What is your name?

Rob ‘The Throb’ Henman (@dimensions2000)

Where is home?

Wiltshire, England

How/when did kendama/SK become part of your life and who was involved?

I used to play diabolo in my bedroom when I was young, which involved a lot of dropping and crashing into things. My parents went away for a few days to Amsterdam and made their way to the SunRise shop and bought home a kendama and the BKA's 'how-to' DVD in the hope that the noise would die down - instead of the occasional loud noise they ended up replacing it with lots of smaller clacking instead.

SK was a gradual invasion into my life, Iain and Paul first went to BKO '16 where I barely talked to them. But over the years the consistent shouting of their own brand name ended up sticking and became something else.

Describe your play-style in three words.

Absolute Fucking Nonsense

Preferred string length/wood type/shape etc.

Short. Always Short… Well its a bit longer now, but damn all you long string weirdos who find pull up tricks difficult.

Between 4&6 nowadays

What is your most cherished kendama memory?

EKO '15 must be it. Spent a week in the middle of a field in Yorkshire with some of the top players in the world (Joris, Sweets, Oase, Void, etc). I got graded by Imada Hiromu to a 5th Dan level, making me the youngest in this hemisphere to achieve that. And then going on to win the European title on home soil, with a super tense final against Oase. Good times.

What else are you passionate about?

All things film. Finding out about new, and interesting directors and watching through a filmography is always fun and lets me find obscure films to constantly pester my friends to also watch.

Editing my own films and videos is something I enjoy also, along with getting into arguments why Avid is infinitely better than Adobe is a recent past time

And it was diabolo and juggling that got me into kendama, so it would be wrong of me to not mention all that. Any kind of prop manipulation gives off a similar buzz that kendama does.

What music do you listen to?

Metal makes up probably about 2/3s of what I listen to, the remainder would typically be made up of Post-Rock, Noise Rock or TripHop

I'll just list some of the bands I've obsessed over in the past:

Iron Maiden, Nine Inch Nails, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Massive Attack, Death Grips, Daughters, Behemoth, Deafheaven, Converge

Fun fact about yourself?

At school, I created a religion called 'bread-ism.' That'll do it, no more explanation needed.

Final thoughts/shout-outs

Why do we all travel stupid distances to play cup & ball in random fields, miles away from where we live? Because of the community, so shout out to everyone who plays kendama.