National Yo-Yo Hall of Famer Jon Gates stood in front of a table of handmade yo-yos and professional trading cards with his picture and information plastered on them on Saturday afternoon.

Gates pointed toward a man sitting with a baby in the stands, noting that he remembers when that man was a child coming to yo-yo club in a Taekwondo uniform. 

He pointed toward another man delicately flipping string around his finger, noting that he has been a member of the yo-yo club throughout his life, standing strong in the hobby during some of the toughest challenges a young man could face.

Behind Gates, around 100 people sat in bleachers at the People’s Building in Aurora, watching 9-year-old Kyler Garcia perform a routine that he created on his own around two months ago before traveling to Aurora with his entire family from the Navajo Nation in New Mexico. 

The Mile High Yo-Yo Club’s “Jamboree 2: Electric Bugaloo” demonstration and informational showcase on Saturday showed that the over-2,000-year-old hobby is still alive and spinning. 

History of the club

The history of yo-yoing spirals all the way back to 440 B.C. in Greece. It’s modern era began in 1928 when Pedro Flores, a Filipino immigrant in California, opened the Yo-yo Manufacturing Company, and kickstarted the hobby.

“There is an entire world about yo-yoing. An entire universe in itself,” Gates said, mentioning that there have been spin-top toys in every culture throughout history, making it the second-oldest toy behind the doll.

The yo-yo is an extension of that age-old spin top, acting as a spin top that returns to the thrower.

Though the history of Denver’s yo-yo clubs don’t stretch all the way back to 1928, they did start with the cultural boom of yo-yoing that revived in the 1990s. 

Gates started yo-yoing in 1976 in Lincoln, Nebraska. He went pro in 1990 and traveled the world. He finally landed in Denver in the late 1990s and started the Denver Yo-Yo Club in 1998.

In 2017, Gates decided to step down. Dave Adams, a yo-yoer that was in Gates’ club when he was a child, picked the idea back up in 2019 and started the Mile High Yo-Yo Club. 

Things have exploded since.

“It’s super to exciting to see it generate this kind of interest,” Gates said. “Now, I’ve sort of become a satellite where I just get to come and hang out.”

“COVID really made everyone investigate solo hobbies,” Adams said. “Then a bunch of yo-yoers blew up on TikTok and Instagram. This convergence made a perfect storm where all of a sudden, we just have this growth.”

L.K. Richardson, a yo-yoer who now makes glass yo-yos, was a member of the yo-yo club in 1996. He said that yo-yoing is bigger now than it was then.

The club has grown so much that the National Yo-Yo League reached out to the Mile High Yo-Yo Club to hold a regional competition in Denver this year. Winners of that competition then traveled to Philadelphia for the national competition and the worldwide competition in Cleveland at the end of July.

“We’re one of the largest and most-consistent yo-yo clubs in the country,” Adams said.

Not just a toy

“Something interesting really happened in me when I started playing,” Gates said of his yo-yoing career. “It was being able to take that nervous energy that we all sort of have and put it into the sole focus of a spinning object. It allowed me to become far more focused, even when I wasn’t playing.”

Gates said his grades and focused improved when he started yo-yoing in the 1970s.

Richardson said the hobby is “something I feel I can continually get better on. I feel like I need to constantly be better than myself. It might not be something useful in life, but it’s a skill I can work on and improve.”

“I’m 55.” Adams said, “We have kids that are nine. Yo-yo is cool like that because it spans all of these generations and people will be like, ‘I played yo-yo as a kid. My dad played yo-yo. My grandpa had a yo-yo.’ Everyone has a yo-yo story.”

Garcia, the yo-yoer that traveled from New Mexico to perform on Saturday for his ninth birthday, was a shining example of Adams’ point: yo-yoing will live on.

“I wanted to show people how much I improved and how long I’ve been working on yo-yos,” Garcia said of attending the performance. “It felt nice. Sometimes when I’m performing in front of people, I get nervous, but it went great.”

About 20 members of Garcia’s family cheered fervently behind him. They all traveled to support the boy’s hobby that he picked up after watching YouTubers when he was six.

“I’m going to support him in anything he wants to do,” Joann Begay, Garcia’s grandmother, said. “It brings his personality out. To shine in front of other people has always been his forte. At birthday parties, he always grabs the mic and reads a poem or wishes somebody well. He’s a showman.”

But it’s those different walks of life walking the dog that make yo-yoing special, both Adams and Gates concluded.

“In an age where everyone wants to convince us that we’re on opposite sides of something, yo-yo reminds me that we actually have a lot in common. It restores my faith in humanity,” Adams said.

“There are people on all sides of the political spectrum in this room, entering in a time when we have vile commentary on that stuff. No one cares here. They might forget it tomorrow, but today, we’re all together.”

“We’ve got people who you may not even see hanging out together having a common language of enjoying this yo-yo. They can truly express themselves in an open way without any judgement because of this fun little thing,” Gates said.

For more information, visit milehighyoyo.com.