Tampa Bay residents juggle flames, spin donuts for Guinness World Records

It started as a way to solve bar bets: Which was the fastest game bird in Europe?

When Guinness Brewery director Sir Hugh Beaver couldn’t find an answer, he hired British researchers to compile a book of facts and figures.

The first Guinness Book of World Records came out in 1954. Because editors aimed to include the entire globe, the original continental bird question wasn’t answered. (Most likely the red-breasted merganser…)

Almost 70 years later, the book endures. People from 215 countries attempted 57,415 records in 2023. Fewer than 5,000 were approved.

Tampa Bay residents hold six records in the 2025 book. An Eckerd College student scored three new ones: Longest time juggling three flaming torches; most backflips in a minute; most juggling in one hand while hanging from the other.

A St. Petersburg parrot identified the most items in three minutes. And a Bradenton man held onto his title for doing the most donuts in a monster truck.

The only upset was a St. Petersburg man whose 2021 record was bested. He’s still in this year’s edition. But since publication, someone has cleared a game of Hungry, Hungry Hippos in less than his record 14.69 seconds.

Backflips and flaming torches

ST. PETERSBURG — His dad gave him the balls. And the basics.

Not just for juggling, for life:

Don’t look at your hands. Focus on the apex, the highest point of the arc. Watch the cross. When you drop a ball, pick it up. Try again.

Aidan Webster was 7 then. He practiced every morning while he waited for the school bus, every night while his parents and older brother watched TV.

That year, his mom enrolled him at a gymnastics class at the YMCA, where he learned to do a backflip. Then two in a row. Then three.

So a couple of years ago, after moving from Pennsylvania to enroll at Eckerd College, after being away from his gymnastics team and enduring a bad breakup, Aidan decided he needed a purpose.

He assessed his assets, started searching:

Juggling. Gymnastics.

World Records.

The first three he saw, he thought, “I can do that.”

• • •

For two years, he practiced.

While his roommates played video games and went to bars, while his classmates scrolled TikTok, Aidan rose at sunrise, walked from his dorm to the beach and spent an hour, at least, throwing bean bags, clubs, torches.

After classes, between working at a dive shop, producing music and studying in a lab, Aidan snuck into the forest to throw custom knives high into the trees. “I didn’t want to alert campus security.”

At sunset, he returned to the sand to practice backflips. Or he hit the gym to do pull-ups and hang by one arm.

“People my age don’t have hobbies anymore,” he said. “I like to create things, not consume.”

He singed his fingers with lamp oil, scarred his hands with the blades, strained his abdominals doing backflips. “Risk makes it fun.”

Aidan is 21 now, a senior at Eckerd, majoring in oceanography. He talks quickly, earnestly explaining juggling angles and art, cascades and cadences, muscle memory, mental focus, velocity, force, the rhythm of aligning objects as they’re floating through the air.

“There’s a satisfaction to the control you have making the patterns align.”

When he’s juggling three balls, he can listen to a podcast. With more, he has to concentrate — and block out everything else.

“I do it for the skills, not the show,” he said. “It’s therapy. I like getting lost in it.”

• • •

He rehearsed for three records, hoping to break one. But on a July day in 2023, in front of two dozen witnesses, time-keepers and photographers, he set all three. In less than an hour.

“People work their whole lives, tattoo and transform their bodies, endure all kinds of obstacles to get a single record,” he said later. “I hit lightning.”

He started in the gym that day: Hung by one arm for a minute while juggling two balls, a total of 162 catches.

Then he stood in the sand and, in one minute, flew through 11 backflips.

The flaming torches were last. For 5 minutes and 2.31 seconds, he kept three spinning.

Since then, Aidan has broken two more records: He bested his torch juggling by adding a fourth. And he set a new record for the longest juggling of five knives.

So what if someone pops off more backflips? Or juggles torches longer? Or keeps more knives in the air?

“If I really wanted to, I could do five torches, maybe six knives.”

He’s also working on his box jump. He can already leap into a pickup truck from standing: five feet. The record is five feet, seven inches.

“I can do that.”

— Lane DeGregory

Hungry for Hungry Hungry Hippos

Donald McNeill didn’t grow up with a burning desire to be a record-breaking Hungry Hungry Hippos competitor.

He’d actually lived his first 30 years never having played the game of marble-gobbling, mechanical hippos.

That changed in January 2021 when McNeill read an article — “one of those ones you see when you scroll way too far down a news page,” he said — about Manchester United defender Axel Tuanzebe. The footballer had set the Guinness record for fastest time clearing a Hippos game.

Still in a period of pandemic-induced boredom, McNeill texted his friends in the group chat.

“Hey. What if … .”

The appeal wasn’t the specific record, but appearing in the book he remembered coveting so much at elementary school book fairs.

“The (Guinness) photo that stands out in my mind were the two big guys on motorcycles,” he said. “I think they were the world’s heaviest twins, and they rode Harleys together.”

So began the journey of a customer service guy for an elevator repair company to challenge a professional athlete at a game of … dexterity? … timing? … luck?

“Well, I don’t know,” said McNeill. “There was really no preparation or strategy or anything at all like that.”

He purchased a game board on Amazon and tested it out a couple times at home to make sure he was fast enough. He found the rules for attempting a record on the Guinness website. He’d need to film it in regular speed and slow motion, show there were exactly 20 marbles and inspect the game board on camera with a level.

He arrived at St. Petersburg’s Critical Hit Games, a tabletop game store he frequented, wearing a suit, dramatically removed his sunglasses, and, with a gloved hand, cleared the game board in 14.69 seconds, beating Tuanzebe’s time by 2.67 seconds.

For the next three years, McNeill had a great line for share-a-fact-about-yourself situations, a cool plaque on his wall and a reason to chuckle whenever he came across a Hippos game board in the wild, like at Barnes & Noble. He moved on, moved to Lutz and became a financial advisor. His name appears in the latest edition of the Guinness World Records book.

Then he got an email from a Tampa Bay Times reporter asking how he felt about someone breaking his record. That’s how he got the news that Malaysia’s Lim Kai Yi had bested his record in October with a time of 11.47 seconds.

He went to bed that night thinking he’d accepted it. The record had always been a goof. He’d made it into the book, had his fun. “Let them have it,” he thought.

But the next day, a different thought crept in.

“I always thought when someone broke it I’d be fine being ‘former record holder,” he said. “But man, now that it’s here I’m conflicted, like, should I try to take it back?’”

— Christopher Spata

A precocious parrot

ST. PETERSBURG — Four-and-a-half-year-old Apollo loves his favorite snack (pistachios) and toys (tiny plastic Wario and Shrek figurines). And like other precocious children, he’s often quick to answer questions — sometimes replying before his dad can finish asking.

“What’s this called, Apollo?” Dalton Mason, 26, pointed to a paper pamphlet in his hand.

“Book!” the internet-famous African Grey parrot groaned.

“Very good,” Dalton smiled and held up a stainless steel bowl. “What’s this made of?”

Apollo tapped the bowl with the curve of his beak. He looked up, cocking his head.

“Met-tal!”

Dalton’s wife, Tori Mason, presented a pistachio. Apollo leaned over and crunched it heartily.

Then it was time for another round of questions.

The Masons found Apollo in December 2020 after spending the year mourning a pair of caiques that died in an accident. He was on sale for $1,700 at Animal House Pet Center in St. Petersburg and turned out to be a pretty great investment. Since his parents started posting him online in September 2021, Apollo has attracted 1.64 million followers on YouTube and 2.9 million on TikTok.

Tori and Mason grew the following from their St. Petersburg house-turned-bird sanctuary, posting frequent videos documenting their efforts to train Apollo. He can name the colors and materials of an object, as well as do tricks like flapping his wings on command.

The couple was inspired by the work of animal cognition expert Dr. Irene Pepperberg and her African grey parrot, Alex. In the three decades that Alex spent with Dr. Pepperberg, he learned about 50 items.

Apollo’s ability to pull quick answers out of his walnut-sized brain has not only drawn internet fame and revenue for the Masons. It also tempted a challenge from the Guinness Book of World Records. In late 2023, Apollo set the record for “most items identified by a parrot in three minutes.”

“Initially they wanted one minute, and it’s like, well, we can’t really get that many in there, because he’s gotta eat his snack in between,” Dalton said.

Apollo correctly named 12 items during the rapid-fire questioning, including a sock, block and rock. In the 2025 book, Guinness praised him as “the perspicacious parrot with a penchant for pistachios.”

These days, Apollo can be found rattling off answers at the Eckerd College Comparative Psychology Laboratory. A 2022 Tampa Bay Times article on Apollo attracted the attention of a professor at the Animal Studies Research Collaborative, and students have been studying him ever since.

— Gabrielle Calise

Spinning donuts in a monster truck

It started with a tiny truck – toy-sized, shin-high.

From the time he was old enough to form memories, Bari Musawwir was obsessed with wheels: cars and buses, semis and tractors. But it was Monster Trucks that really revved his engine.

Well, you can’t drive a monster truck when you’re 6, so his parents bought him a radio-controlled miniature instead. Musawwir was hooked.

He’d set up makeshift courses with ramps and tracks in the yard, and twice a year — for the better part of the next decade — he’d beg his parents for rides to competitions where he’d race against other kids and adults. The events were often in middle-of-nowhere Ohio, set up in the atrium of a Holiday Inn.

It turned out Musawwir’s passion was matched by his talent. By the time he was a college student in Tampa, he was traveling the country to race other eager hobbyists — mechanics nerds who loved how creativity merged with science on the track. Still, he was dreaming of sitting behind the wheel of the real deal.

Magic struck in 2006 when a Monster Jam official saw Musawwir race.

“Man, if you can drive a radio control truck that good, you can drive the real thing,” Mussawir remembers the guy saying.

It took time for the transition, but in 2011, Musawwir, 29 at the time, traded his 12-pound mini-truck for a 12,000-pound Monster Truck and became Monster Jam’s Rookie of the Year.

But the glory didn’t stop there.

Musawwir raced another eight seasons, launching his truck off of ramps more than 30 feet into the air, doing backflips and wheelies and living on “that ragged edge of controlled chaos,” until everything came to a halt in 2020.

With the season on a pandemic pause, Musawwir prepared to hang up his helmet for the foreseeable future. Then he got a call.

A group of drivers were getting together at a track in Bradenton to try and set a series of World Records. Did Musawwir want to try for one of his own?

He showed up to the track with his truck, “Zombie,” and set out to complete the most monster truck donuts in a minute.

It was trickier than he had imagined. The truck engines aren’t made to run full throttle for a minute without pause, so he had to make sure it didn’t overheat. He had to balance speed with his turn radius to stop the truck from toppling over.

Musawwir managed to net 44 donuts, minting him as the Guinness World Record Holder for the most in a single minute. He set a second record that same day — the most consecutive monster truck donuts — when he kept spinning to complete 58 in a row.

When the record was called, he said it felt pretty surreal — and not just because he was dizzy.

“To be able to live out my childhood dream and do something so unique is pretty awesome,” said Musawwir.

The only thing cooler? Seeing his son follow in his footsteps. The 11-year-old is sticking to the miniatures for now, but Musawwir said a bigger truck is likely in his future.

“Maybe one day we could actually race together,” Musawwir said. “I’m hoping I can last.”

— Lauren Peace