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The Yo-Yo Man
behind his back, performing moves with the artful precision of a cowboy doing rope tricks: Two-hand looping. Milk the cow. Punching bag. Ride the horse. Cow jumped over the moon. Lay-on back loops. And at 35, Bazan is about three times the age of the typical kid who picks up a yo-yo. Standing on a 6-foot-square platform, Bazan, of Bedford, Texas, is all smiles. And why not? He's making a living at what he loves. And he's spreading the joy of yo-yos to kids everywhere. But there could be another reason for that ear-to-ear grin. Rarely does a day go by when Bazan's not chuckling about the unlikelihood of his situation. After all, he never owned a yo-yo as a child. Didn't pick one up until he was 27. LEARNING THE TRICKS He was on vacation in Montana about 10 years ago, visiting some friends, when he walked into a store and on an impulse bought a Duncan Imperial, the classic yo-yo introduced by the company in 1929. Success wasn't immediate. "I spent a week learning how to make it come back," he says.
"I'm a real competitive person," Bazan says. "And that's the thing about yo-yos - as long as you practice, you will get better and better." Bazan practiced. He'd yo-yo at work, yo-yo at home, yo-yo while watching TV and while dinner warmed in the microwave. Two months after Bazan bought his first yo-yo, he started entering contests. WHERE ARE THE KIDS? Bazan didn't see many kids at the yo-yo contests he entered. So Bazan started a yo-yo club with the local police department's outreach program geared toward elementary students. In 1998, he started his first yo-yo contest, the Bay Area Classic - now one of the largest in the world, he says. One day, about a year after he bought his first yo-yo, he got a call that changed his life. A yo-yo buddy asked him how he'd like a job in Hawaii "throwing yo-yos."Yeah right, he said, thinking his friend was joking. But the friend was serious. Team High Performance, an exhibition team of allstars that helped create the boom for yoyos in the late 1990s, hired him for their touring squad. Before this trip, he'd only been on an airplane one other time - a short hop within California. Now his job required him to fly all over Asia, North America and Europe to demonstrate yo-yos: at malls, school assemblies and wherever he could find groups of kids. Then in 2003, he started his own line of yo-yos - Buzz-On. He moved to Texas and worked out of a one-car garage, and then a two-car garage, selling his yo-yos wholesale. A year ago, he opened up a retail store in a small strip plaza. The shop, called Buzz-On Toy & Hobby, looks as though it could pass for the set of the "Monster Garage TV show," with a dash of Santa's workshop and a splash of Japanese anime subculture. His own collection of yo-yos numbers 1,500, which is smaller than it used to be, he says. THE PERFECT HANGOUT Inside, the store looks like the perfect hangout. The glass counter displays hundreds of yo-yos, including his own brand and others, which sell for as low as $2 and up to $22. Photos and news clippings and anime action figures cover the walls. You can also order custom-made yoyos, and watch Bazan make them on the lathe in the back of the shop. Someday, he hopes yo-yos might make him rich, too, and not just famous in a niche-sport sort of way. For that to happen, yo-yos will have to experience the kind of boom that periodically happens. In that case, he'll be ready to sell a lot of his own brand of yo-yos, he says. On a recent Saturday, he was working on the fundamentals with an 8-year-old girl, who couldn't quite get the yo-yo to go down and up without getting all tangled. He tells her to throw her hand down palm up "like you're saying, "Give me five!" "You'll get the hang of it," he says. "Just keep practicing." Words to live by - and not just for yo-yos. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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