By JULIET ROWAN
Steve Brown makes yo-yoing look easy. With fluid grace, he loops, swings and spins his Duncan ProYo around his fingers and into the air, in sharply executed manoeuvres - not "tricks", mind you.
"A trick implies you are fooling something," says the 28-year-old American Yo-Yo Master. "Playing yo-yo is
something pure and simple, something beautiful."
The Ohio resident is one of only nine people in the world to have the title of Yo-Yo Master bestowed on them by the International Yo-Yo Museum.
He is a director of the World Yo-Yo Contest and inventor of the freehand style of yo-yoing.
In freehand, the yo-yo is attached to a counterweight rather than the finger. This allows both yo-yo and counterweight to be released during play to create extreme new moves.
The marketing and promotions co-ordinator for Duncan Toys, the world's largest yo-yo manufacturer, he is passionate about spreading the yo-yo craze his company says is sweeping the world.
This week he has been performing in shopping malls around the country.
Brown began yo-yoing a decade ago. The beauty of the sport, he says, is that anyone can do it. "Tall, short, fat, thin, ugly, cute - it's just a matter of practice."
Although New Zealand has no official yo-yo champion or clubs, Duncan Yo-yo's claim of a global craze appears to be true; registrations for this year's World Yo-Yo Contest are up 25 per cent from last year and applications for yo-yo-related patents in the United States have topped those in 1998, considered the peak of the last craze.
Yo-yos reached the height of their popularity in the 1960s. In 1985 a yo-yo was taken up on the space shuttle.
British toy retailers voted the yo-yo "craze of the 20th century" and it has been inducted into the US National Toy Hall of Fame.
GOING YO-YO
* Some say the yo-yo originated in China around 1000 B.C. Others pick Greece, where a boy is pictured playing with a disc resembling a yo-yo on a bowl dating from 500 B.C.
* The yo-yo was all the rage among the French nobility in the 18th century.
* Duncan Toys patented the yo-yo in 1929 and has since sold 1 billion of them.
* Today's most sophisticated yo-yos cost about US$100 ($152).
* One expert estimates more than 2000 tricks can be performed on a good yo-yo.
