won, so let's just make a show out of this. Dale got pissed at us. Oh, he was pissed.
00:21:49
Speaker
We cannot have people throwing jojos during the competitors freestyle. And that became a rule. That is in the rules. Is that where it came from? Yeah.
00:22:00
Speaker
It came, it came from Southwest regionals. It came from the fact that Dale Oliver was super pissed off about this and then it's, and it's still in the rules today. You cannot, if a yo-yo player loses a yo-yo off the stage, an audience member cannot return it to them that yo-yo is considered dead and out of play. Like, so somebody got up there and played better off alone because that was the hip track. It was popular shit at the time. It's good. Good track. It's good yo-yo. It's good for yo-yo and shit.
00:22:32
Speaker
Then did the routine great. It was somebody that wasn't hip to it or not hip to it as far as they were just like, I like the song. We're going to say James Locke. James Locke was one of the guys in this circle. Then somebody else uses it accidentally. It was like the next person. It came up right up. It's like it would a jukebox plays the same song on repeat. You're like, ha, ha, ha.
00:22:59
Speaker
And then I swear, and then third person comes up. And by that point, I think it was like Jason Lee, who we've got a history of him just being like music, whatever. So I'm sure that he was just like, just play that one again. So that got played again. That's exactly what it was. So one player got up, he was better off alone. Next player got up, and it was like a young kid, like first contest, looking real nervous, looking real embarrassed about it. His music starts on a separate disc, and it's better off alone.
00:23:28
Speaker
third player gets up Jason Lee is just Jason Lee never showed up to contest with fucking music like ever. Jason Lee didn't show up with with music. He didn't show up with string. Half the time his yo-yos exploded or only had one like Jason Lee showed up at yo-yo contest, used whatever was handed to him in that moment and then fucking won. My favorite Jason Lee story that was we went up to BAC like
00:23:54
Speaker
2002 to three four around that kind of thing we're driving up there and again at this point Jason Lee is the height of his like Like respect like he is just killing it great player. Everyone's excited soon, and we're all driving up there and I'm music music What kind of music do we have and I went and I was like and I had like a burn random compilation like Napster was coming down and so I was like I
00:24:22
Speaker
I grabbed a buddy when I was like, I was like, here's just a bunch of random songs I'm never going to buy. Can you just burn these two a couple CDs for me? So for no apparent reason, I had the clown theme from Akira, which if you've ever, that's like, that is like Taiko drums, like post-apocalyptic anime.
00:24:54
Speaker
You should stop this podcast right now and go find, like pull up YouTube, just a crime theme. Akira is amazing. So he definitely was in it to mess. And then by the time, and then there was like a.
00:25:09
Speaker
I think by that point it became laughable. Then you had the people who were just doing it to fuck with Dale Oliver, putting on better off alone. So then there was at least another person that... So what happened? Okay. So we had one player use it, second player embarrassed, same music used it.
00:25:27
Speaker
third player Jason Lee doesn't give a shit. I don't know, whatever. Just play that song again. Fourth player gets up. Totally different song. Fifth player gets up. Better off alone kicks in at this point. Billy Lewis is like Billy Lewis, as soon as this routine is done, addresses the crowd and just straight up says next person who uses this music is getting disqualified.
00:25:53
Speaker
So two more players go and then Jen Niles gets up there and she was gonna use Better Off Alone. But she was like, I can't use my music now. So she decided to just freestyle in silence and we all just sang and hummed Better Off Alone. Somewhere out there, there's, I mean, somewhere online, there is video of Jen yo-yoing at this contest and you can hear all of us
00:26:28
Speaker
Holy cow. Oh, I'd love to find that. And the damnedest thing about, I still hear that song in like random grocery stores and shit at least twice a month.
00:26:38
Speaker
No way. I'm not even fucking kidding. I'm not exaggerating, which I know I'm prone to. I still hear that song in public, like in the wild, at least twice a month. And every single fucking time, I assume somebody is fucking with me. And so that was for years after that. That was how you separated the the old school players at a contest where someone would put that on and you could look around the crowd and
00:27:08
Speaker
20%, 15% of people would start cracking up. They know what the ridiculous. Yeah. I'm like, yeah. I mean, I, the caribou lodge is just going to release a fucking Alice DJ t-shirt. And that'll be my million dollar idea. Like you showed up at 44 clash selling Alice DJ t-shirts sold out. Garin fucking teed, man. We'll have to check. We'll have to test that.
00:27:33
Speaker
Not long after that, I feel like Bill might've done a second Southwest regional. It wasn't long after that that I took it over. Like, and that was just like, Bill and I were, you know, like, gosh, I'll, I'll, I'll put it on. Um, Bill was still pretty, uh, you know, he had a stored run. And, and by this point, things were like, yo-yo's weren't a big draw. So there wasn't a lot of advantage for him to do it. Yeah. I mean, this was.
00:28:02
Speaker
This was definitely like post boom. Oh, very much. This was like, oh, three, oh, four. I put on the Southwest regional for one year and you know, the second, maybe the third, if you told me it's third, it was, but I'm pretty sure it was the second year was actually when Bill died. And that's when we renamed it to Billy, what's classic in his honor. Like I wanted to come up with something besides classic and BAC and BLC were too close, but we just couldn't come up with anything that sounded, you know, better or worse. So that was.
00:28:32
Speaker
So that's when, so Southwest regionals quickly became a BLC because, yeah, simply builds around for one of them that he didn't, one, maybe two that he didn't run, that I was running. And so yeah, he, and it was, again, this goes to the going to our case study, if anyone can do this, that,
00:28:57
Speaker
I went to the park near my house and it had a decent community center. And this is something which I've said is like, if I ever give a Ted talk, it'll be the topic and you'd make three phone calls just because the first one you're going to be like, who do I need to talk to? And they're going to say, I don't know, but you should talk to this person. Call that person. Who are you going to talk to? I don't know, but it's this person. And then that's the person you actually need to talk to. So walk over to the park.
00:29:25
Speaker
I want to put on a yo-yo contest here. What does it take to do that? Oh, man. Well, you have to rent the community center and this and that unless it's a city event. But this is the other way. Stop right there. How do I make it a city event? Well, you ask. OK. Who do I ask? They're not here right now. When do they come back? Tomorrow. I'll come back tomorrow.
00:29:49
Speaker
Come back tomorrow. Hey Frank, I was told that I need to talk to you. Can I make this a city event? Yes. Stamp of approval. Exactly. But the first guy was going to be like, you can't, I can't stamp their approval. Only Frank can. All right. Well, I'll be back to talk to Frank. So city of West Hollywood was really cool. They were always very supportive because it turns out that people like yo-yo contests. So I say, Hey, can I do it? And they said, sure. Sounds great.
00:30:19
Speaker
and you just have to make an official city event. What does it take? Well, you list us as a sponsor. Done. First sponsor, City of West Hollywood. Yeah, and then we just called Yoyo companies. Hey, you want to sponsor our event? What does that mean? Whatever. What are the expenses of the event? Well, we had a PA system. Excuse me, the park gave us the venue.
00:30:47
Speaker
So, and then everyone else was in it for the volunteer. So prizes. Cool. So I will say as a manufacturer, like do not fucking call a manufacturer and be like, Hey, do you want to sponsor my event? And then you go, yeah, what does that mean? And you're like, I don't know. Whatever. Yeah. Like we fucking hate that drives us fucking nuts. Cause if you just say, whatever, I'm going to send you like eight discontinued t-shirts and call it a fucking day.
00:31:15
Speaker
Like, so like have, have a plan, like have some kind of like, you know, understand like what your hard budget is. Like, okay, it costs us, you know, two grand or 800 bucks or whatever it is. Like it costs us X amount of dollars to run this contest. So ideally we need to get that back in registration and in sponsorship. So if your sponsorships are like need to be a hundred bucks and you need to sell like eight of those,
00:31:42
Speaker
Great. Then the sponsorship's a hundred bucks. Like just have a fucking plan. Totally. And we did, this was also before contests were expensive to make sure people were committed. True. There was a shift in yo-yo contests where, because anybody would show up just to get like some stage time and find out if they're like the 56th or 57th worst person in their state. And you can't, you,
00:32:10
Speaker
You couldn't bang it. You just ended up with so many people signing up that there was a shift years later, years after this, years later where they said, okay, we're going to move the burden of the contest more towards the competitors to make sure that people are $50 committed. That's when there was a jump up in registry.
00:32:33
Speaker
I'm gonna push back on that because realistically like here's what actually happened is people started expecting the quality of the events to continue growing and of course that just cost more money to produce but also because of the volume of players like
00:32:50
Speaker
You needed to rent venues for longer and you needed to have like more staff and like more people needed to, you know, I mean, some judges were getting paid. Sometimes they were just getting paid in like meals, but you were like still hooking them up with like t-shirts and like merch and stuff like.
00:33:06
Speaker
It's one of those things where every person involved in running it needs something. Here's the foreshadowing. The foreshadowing becomes money became a thing, prize money became a thing. Players wanted prize money. Dave Bizon set that precedent hard. Dave Bizon was throwing BACs and
00:33:31
Speaker
you know, being like $1,000 first prize. And all of a sudden, every contest was like, oh, shit, we got to do something. But there was, there was definitely a time like Bizan put out a couple of those and then it went away. It went away for a long time. Well, it went away for a long time because the boom died and nobody would give up any money. So this was in
Innovations and Changes in Contest Organization
00:33:49
Speaker
that time. This was in the lull. There was no boom. So we figured we'd have like a few like we'd have a few dozen
00:33:58
Speaker
Competitors and we charge everybody like five ten bucks and then every and then everybody else we would say hey What do you what would it take to make it worth your while as a manufacturer? So we tried to we tried to be a little bit more interesting than just like give us some stuff for prizes like one of my favorites was We worked with
00:34:20
Speaker
pressure is yo-yo factory at the time is pro your yo-yo factory cuz I remember it was Ben and Hans and They bought smoothies for everybody. That would have been yo-yo factory. Yeah, there was there was one of the BAC's where If you entered halfway through because we knew it would be blowing through lunch
00:34:38
Speaker
Like, every competitor got a smoothie, and Yo-Yo Factory bought smoothies for everybody. That was how they sponsored the contest. In your registration was, what Jamba Juice do you want? And they all came back with Yo-Yo Factory stickers on them. That's, I mean, fucking shout out to, that's all Ben McPhee. That was actually my idea, and I sold it to Ben.
00:35:05
Speaker
I was like, who wants to buy smoothies? And Ben was like, I'll do that. Done. So, and then we got into, and we got into other things like, oh, going back to the barbecues, one of my favorites was we had a, we had a barbecue and this would have been 2005 that I had gone to South Africa to hang out with the guys from Radioactive.
00:35:35
Speaker
And I got, that was Yaco. Yaco, Yaco grief. Yeah. Yeah. And gosh, like, okay, here's another like do it yourself story. Well, a little tangent. There was like one guy, Yaco, who was, who was bringing in Duncan's.
00:35:53
Speaker
into Johannesburg, selling them at like, they didn't have shop there. So he's selling them at the, like a little flea market stand, right? Now that is, Johannesburg is, is like the furthest you can get away from Cleveland, Ohio, where these things are being manufactured. So people were already surprised that yoyos were not $2 that yoyos were now
00:36:19
Speaker
$15, $20 because they had a berry in them. And then you doubled that price because they had to be shipped all the way to the other hemisphere in both directions. So it was just tragic for him. So he just kind of got tired of it and just made his own little yoyo company, just started making yoyos in Africa. And it was radioactive. And I actually really liked his yoyo. He used this weird plastic that just
00:36:49
Speaker
It was a plastic that felt like wood, and I loved it. Whenever they hung out with him, good guy, had some fun, came back. So next time we're doing the BLC, I put out the word to manufacturers, hey, anyone wanna be involved. Yaco said, I'd love to, but I don't really know, I don't really have any
00:37:17
Speaker
product. I don't know how I would support you kind of thing because the conventional packages, which was this much money and this much prize type stuff. Well, when I went over there, Yako says, Hey, what do you want to do while you're in Africa? I want to eat some shit that I can eat in the States. Let's go find some crazy. So he goes, he looks and comes back a few minutes later. He goes, I know where we're going to dinner.
00:37:46
Speaker
We hop in his little car, drive out to a place that if you're in South Africa, I hope it still exists. There was a restaurant called Carnivore that is actually the name of the fucking restaurant, Carnivore. What? It is a Brazilian-style steakhouse. Brazilian-style, like, you know, the guy comes around with the sword of meat, right? Right. And you just say, it's just like, oh, Brazilian-style steakhouse, they'll come around and be like, chicken? And you say, yeah, and they'll chop you off a piece. Like, for learning your own, yeah, chop me off a piece, cool.
00:38:17
Speaker
Same thing, guy comes around, flame me on, great. This, then it goes like, oh, uh, yeah. So chicken, and then ostrich, and then alligator, and then hemsbach, zebra. I was like, fuck yeah. That's fucking great. And there's a trick.
00:38:41
Speaker
that I still love. I can't explain it. It's like just a not trick that I was doing at the time. Nobody had taught me. I was just like playing around with it. And so, and Jaco decided that that trick was named McBride Eats Zebra. Doesn't look a little bit like a zebra drumstick. And so, so when we go, when I reach out to him, I go, Oh, whoa, a zebra drumstick.
00:39:05
Speaker
Go ahead and just, you know, like, it looks like the shape of a zebra. I mean, it's big. Zebra drumstick has got to be fucking huge. Yeah, but it's the, it's the shape, the shape. Did you actually get a zebra leg? No, they came out, they came out like steak style. Oh my God. I'm just suddenly imagining you like, I mean, that's like some Flintstones level shit. Like that's like the biggest Renfaire fucking turkey leg. Oh my gosh.
00:39:35
Speaker
But I do have a Hemsbach hide, which to this day is like...
00:39:41
Speaker
still hangs in my workshop and a knife from that restaurant. There is, if you look at the, if you, this is, we're going to get back to the contest here in a second, I swear. But if you look at the original packaging for the yo-yo factory dynasty on the inside flap of the top of the box, you can see a photograph of like a reindeer pelt.
00:40:06
Speaker
And it's because when Hans originally asked me to send him photos of myself to use on the packaging, everything that I sent him was me shirtless with a reindeer pelt thrown over me holding a fucking two-handed broadsword. From Viking tour. The only picture you had of yourself.
00:40:30
Speaker
And I know I took, I took those, I took those just for that. Oh, that's great. It is. I've, somewhere I will find the entire original photo shoot, but it is fucking ridiculous. And Hans messaged me back after he got those and was just like, I don't know if this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen or the best, but I also need other pictures. So, so Yako goes, I tell you what,
00:40:55
Speaker
I'm working with him. He's like, what else can we do? I said, well, we always have a barbecue afterwards. And at this point, Jen Niles hosted it. So she didn't live very far from me. So we could literally go to the park by my house, have the event, and then we would all walk down.
00:41:13
Speaker
four blocks, five blocks to Jen Niles' house. And there was a barbecue and we don't hang out at her house. Yeah, she lived, she lived on Sierra Bonita, like right around the corner from Golden Apple. Yeah, right. And so we all walked down there and Jaco says, I got you. He finds a place
00:41:34
Speaker
in, I'll say Seattle, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, where you can order freeze dried exotic meats. So the BLC 2006 will say one of those years, the after party we grilled
00:41:52
Speaker
Crocodile, alligator, kangaroo, bison, and we didn't get to the antelope. Like I saved the antelope for later.
00:42:06
Speaker
That was because African yo-yo companies like, oh, I sponsored your contest. Here's your antelope ribs. I mean, I've just, you know, lately I've just been bitching and moaning that like yo-yo content, like sponsoring a yo-yo contest is just like hurling money into a fucking void.
00:42:23
Speaker
because you're not doing anything notable or memorable with it. You're just like, oh, I'm going to go have a booth, and then everybody's going to forget about that booth immediately after they leave the contest. But I think let this be a lesson to all yo-yo manufacturers out there. If you want to really make a mark in this world, rare exotic meats. Absolutely. Absolutely. That's the way to go. So no, and it was fun. We really tried to
00:42:51
Speaker
improve and tweak the yo-yo contest with that contest. I also had enough of a tech background at that point where we did rear projection. I got a projector and we did a rear projection
00:43:15
Speaker
at the park. When you say rear projection, you mean you've got a projector set up but it's behind the screen? Actually, you were correct, but I'm incorrect. We had a projector that was
00:43:30
Speaker
mounted so that it would show on the screen behind the player. So we did have to tweak it to make sure it didn't hit the player. So it wasn't true rear projection, but it was a projection behind the player. So instead of like a printed backdrop, which everybody was using, you know, shitty printed vinyl backdrops at the time. So instead of that, you had like a projection so that you could also switch logos. Not just switch logos, but we had them scrolling. So we got art from like
00:43:58
Speaker
either Renee or Whip, depending on the year, like we'd get some good art to be the background and things would roll by. And the thing that, one thing that we did that was excellent was, cause again, at this point, like I knew flash, so I could just animate and have this interactive thing. So I had a whole system. That's when we shifted over to MP3s. People had to send me their MP3s ahead of time. And I had them queued up in the flash player. So literally the whole thing would just was going through.
00:44:28
Speaker
a list of players and it would pull up and play there. You basically created one long video that was also the playlist for it was software so that it was software so that it was on a queue. It wasn't played. It was like, it was like, like there's the video loop and it was feeding off it because it displayed the on deck. So you saw your name coming. Like it had like on the left column, left side. That stopped yo-yo players from not realizing they were next. Dude, you'd be surprised though, man.
00:44:58
Speaker
It's OK. How is it that at a Euro contest, if you announce, like you announce the player like on deck, this person, this person, they won't hear you. But yet if you show well, actually here it is, is that our on deck list was like seven, eight people long. So you could see it coming 20 minutes out and you would watch your name crawl up just like the menu at Wendy's, you know. And my guess is that what happened is the actual players still weren't paying any fucking attention, but their friends were. Their friends were the guilt factor.
00:45:28
Speaker
There was shame. We introduced shame to organizing YoYo's contest. I mean, it's the only way to get YoYo players to do anything is peer pressure and shame. It's true. But it worked. It ran really smoothly. And the other thing is that, since again, it was a cutoff. We had a time going, which also, oh, gosh, asked me when I finished the story about time.
00:45:53
Speaker
So I had the clock. I just was like, Oh, I'll just display the clock. So it had the countdown clock running too. And I was totally surprised that people like we didn't talk about it kind of thing. It was just like, Oh, I just put it as part of the display. We had stuff going. It was like a video game. Like you'd have logos running by, you'd have the names of who's on deck, who's coming this, you know, the division. And you had this countdown clock and everyone started looking behind them and like checking their time in the middle of their freestyle.
00:46:18
Speaker
to like monitor if they were going to do another trick. Yeah, I so I personally like the idea of having that as more like a monitor for the player than for the audience. But I do like I legitimately love that idea. I love you know, I've always loved that like comedians there's like a red light to let them know when they've got like 20 seconds or whatever to like wrap up.
00:46:38
Speaker
I like the idea of players having that timer so that they're not... Now granted, this is also coming from a time when we weren't necessarily choreographing our shit that tightly to music. A lot of us were more just showing up with a song we liked that we knew was the correct length and then winging it for three minutes.
00:47:00
Speaker
Yeah, competition these days is like a lot tighter. Like players know exactly how much time they have left by where they are in the song. But I do think that there's still like some good value to having that clock like as a player view monitor. Oh, absolutely. But again, like I never thought it was going to be a thing. And on top of it, it was interesting what we had with that.
00:47:23
Speaker
was we shifted to criteria-based judging, which was Olympic judging, where each judge did a different thing. We had a tech judge. I'm embarrassed. I forgot the name of it. It was basically competency. Did you do a good job? Did you hit your tricks? We had two of those, so they were double-weighted. Then we had tech innovation and performance. And then each judge,
00:47:53
Speaker
just gave a score 1 to 10. And then you just normalized, averaged them, and that became your total thing. Well, when you do that, when you do a contest like that, there's no advantage to time anymore, to the point where there's actually an advantage to being shorter than three minutes. But nobody could understand that. We were like,
00:48:18
Speaker
Uh, they would say, what's the time limit? The first year that we did this, everyone just kept asking, what's the time limit? I'm like, it's, it's, it's Olympus style judging. There's no advantage to long or short. So anywhere from two to four minutes. And they're like, but what? And you could just watch smoke coming out of people's ears. Like it was literally baffling to people. I mean, if, yeah, I mean, if you're doing Olympic style judging like that, then realistically, the shorter your routine is.
00:48:42
Speaker
Like, I mean, obviously law of diminishing returns and all that, but like you want to get up there just long enough to like nail everything and then fucking bail. Exactly. We had a guy the first year, but again, we're explaining this and I remember, and I wish I can remember his name. I'm embarrassed. And he, he wasn't one of the hardcore players. He was an enthusiast like player kind of thing. He walks up and he's like, wait a second. So I could just get up there and just do rock the baby.
00:49:12
Speaker
And I was like, well, I mean, if you did it perfect, you'd have a really great like execution score, but your tech innovation and performance would be shite. And he's like, hmm. And he went up there and did rock the bogey, landed it, took a bow and walked off stage and did finish last.
00:49:36
Speaker
He then rocked the baby. I don't know if that's an argument for or against that judging system. I can't remember who he beat but it was somebody who was just like flailing and you know barely try so it was but it was like it wasn't zero. He got up there and he did not get zero.
00:50:01
Speaker
I mean, that's, you know, I like the idea of, of actually numerically scoring the entire philosophy of leave them wanting more and, and, you know, not wearing out your welcome, like just taking that whole philosophy and being like, yeah, that's literally how we're judging this contest.
00:50:17
Speaker
Get up, nail it, and then fuck off before you screw something up. No, that was the point, because people would just be trying to collect clicks, and we're like, don't collect clicks, show off the good shit, get off. And so it was intentional to have the judging system do that. Also, the thing that I liked about it is that I collected judges that were respected in those
00:50:44
Speaker
aspects. Right. It's like in those particular disciplines.
00:50:49
Speaker
Your technical judge was somebody who was a very good technical yo-yo. Yeah, I think Spencer Barry did it a couple of years. Innovation was Paul Escolar a couple of years. Again, this is when we got performance. We got the singer of the Dead Kennedys who didn't know anything about yo-yoing. And he's like, I don't think about anything like your performance. Is it cool looking? He's like, well, I can tell you if it's cool or not.
00:51:14
Speaker
That's your judge, you know, because he's an expert on performance. You know, I just want to point out this was the second singer of the dead Kennedy's, not the original, not Jello Biafra. No, no shame on Jeff. He's a good dude, but no, not different. Yeah. And we had other, and then we had some other, like we intentionally got like performers, non yo-yo people to be the performance judge.
00:51:39
Speaker
Well, I mean, that was something, I mean, that was something that I was, you know, hollering for like way back in the Orlando world's days.
00:51:46
Speaker
I was like, why do we have yo-yo players judging performance when I've seen these people on stage, they don't know shit. All they're doing is waiting for a slight break in their tricks and then they're going to look at the audience and they're going to do the hand thing where they ask the audience to clap for them and then they're going to go right back to doing those same fucking tricks. I love those. I love the hand thing. Back when that was performance, that was performance.
00:52:12
Speaker
Because still, to this day, players still do it every time. I just want to throw a fucking chair at them every time I see it. No, because the thing that I always laugh about that is because there's one or two guys that can pull that off as far as they'll do something. And then they give it the rest of their hand wave, and everyone goes, yeah!
00:52:33
Speaker
And those one or two guys pulled it off like twice and decades, decades of bullshit copying. I hate that so much.
00:52:50
Speaker
At that point, people would travel in. The Arizona gang, spin doctors would come down. Well, it's a yo-yo contest. Everybody wants to go for the spectacle and the camaraderie and the fun. And again, at this point in the story, I'm 10 years older than most of these kids. And so I had my own apartment.
00:53:18
Speaker
And most of these guys were old enough to travel, but we're all, you know, everyone's dirt poor. So even though I said, here's the hotel and usually you'd go to the hotel, you'd still like just have how many people can I fit in my apartment? And so we'd have like.
Philosophies and Venue Changes in Yoyo Events
00:53:37
Speaker
10 people like just, you know, like around. And that was just like just hanging out, chilling at apartment, like just all the people just crashed there. So one of the conversations I remember was is sitting around my pool and my little like little apartment complex. I remember that apartment that it was a great little pool and it was tiny as shit.
00:54:06
Speaker
And it was like cold. It was always cold because like, architecturally, like it never got direct sun. So for like two weeks a year, it was warm enough to swim in. And so we're sitting around and it was me and here, Nori me and Paul Escolar and some other people, but we basically here and I just got it, got into it in a very positive, friendly way as far as just like.
00:54:36
Speaker
the uniformity of judging or not. And I was very much of the opinion that each contest should be judged and the system should be defined by
00:54:57
Speaker
the organizer because every place has a unique value system. What makes it interesting? What's valuable? Your judging system reflects what is valuable, what you are trying to encourage. I was fine with the idea that you could have a network, a cascading network of contests that feed into each other that all you needed was to define who the winner was and pass it up.
00:55:28
Speaker
totally disagreed. It had to be uniform top to bottom because you were doing a disservice to whoever was trying, anyone trying to get to the top. And all of a sudden, if the judging system was different than where they came from, then that wasn't fair to the players. And Paul Escolar was just falling asleep. Listen. Oh, Paul. But it was really interesting because, again, having this conversation with Hero that I just assumed that
00:55:57
Speaker
Everybody thought the way that I did and it's just not the case. Yeah. I mean, and I've definitely like, I had to work, I put in a lot of work on standardization. Um, but I think I'm one of the very few who has put in that much work on standardization, who also still understands the value of the wildcard shit. I had a good relationship with Bob. Bob and Thad were really great as far as like they said, look, you're doing
00:56:27
Speaker
a good enough job that the contest is legit. I did have some parents kind of get annoyed with me on some things. One thing that we caught flack on was we did rookie and pro divisions. And instead of doing it by age or this, that, we said rookie or pro. And the dividing line was were you sponsored? That was the dividing line was if you were a sponsored player, you weren't sponsored. And if you were not sponsored, you were an indie. Well, I guess there was indie rookie.
00:56:57
Speaker
rookie was like kind of a voluntary thing. We had Indian sponsored were the divisions. And there was one year where yo yo jam started a promotion or not promotion of
00:57:10
Speaker
They had the yo-yo jam proteges. Yes. Yeah. And it was a program. That's what I'm looking for, where they had their junior kids get teamed up with someone. And Tessa was like, maybe her first contest. I don't know if it was, I don't think it was her very first contest, but it was the first one I remember dealing with her. And she signed up and I was like, you're on yo-yo jam. You're unsponsored. And Valerie was like,
00:57:37
Speaker
No, she's a junior program. I was like, nah, man. The rule was, would it be awkward if this was how I defined it? Would it be awkward if the player wore a t-shirt of a different company? And I said, could she get up there in a Dunkin' t-shirt? No. She's sponsored.
00:58:03
Speaker
Wow. That's a really solid kind of end run around that. Yeah. And so, and she, but she's, but she's junior. I'm like, no, man, she's getting one-on-one tutoring from Johnny. Still a Whopper motherfucker. I'm like, no, man. She's playing with the big boys. And it was funny. Like I pulled this aside. I was just like,
00:58:28
Speaker
I hope you're cool with this. And she was. She was just like, no, I get it. I get it. Kind of thing. But it was about the parents and Valerie were like, I can't believe you're making those juniors compete. I was like, sponsor to sponsor. That's how we broke the line. True. And so yeah, we were well enough. We ran a tight enough contest that it was predictable and respectable. And so Bob let us keep doing it differently.
00:58:56
Speaker
like doing it with the criteria judging that wasn't the clicker-based judging. And it was cool. And so we did it with the city of West Hollywood for a while. Then they changed, like some election changed and all of a sudden they decided to revamp the way they were gonna do it and they were just became a pain in the butt and the new guy was inaccessible. So we did the next thing that you do, which is you,
00:59:24
Speaker
Find a commercial place that's happy to have people brought to their shops. Right. And I think by this point. They'll do it at the Grove. No, we did it at the lab. I'm pretty sure the glass I had founded ahead of me and thrown the DXL battle there before we moved Southwest regionals there. OK. And it was a.
00:59:47
Speaker
hip shopping district, basically like they found, like developers found some old warehouse type industrial space that was close enough to main thoroughfares that they, you know, tore down, put in an urban outfitters. And all of a sudden it was nice. Right. And they were really great to us. They actually treat us very nicely. And we ran that there for a few, few years. And it was great. This is another thing for all you would be organizers, uh, find a venue that is close enough for food.
01:00:17
Speaker
Yeah. That is, that's, that's all that you really got to worry about is make sure that people can eat. Yeah. I mean, if, if you tell people that there's like a half hour, hour, whatever for lunch and it takes them 30 minutes to get anywhere that has food, you fucked up. So that place like had some, had some shopping. So they were, they were happy to be the throwers of the contest and peep, but there was a lot of food around. So everyone that we brought in could just go and grab lunch.
01:00:46
Speaker
I mean, it's like the only benefit of mall contests, to be honest. Everything else about a mall is fucking terrible, but the fact that everybody can just immediately scatter and have like 30 launch options. And so by that point, we started also doing the pocket circus. Pocket circus sounds like something that a guy does on a bus right before he gets thrown off for doing that on a bus. Yeah, that's why we're going to do that.
01:01:20
Speaker
You put on the contest during the day people would travel in for it and then and then what well By this point, you know, we weren't doing the barbecues. It was too big for a barbecue
01:01:33
Speaker
So we put on a show. It was too big for a barbecue and it was too big for y'all to like take over a Denny's or something. Like there was two, I mean, that was, man, that was, that was one of my favorite things about yo-yo contests is, you know, everybody would, everybody would scatter. There would always end up being three after parties to every yo-yo contest. Right. There was, there was like the two hotel rooms that everyone dog piled in to like drink booze and get rowdy.
01:02:01
Speaker
there was the parking lot where all the younger kids hung out because that was the only spot that they could hang out parking lot slash hotel lobby. And then there was the Denny's nearby where as many people as could reasonably fit into that Denny's fit into that fucking Denny's. And you just take turns. Like you'd be like, Oh, I'm hungry. I'm gonna go over the days. Who was going with me? Seven people walk over and you'd see eight people walking back. Yeah. And so we had, we actually put on,
01:02:29
Speaker
after-party shows. The first year, I met a guy randomly that had some Koreatown back alley venue space that he wanted to turn into an art gallery. When he took it over, he ended up having to kick out a bunch of
01:02:53
Speaker
migrant farm worker guy like like 12 12 migrant guys that were like sleeping on mattresses, like squatting there. Whoa. And so he cleaned it out. He was turning into an art gallery. He didn't really do anything with it yet. I was like, Hey, can I put on a show here? He's like, Sure. So we had some comedians. I got like comedians, music act, yo yo's. If you want to do a yo yo act, you got up, you could get up there and do yo yo act. And
01:03:23
Speaker
We could, in between like a couple of comedians, we had one guy do a evil ventriloquist. What's an evil ventriloquist? Like it was a possessed dummy. Like the dummy was possessed. So it was evil ventriloquist. Duncan, can't remember what his name was.
01:03:44
Speaker
And I think that might've been the year we had Scott Neary who escaped, did an escape from a backpack act. Scott, uh, I've known Scott for a long time. That is a fucking fantastic routine. And he is, he's now currently running variety variety shows in Los Angeles. He's been doing that for a long time now. Uh, Scott Neary's booby trap, I think. Yeah.
01:04:08
Speaker
And I'd met him when he did the pocket circus. We had a comedian. This is the fail spectacularly part of it. One of my buddies was a comedian. And he had a whole bit where he talked about how when you do helium, it makes your voice high. But when you do whippets, it makes your voice low, like the guy from Silence of the Lambs.
01:04:34
Speaker
He legit went up and just was doing rippets on stage for part of his standup routine. It was so horribly uncomfortable. It was safe. I'm not going to do it on sale. I do the guy well enough that it was
01:04:57
Speaker
It was going to be fine. I would say for everyone but him. Oh, yeah. No, it was horrible for him. God, that's like one of the worst things that you could do. Can you imagine if that dude had just straight fished on stage? Like, that'd be real bad wrong. I was like, but it was. It was just kind of like, hey, look, Skippy's, he's one of those comedians in the Neil Hamburger vibe of like half the humor is the discomfort, the discomfort that he brings to the crowd.
01:05:26
Speaker
And so we got mixed reactions. But yeah, the show was really good, except for the guy doing the whippets. We got mixed reactions. I think that is the most diplomatic fucking way you could possibly explain that. No, they were truly mixed because some people thought it was fucking hilarious. Other people were like, man, the music was good. But then by that time that guy came up to her, I don't know.
01:05:54
Speaker
The next year we did it, it was much broader and we had much more rock and roll presence. 100% less whippets. 100% less whippets. We had Higbee there for one year. John Higbee came in. He was amazing. The year I'm thinking of, we actually had it at a venue that was doing more rock shows. It was like an after hours diner bar type place.
01:06:24
Speaker
and it was a great place called the Blue Star and it was great. And so we had some bands get up there, Higbee, we had a burlesque, we had some burlesque routines and the two genius ones, again, we had some yo-yo stuff and like people just yo-yo things, but the one that was fun was I stole a classic from the NYU,
01:06:52
Speaker
a yo-yo club from the late 90s where I got a spiked yo-yo, like made a spiked yo-yo which opened so that like pointy stuff would come out and we put our burlesque dancer in balloons and then proceeded to do
01:07:11
Speaker
proceeded to do different around the world side tricks to pop the balloons off of the burlesque dance. So I was there at the NYU Yo-Yo Club contest when that was debuted.
01:07:29
Speaker
And it was an X-brain when the clutch was disengaged, right? So the hands would come out. So they had drilled holes in the body of the yoyo so that when the forearms of the clutch went out, each of those forearms extruded a spike through the edge of the, through the edge of the rims. So when it was at, only when it was at full speed were the spikes out. So you could still technically catch it, quote unquote,
01:07:59
Speaker
safely. My engineering was seen as how I'm not an NYU engineering student. I use the centrifugal force bending some thin metal. So what was the other one? We had another act, the most dangerous trapeze, where one of my buddies went back to the crowd. And
01:08:24
Speaker
we pretended that he pulled his junk out because I don't think that he was actually going to do it and then do a trapeze over junk. So we must have done the pocket circus at the five star, at least two years then. As someone who has actually pulled his junk out and done a trapeze on it, I can safely say that what your friend did was probably a much smarter option. Yeah, because that was the thing with like, can we actually do this? And he was willing to actually be like, yeah, but this is, yeah, it's not. But then my favorite though was the burlesque year where
01:08:54
Speaker
We got and this was because this was a true show of some yo-yo skill was we had national champion Patrick Mitchell get up there and actually do loops and knock the pasties off the burlesque dancer. Wow. That's solid. He stepped up. I said I said I didn't really give him much.
01:09:23
Speaker
head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head, head,
01:09:49
Speaker
So yeah, so that was, you know, so it was fun. And it was, you know, so I was able to do the contest the way that, you know, I thought was a good contest. It was a fun event. That's great. Yeah. And then, uh, Steve and then, and then, and then, and then things kind of went south. Things overbalanced.
01:10:14
Speaker
I'm going to say my side of it and then Steve can correct me because this is where Steve and I parted ways on the yo-yo contest world where there is a shift. Here knowing me and Steve Brown are the people that I point out as the leaders of this, I don't know how much.
01:10:41
Speaker
It was, no, we got to do contests the right way. Maybe in the right way. Well, there's a way that we're going to do it. It's going to be the right way. If we ever want to be taken seriously, we got to, we got to do them all the right way. It's like, no, man, it's for the love, for the love. You can't, it's just, you gotta, how can you do what? You know, but I lost, I lost the argument. The, the, the, this is the, I don't know how this coincident fit coincided with the shift
01:11:10
Speaker
into the International Yo-Yo Federation, National Yo-Yo League, where the world's left Orlando. We can't get into that story. That's a whole other podcast. But at some point, it was dictated that if you were going to be an official regional contest, you had to do it a certain way. And I went, no. And I stopped doing Southwest Regionals. Yeah.
01:11:40
Speaker
So here's what was happening. The quality of the regionals was all over the place. And it wasn't a reflection. It was not a reflection like directly on humor contest. It was the fact that it was the fact that like you can't have your contest exist. Like the yo-yo contest were on a spectrum and too many of them were at the low end.
01:12:02
Speaker
And, but they were all feeding into the US nationals. And the problem is, is that you can't have like the two worst contests looking at you running a quote unquote, like Lucy, Goosey kind of like artsy, like more free for all sort of thing and explain to them why yours is okay and theirs is not. Which is really hilarious because yeah, while it seemed all Lucy Goosey, I also was the first contest where we had
01:12:31
Speaker
Real-time judging calculated like like spreadsheets that were legit like doing the math real-time and Analyzing it and like I remember setting stuff up on my floor just having multiple like having to
01:12:46
Speaker
Bar our laptops and people checking local area networks so that because never trust never trust the fucking Wi-Fi And so and laying all that stuff so is so that's the thing that is is Lucy is kooky is that stuff seemed yes kooky as it was on the surface like the back end of it is that you were running like a Forward think you were running a tight ship, but you were running a roll forward thinking one like tech forward. Yeah, I
01:13:12
Speaker
Um, but so the thing and philosophically forward and philosophically forward. So the thing is, is that like, this is, this is what was, we were specifically running into at the time is that we were actively trying to solicit larger companies to sponsor the entire yo-yo league plus nationals. So we were trying to get non yo-yo money into the league.
01:13:34
Speaker
but you can't have non-Yoyo money into the league when you show them one big pinnacle event and then four great regionals and then two really shitty ones. Like we were running into this problem where it was like we're trying to put together this whole package to like sell because Yoyo companies were not
01:13:53
Speaker
The amount of money that they were putting in was just dropping steadily. This would have been 2010? Yeah. This was one of the lowest points in yo-yo industry. We were desperately trying to figure out, how do we make this sustainable? To us, the only way we could figure out to make it sustainable was to get not yo-yo money in.
01:14:18
Speaker
Um, because the, the amount of money that yo-yo companies was making and they were able to contribute was not growing at all. And that was my position too, where I said, and this is, I think where you and I differentiated was that you thought that there
01:14:34
Speaker
if we did a better job, we would get more money. And I said, the money's not there. We just got to do a cheaper job. And that's why I just banked on them, like, nah, man. That's not going to happen. So we got to do it cheap. You got to make it
01:14:51
Speaker
you gotta let people put on their contest cuz i was what i said i said i'll put on my contest but i'm not gonna put on your contest right and that was the and that was something that i did a real shit job of communicating. Which is that my feeling was like alright fine like fucking do it that's great but it can't be a league event.
01:15:12
Speaker
And for me, what I was trying to do is I was trying to lock down the league stuff so that the league stuff was very consistent across the board. We could sell it to sponsors. The quality was even inconsistent across all these contests so that everybody competing in a league event trying to get to nationals would have a similar experience at every contest.
01:15:37
Speaker
I wasn't trying to stamp out like the little weird indie contest. I was just trying to clean up the league ones. Yeah. And then, and I have to say that you did say that in the, but you said it poorly and pissed me off because the way that you said it was that, no, we're not getting rid of any contest. There should be any contest. And if you guys do something really cool, we'll take it and roll it into our contest. I was like,
01:16:07
Speaker
I could totally see myself, I am positive that your recollection on that is 100% fucking right. I could totally see myself saying something like that and thinking that what I was doing in the moment was complimenting your ingenuity. And instead, I was just being a complete fucking asshole. And it was backed up because at that point, again, there was this
01:16:36
Speaker
this move with, you know, this is how we're going to do worlds all the way up and this and everyone signed on. I was like, fuck you all.
01:16:50
Speaker
Well, I mean, it was like, I mean, and we're still trying to, we're still struggling with it, right? Like, but like it is one of those things where for like, for the very specific type of competitive yo-yoing, like it's not just the way that we want it to be. It's the way that people competing want it to be.
01:17:09
Speaker
They want that consistency from one event to the next because they view it as they're spending their year hitting all these different contests to hone that routine for worlds. And if they're having to play to a different judging system every time, it fucks them up. Yeah, but then right there, you're pointing out that people are making routines to
01:17:30
Speaker
work towards a judging system, not making a routine that's awesome, and then having the judging system follow it. And that's why I don't like leading with a judging system. And that's fair, but the reality is the judging system changes. The judging system, in order to keep a consistent
01:17:52
Speaker
Like in order to keep like a stable, consistent, repeatable judging system, the judging system just has to necessarily move kind of slow. So the judging system is always going to be about three to three years behind the actual like will of the players. Um, because you've got to have time to like kind of make those changes, vet those changes, talk to everybody about it, and then implement it and then fucking argue with people.
01:18:17
Speaker
And then argue with the exact same people who want those changes in the first place. It's just that now it's two years later and they're like, no, no, no, I want something different now. But it is one of those things where the goal is for the judging system to continuously evolve and reflect the will of the players and what the paradigm is at that time, what players value at that time.
01:18:42
Speaker
But anything of any scale, even at the scale that a competitive yo-yoing is operating at, which is so fucking tiny in compared to the rest of the world, even just at our tiny little scale, it's still big boats turn slow. That was when the BLC went independent.
01:19:06
Speaker
like Southwest Regionals became its own contest. Brian like Glass Eye worked with Duncan to put it on put on the regional at Disney. And I went to another hip little shopping joint off of like Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood proper.
01:19:28
Speaker
that had like a skate shop and was owned by an urban outfitters. And they were actually connected with the, I think they're the same developers, the lab. And yeah, it was, and we went there and actually we did, we did busking style judging for that contest. Nice. Oh, that's right. You printed fake money. Because what happened was at that point I was like, we're doing an independent contest and
01:19:58
Speaker
I'm going to blame Tyler Severance, but I think it was somebody quoting Tyler. Somebody was looking down their nose at me in some interaction, kind of giving me shit like, nobody's going to show up to your contest if you're not offering prize money. Because I'm like, it's a young contest. You know, like, Ernie from general, yo, always a fucking supporter. He's going to show up. You know, like, this, we're going to get stuff from the skate shop. We're going to be fine. You know? Nah.
01:20:28
Speaker
No, like yo-yoing has grown beyond your little street stuff. You need prize money. So I went, fine, fucker. We're going to do stripper style. We give everybody fake fucking money that we get. Like all of the, all of the money that was, uh, your, your admission fee.
01:20:47
Speaker
your admission fee, you gave it to us. We gave it to you back in like monopoly money. And anybody else, anybody could buy monopoly money. When somebody went up and did the routine, people literally threw cash at them. Whoever had the most cash at the end, won. And however much cash you had, where's your prize money?
01:21:10
Speaker
fucking fantastic. But we couldn't call it stripper style. So that's what I call it. Bus crew style judgment. That's a nice little pivot. I think I think you should go back to stripper style. I think you should just straight up. You should hand out garter belts. Make it make it like real old timey strippers. Look at the gams on that dame. Oh, yeah. So we did that for at least
01:21:39
Speaker
two years, at least two years, we, we had that. And, um, and it was great. And then we had in Hollywood.
Future of Yoyo Contests and Youth Involvement
01:21:50
Speaker
So here's, here's the thing now is that now that it is, it has taken a lot of work from a lot of people to kind of get the national yoga league a little more solidified and get the IYYF solidified and get
01:22:03
Speaker
you know, the national contests and the worlds and like all these like regionals and things like that. The regional system in Japan runs like fucking clockwork. The regional system in the US is better than it used to be. Um, but now we don't, and especially because, you know, of fucking lockdown and the pandemic, like yo-yo contest just took such a giant fucking hit.
01:22:28
Speaker
But now what we need to do is now that we've got those like, you know, very reliable, repeatable systems in place. Now we need to work on the silly fun shit. Like we need, we need 44 clash to come back. We need BLC to, you know, to come back. We need, um,
01:22:47
Speaker
you know, we need a triple D kind of thing. We need more fun, creative, silly shit where yo-yo players can like come in and just cut loose and enjoy themselves. Um, you've got Scales Collective doing some interesting fun things outside of the contest system, but they're still very like contest focused. You know what I mean? They're still very like, we are competitive yo-yoers looking for a better way to be competitive yo-yoers.
01:23:14
Speaker
Which is, you know, very fun for competitive yo-yoers, but for, you know, random punk rat kids who like doing yo-yo tricks, like it's not the fucking jam. So, so we need more, we definitely need to find a way to interject more silly fun shit into the yo-yo contest scene. Because again, like even when you're doing it like this, yo-yo players still only want to show up for a fucking contest.
01:23:39
Speaker
So, you know, we've got to find a way to make that contest like just a different experience. I've always been really amazed with yo-yo players that like so many kids at this age, like this very specific age and time in their lives are so hesitant when it comes to like DIY stuff.
01:24:01
Speaker
like there was there was just something I mean like us in our like early 20s like man we would try anything twice you know and so many of these kids like they're just so hesitant to do it and I don't know I don't know if it's just because everybody feels like the stakes are higher I don't know if they feel like they have like you know they're looking at like nationals and worlds and they feel like they need to somehow live up to like this higher standard or what it is but like
01:24:28
Speaker
You know, we need more, we need more of these guys to just be like, I'm going to get this VFW hall. I'm going to fucking do it. And so that, yeah. And that's an experience that. It's almost like they don't get to have like the one that I got to have where, okay. So the last BLC that I helped organize, I was trying to get Leo was, I think the guy that I was like, you can do this. Yeah. And like, and I was trying to get like these guys to help and they,
01:24:59
Speaker
I was trying to make it their contest and they did and it was almost like they didn't kind of realize it, you know, and or that they did. They said afterwards like, oh, wait, I'm doing this. I'm like, yeah, because you can't. I'm just here to have your back. Yeah. And I realized it just made me flash back to the contest where the one the contest where Billy Woods was still alive and I ran Southwest Regionals and it was
01:25:27
Speaker
It was awesome. I mean, like Bill showed up, said, you did a great job. Like I so can thought, I thought this was his contest, but he, no, he was just like, you did a good job. Like he could have said, you did a good job with my contest, you know, like, and take a job. And I was like, dude, it
Conclusion and Empowerment of New Organizers
01:25:44
Speaker
felt great. It was fine, man. And it was like, those happy that I took it and ran with it, you know, and I wish,
01:25:53
Speaker
that some of these younger guys would realize how happy it would make us old guys to watch them take it and run with it. Yeah. I'm Steve Brown. And I'm Mark McBride. And this has been YoYo Player, a podcast about the modern history of yo-yoing from two guys who helped make it. See you next time.
01:26:47
Speaker
Thank you.