The following summer was Worlds 2001. This was a huge event for AAA because with the exception of Huber, Taylor, and Sky all of the major American AAA players were there. (Rick Wyatt even held a AAA workshop.) But the true impact came from the fact that a whole new batch of material came over from Japan. Jun returned and had Double Trapeze down and had even added Double Eli Hops to it. Masanobu, who I’m told is pretty much the other half of the hard core Japanese AAA innovators, showed up with a slew of Velvet variations that were killer and elegant. The biggest problem with AAA tricks was that the new ones that were created were often too clunky and stupid and died on the drawing board. But the Japanese came over with cool, smooth new moves and really showed us that more AAA moves were right there! Another move that Jun was showing off and had caused a real buzz before I even got to meet him was an Assisted Seasick. It was called Assisted because it used the same one short string for the freehand (now being called the Assistant) mount that Assisted Suicide had, but then the dominant yo was threaded over and mounted into a split bottom mount and Seasick was pulled off of that. It really opened the flood gate and I remember standing around with Masanobu (who by the second day of the contest was my new hero) just seeing what all we could do Assisted... Barrel rolls, Split the Atom, Thread the Needle (which turned out to be really cool Assisted), and so on.

The other happening that helped really re-energize me at Worlds ‘01 was less involved. One night weeks earlier the idea of a AAA Zipper reentered my head. I was out dancing, not talking to anyone as I was shaking my groove thing and gauking at half naked go-go dancers and I suddenly got really obsessed with the idea of this mount. I had tried working it out months earlier after Krembrule had put me in touch with a kid who said he had, but it hadn’t panned out for me. So standing there, 1:30 in the morning, staring at beautiful women it made sense to me... and it was a Velvet mount! I labored for a while but was having a bitch of a time landing it. At Worlds I showed what I could do to the DXL guys and James Lac in his infinite wisdom says, “Just shorten your strings.” Brilliant! I shortened my strings and all of the sudden every AAA move seemed to work better. Again I kicked myself for not thinking of it earlier. It was doubly insulting because back in college I always shortened my string (and Steve used to even make fun of me for it) and then got out of the habit when I went pro and changing my string every day.

On a more grand note, another historical AAA significance of Worlds ‘01 was that it was the first major contest where AAA moves were done in competition. The guys responsible for this were Felix and Jun.

In the end it was significant enough of an event that we called everyone together and the new 2001 dynasty was instated.

After the contest I was talking to Steve Brown about how cool it was to see that AAA had made it to Japan (They even called it Triple A; Masanobu had “AAA Player” on his business card!) and Steve said, “Yeah it was really cool to see that them building on that AAA mount I came up with.” After I hung up, I snidely snickered to myself, “He made up?” Thinking that he was referring to the Double Gunslinger Variations he had pulled out for the Duncan video. “Who does he think he is? Huber was doing a kick ass Double gunslinger with variations at least a year ago. And I had built a Mach 10 mount out of that nine months ago.” But I was a sucker. Steve was making a reference to The Assisted and I just want to set it out there that the first recorded Assisted Trick was Assisted Suicide which was Steve’s (although many people mistakenly call Rick Wyatt the originator. He’s probably the tricks biggest advocate, but not its daddy.) Later, when I had my dumb-assness pointed out to me, I was telling Steve about all these cool Assisted things I had been playing with with Masanobu and Felix and he said, “What’s funny is that after I first did Assisted Suicide, I tried out other things and was doing an Assisted Braintwister and thought it was too silly to really show people.”