UCLA’s Yo-yo Kid has world on a string

The neon green yo-yo swings in front of Ian Johnson, looping left, right and in nearly every direction as his fingers play puppeteer.

With a flick of his wrist and a few fingers, the yo-yo flies off the string and high into the air. He whips the string backwards behind his back and then forward to effortlessly catch the yo-yo.

“It’s like, yo-yoing is a hobby,” says the first-year business economics student. “It’s an art form. It’s a sport, and it’s just, like, a simple toy.”

With the nontraditional sport, Johnson, the current off-string yo-yo national champion, has captivated thousands.

“Yo-yoing honestly has changed my life,” he said. “It’s taken me so many places, both literally and figuratively.”

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Many basketball backboards are scattered around Johnson’s hometown of Hebron, Illinois. Each is a landmark bearing an inscription, something the near 1,200-person town is known for. Fittingly, one of them reads, “Ian Johnson: The Yo-yo Kid.”

The nickname has become his reputation; it’s been that way for so long his mom, Lois Johnson, aptly calls it “standard.”

At just 11 years old, Ian Johnson captured his first yo-yo contest win. In these competitions, participants of all ages choreograph three-minute yo-yo freestyle routines to music for judge’s evaluations.

After his first win, he began competing in any contest he could find within 400 miles, sometimes even farther.

Just three years later, a major yo-yo company, YoYoJam, sponsored him. By 16, Johnson appeared on America’s Got Talent, advancing all the way to the quarterfinals.

In between, he performed at local high school football games, town events and won smaller talent contests, impressing many along the way.

“He just kind of wows people wherever he goes,” said Matt Buetsch, one of Johnson’s best friends.

At first, Johnson was just a 10-year-old boy with a toy. But yo-yoing soon became more for him as he focused on hitting the next new trick and knocking down the next new challenge.

“I never really started with … the mindless up and down,” he said. “I was always jumping head first into the better tricks and it was always just pushing myself further.”

The key to The Yo-yo Kid’s success lay in his passion for the sport, and in his desire to improve constantly.

And so months before competing, Johnson would commit to a strict practice regime, buckling down especially for the biggest annual contests: the World Yo-Yo Contest in August and the national championships in October.

For the first few weeks, he’d plan and cut together music for his routine as each trick, each crowd-pleasing display had to be planned precisely to a specific time in the song.

With his routine ironed out, Johnson spent hundreds of hours practicing. In almost daily practice sessions, he immersed himself in his yo-yoing, focusing his mind solely on practicing his routine over and over again to almost near flawless execution.

The sessions could last anywhere from one to five hours, and by the close, he’d be drenched in sweat, physically and mentally exhausted.

“I think Ian likes yo-yoing so much because he realizes that this is something that is his own,” said John Narum, a former fellow yo-yo competitor and one of Johnson’s best friends. “It’s something that he’s able to lose himself in the moment with.”

With such dedication to his craft, Johnson’s emotions sometimes run high. His practices are often filled with yelling, and one day even, after a few drops of the yo-yo too many, he wound up breaking a door at his house.

“He gets really into it, he’s really passionate about it,” Buetsch said. “When you’re that passionate about something, and you mess up a couple times a row, it can get you down but he always comes back up.”

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Through two-thirds of his freestyle routine at last year’s world championships, Johnson was performing flawlessly. A little longer, and the title would be his.

But things quickly began to unravel. He made one mistake, followed by another. Then a few more after that. At one point, he lost the yo-yo offstage, eventually losing the competition.

Two months later, however, he was a national champion with a perfect score on his freestyle routine, just the fourth such in yo-yo contest history.

“I think one thing that Ian has over the majority of yo-yoers is (he’s) always had the skill to be a champion,” Narum said. “I think that happened finally because his defining characteristics are persistency, and his way of dealing with adversity.”

With the month of June underway, Johnson is beginning to prepare for his biggest competition yet: the World Finals in Prague in August. This year he plans to win it all, and could very well do so.

If he lands a few world titles, he might retire from competitive yo-yoing. But, there will always be a yo-yo in his pocket.

“Honestly, I think I’ll probably yo-yo for the rest of my life. I don’t see myself stopping,” he says. “It takes my mind off of anything.”