This is Hajime Miura. And in a few moments, he is about
to completely and utterly blow the minds of the hundreds of spectators gathered here today
to watch the 2019 World Yo-Yo Contest finals. After his performance, the last of the night, the results come in. Third place: Yuki Uchida, a clutch finish by the Japanese yo-yo
player who eek-ed out his best placement to date by just one-tenth of a point. Second place: Tsubasa Onishi, a veteran of the 4A division who could now boast a staggering total
of nine top-three 4A finishes at Worlds. And finally, the first place announcement. As the audience awaits the final result, chatters in the crowd begin to swell ever-so-slightly. Understandably, this is because the 2019 4A world champion is about to be declared. But, keen observers have also noticed that
the placements so far don’t quite seem to add up. Presumably, first place is about to go to Hajime Miura; it just seems inevitable. But where does that leave Rei Iwakura? Rei is the most decorated 4A yo-yo player of all-time, and in this moment, holds five
4A world champion titles under his belt. This year, he was no slouch,
and while his performance may not have been as electrifying as Hajime’s, his yo-yo mastery is
still extremely polished and highly technical. It would be quite unfortunate if he had somehow
slipped down to the fourth place position. slipped down to the fourth place position.
(Congratulations, Japan!) (Rei Iwakura!) Yo-yos are one of history's oldest known toys. Dating as far back as Ancient Greece, intermittent
records of individuals playing with a disc attached to a string have cropped up
throughout the history of humanity. There have been ebbs and flows in how the
yo-yo has developed over the years, but our story today starts in the early ‘90s, during
the advent of modern competitive yo-yoing. In 1992, the first recurring, annual
Yo-Yo Championship was held at the International Jugglers' Association convention
in Montreal, Canada. Six years later, in 1998, the yo-yo community broke free from the jugglers
and formed their own, independent event, the World Yo-Yo Championships. From there, the event
would be rebranded two more times, first becoming the “World Yo-Yo Competition” in 1999, and then
later the “World Yo-Yo Contest” in the year 2000, the name that would ultimately stick. And thanks to a wave of
interest surrounding modern yo-yoing during this time, the competitive yo-yoing scene
continued to grow. By 2013, the annual contest was now overseen by an official, global governing
body, the International Yo-Yo Federation. In competitive yo-yoing, there are
five primary categories of play, named 1A, 2A, 3A, 4A, and… 5A, respectively. The first category, 1A, is yo-yo play at its most
conventional. We all know, fundamentally, what 1A yo-yoing is, because we are all familiar with how
a basic yo-yo works. That being said, you would be surprised by how far people have been able to
push tricks with just a basic, standard yo-yo. In 1998, the second category, 2A, joined
the fold. 2A is the natural extension of 1A: you have two hands, why not use two
yo-yos? However, note that in the 2A style, each yo-yo operates mutually-exclusive from one
another, looping in a variety of different ways, but never directly into one another. So, to remedy this, we introduce the third category, 3A. In 3A, two yo-yos are once again in play, but now,
they must interweave and compound together to create complex and elaborate string tricks.
The 3A division arguably houses one of the most technical styles of yo-yo play, and is Hajime
Miura’s primary category of competition. Next, we have 4A, or “off-string” yo-yo.
Performances in 4A involve a lot of airtime on the part of the yo-yo, one of the main benefits
of no longer being beholden to the string. One side-effect of the unstrung nature of
the 4A style is that there is no apparent limit to the number of yo-yos that can be
used at once. This enables competitors to perform special tricks using two yo-yos instead
of the ordinary one yo-yo, using a specialized technique known as “soloham.” Finally, there is 5A: a freehand, counterweight-based style of yo-yoing, in
which the yo-yo is no longer tied to the player’s finger, and is instead balanced out by
a small weight at the other end of the string. And now we’re up to speed
on modern competitive yo-yoing, I strongly recommend checking it out. Hajime Miura is God’s smile shining
onto the world of yo-yo. Born in 2003, Hajime began to play yo-yo when he was just seven
years-old after attending a local yo-yo event. A year later, he had picked up the 3A yo-yoing
style, which he used to win his first notable competition, the 2012 West Japan Yo-Yo
Contest. Only two short years later, in 2014, Hajime Miura completed an incredibly prestigious
“grand slam” tournament run, winning a national, multinational, and world yo-yo competition
all in one year. And he did this at the impressive age of only 10 years-old. Hajime’s World Yo-Yo Contest victory in 2014 ended the
three-year-long winning streak of the defending world champion, Hank Freeman, who, up until earlier that year, had
been an obvious shoe-in for first place. During his three-year reign, Hank’s 3A performances had
towered in quality compared to his competitors, resulting in an average margin of victory of
almost 10 points (out of 100) over each past year’s second place player. But in 2014, Hajime
gave Hank a taste of his own medicine, coming out of the blue to beat the once unstoppable
3A threepeat-holder by a handsome 9.9 points. And, of course, 2014 was just the beginning. Hajime’s dominance in 3A is the most
long-standing, active dynasty to currently exist in competitive yo-yoing across all styles of play,
with his current reign making up over one-third of the entire history of 3A world champions. His
six-time World Yo-Yo Contest winning streak is tied for the longest world champion title streak
in the history of modern competitive yo-yoing, matched only by Shinji Saito’s six-year run
in the 2A division from 2002 to 2007. And as a cherry-on-top, Hajime’s performances make up a
spotless World Yo-Yo Contest resume, with every single one of Hajime’s 3A appearances resulting
in a first-place finish, making him six-for-six. It is wholly uncontroversial to state
that, as of right now, Hajime Miura is the greatest 3A yo-yo player of all-time. But this story isn’t about the 2019 3A finals. Hajime was already slated to win that division,
and he did, impressively and unsurprisingly. Hajime Miura first dipped his toes into 4A
competition the year following his first 3A World Yo-Yo Contest victory. That year, in 2015, he won
first place at a regional yo-yo contest in Japan, and placed fourth at the Japan National Yo-Yo
Contest. Two years later, at the multinational 2017 Asia Pacific Yo-Yo Championship, he swept
both the 3A and 4A divisions for first place. But it wasn’t until the 2018 World Yo-Yo
Contest that Hajime would first bring his 4A yo-yoing talents to the big stage. That year, Hajime did the unthinkable, accompanying his 3A victory with an
incredible win in the 4A division as well. This dual accomplishment makes him
the first and only yo-yo player to ever win two separate championship
divisions in one year. As it turns out, Shohei Ohtani is
not the only once-in-a-lifetime, two-way phenom to come out of Japan. So, coming into 2019, expectations are set high: if there’s one thing that you’re
looking out for at this World Yo-Yo Contest, it’s how Hajime Miura is going to answer
the question: “what can he do next?” And, right out of the gate, Hajime starts
his routine by launching two unstrung yo-yos into the air to begin a series of soloham
tricks. So far, this is not necessarily unusual; historically, and especially as of recent years,
soloham tricks have made their way into high-level 4A routines as a way for competitors to add
variety to their repertoire of moves. But as the performance goes on,
Hajime maintains his soloham setup. And slowly, it begins to dawn on everyone in the room that for the duration of this routine,
Hajime Miura will only perform soloham. If you’re not familiar with the yo-yo scene
- and odds are that you’re not - it’s hard to overstate how baffling this decision is.
While not technically the first of its kind, watching a routine like this one is kind of
akin to sitting down to watch an NBA game, only to witness one of the teams accurately and
exclusively shoot threes for the entire match. But after his performance ends, you have
an idea of what happens next. Not first, not second, not third. Not even fourth. There are two more things I want to tell you
about in this story before this video is over. First, I’m going to explain why this happened,
why Hajime placed so far from the money. And then, I’m going to talk about
what all of this really means. There are a few good reasons why it was
unprecedented for Hajime to perform an exclusively soloham routine. For one, the
technique is evidently difficult, which adds an element of risk and variance to a form of
competition that relies heavily on consistency. And while many members of the upper echelon
of 4A possess a degree of mastery that makes performing soloham tricks far from impossible, its
presence in competition is quite uncommon. Of the 30 total minutes of 4A performance in the 2019
finals, only 4 minutes and 40 seconds consisted of soloham tricks, with Hajime and Rei accounting
for the overwhelming majority of them. And beyond difficulty, there are further caveats that come
with the style: soloham tricks cannot easily be done in quick succession, due to the time it takes
to set up each trick; and certain trick elements, such as throwing the yo-yo horizontally, are
simply infeasible when two yo-yos are in play. These constraints impact what are roughly
the three key features of a competitive yo-yo performance: trick difficulty,
trick frequency, and trick variety. The way that yo-yo performances are scored is
through the usage of two tally clickers, one in each hand. In one hand, you click for positive
points. And in the other hand, you click for negative points. Afterwards, you subtract the negative
from the positive, and then normalize everyone’s scores to get a final technical execution score.
This value is a key decider in where a competitor ultimately places; the players with the highest
technical execution scores are very often the players that win. And if we look at the final
scorecard for the 2019 4A finals, there is an immediate discrepancy in the
technical execution column: Hajime’s score is tied for last. While this outcome is pretty
incompatible with the average eye test, ultimately, it turns out that these results track
based on the factors mentioned earlier. Hajime had a lower trick density than his competitors,
resulting in fewer opportunities to score points; there were a few moments where he repeated
tricks, which does not award points; and finally, there’s the rub, which is that the evaluation
of how many clicks a trick is worth, especially when it comes to novel, lesser known tricks, is
a subjective task on the part of the judge. By all counts, Hajime’s final placement was fair
and justifiable. Under the standard criteria of 4A yo-yo judging - criteria that Hajime is
undoubtedly deeply familiar with - there were no flukes here. At the end of the day, if you want to
win the World Yo-Yo Contest, the rules matter. But even if we can understand why, by the book,
Hajime’s 4A performance was not a tournament winner and in fact worthy of third-from-last
place, the heart tells a different story. It is trivially easy to find an endless
number of comments that revere Hajime’s 4A routine as the greatest yo-yo performance of
all-time. After the first-place announcement, many were quick to declare that Hajime had been
robbed of back-to-back 4A world champion titles. And for me, a casual observer of the yo-yoing
scene whose brain is hardwired to be obsessed with highly kinetic, execution-heavy displays
of mastery, I just didn’t get it, either. But while, for many, Hajime’s 2019 4A
placement carries a heavy asterisk next to it, his performance is also emblematic
of more than just a result. There’s a reason why yo-yo contests have a scoring
system for judging: in a yo-yo competition, you need to figure out who’s the best at yo-yoing.
But what does that mean, “best at yo-yoing”? If you were to peer into the collective
consciousness of yo-yo players, you could pull out hundreds and thousands of different conceptions
of what it means to be excellent at yo-yoing. Some players’ ideas might be
well-structured and precise, made up of clear sets of attributes, while other
players’ ideas might be fuzzy and abstract, based on gut-feelings where you know it when you
see it. And if you were to take all of these ideas and superimpose them onto one another,
you would end up with an amorphous, Joe Baseball-like blob, or what I will be calling, “cool shit”: the infinitely dimensional
venn-diagram of yo-yo beliefs and values, hot in the center, and increasingly
disparate as you approach the edges. Truly defining cool shit is simply not possible
due its ever-changing, complex, and nuanced nature. But when you’re hosting an event where
you’re trying to determine who can do the coolest shit, you have to come up with something, in
fairness to those competing, and those who oversee that competition. So, in order to address
this problem practically, we create sets of rules that try their best to approximate a reasonable
definition of something that is ultimately undefinable. If cool shit is a real-life orange,
sitting on a coffee table, then the rules are the artistic renderings we create in order to try and
capture its image. None of them will be perfect. Some of them will be distinct. And all of them
will embed and prioritize different values. This applies to almost every hobby and activity.
While organizations do hold skateboarding competitions, for example, skateboarding culture
is extremely privy to the fact that cool shit in skateboarding is deeply rules-resistant, and that
an olympic scoring system will never truly respect the creativity of someone like Gou Miyagi,
or the sheer insanity of someone like Jaws. And even in traditional sports, where the basic
parts of a game can be simply defined on paper, like how basketball is a game with two
raised baskets on each end of a court, with two teams who take turns trying to shoot a
ball into said baskets, the actual implementation of that game is an approximation that is open to
interpretation. The NBA does not have a shot clock that forces action every 24 seconds because shot
clocks are intrinsic to the essence of basketball; the NBA has a shot clock because it’s their
best attempt at a way to express that the league’s organizers, its fans, and its pros all
value a fast-pace in the game of basketball. None of this is to say that rules are inherently
good or bad, that the system is broken, or that it needs to be changed. But, sometimes, we
forget that rules are merely a tool: a reflection of cool shit, and not the other way around. So, when someone does something that is undeniably essential, but the rules fail to see that, we are
reminded that cool shit fundamentally comes from the soul. We are reminded that
when it comes to doing cool shit, the rules don’t matter.
