Tulsa has a new celebrity but he’s not a musician or an actor. Instead, he wants to make the city the boomerang capital of the United States.
Thomas Sargis had been in Tulsa for about a year when he went online to find out where he should throw his boomerang. On Reddit, his handle is Shared Honey, which goes back to his roots.
“I think probably everybody in the Middle East shares this tradition, but we’ll have bread, lavash, it’s popularly called. You’ll have a little plate with honey in the middle of the table and everyone will scoop from it with the lavash and, it’s a little gross, but it’s family,” Sargis said.
Sargis moved to Green Country from California for the Tulsa Remote program. He’s a self-described “shy guy” by nature. He does have a few friends he hangs out with at a local cigar bar, but was looking to branch out.
He took a vacation outside of Oklahoma to Massachusetts. The trip wasn’t as fun as he hoped. One night, Sargis was watching an improv comedy show. The performers kept talking about boomerangs. That’s when he had a lightbulb moment. He had to buy one.
“It was almost a self-care move. I said, you know what, I’ll spend a little bit of money on something silly,” Sargis said.
He finally got his boomerang in the mail after waiting over a month. Then he made a post with a five-letter obscenity about trying to find friendly a park.
“At first, I was like, it (the post) is a little crass, but once I got to actually throwing it, you really gotta chuck the thing,” Sargis said.
The post caught fire. Sargis became a Tulsa celebrity. He’s done some guest bartending, chatted with an Australian boomerang documentarian and had people honk at him in the park while he was boomeranging.
He even made some friends in real life because of his post. Sargis and the rest of the “Kitty Gang,” an urban farming and art cooperative, meet every Wednesday at Wildflower Café off Route 66. James Taylor is the leader of the gang and liked Sargis’ style.
“I immediately wanted to participate in the shenanigans,” Taylor said.
Taylor made a boomerang T-shirt because he thought it would create a community.
“I thought the shirt was a good way to make a group of random people that don’t know each other but have some random thing that they liked,” Taylor said.
The shirts have been selling coast to coast. One post on social media shows a former Tulsan wearing the shirt in Baltimore and other people have been repping Sargis in California.
Proceeds from selling the shirt are going towards the creation of a Tulsa boomerang club. Boosters say they want to make the city the boomerang capital of the country.
There is a ticking clock to how long Sargis believes he can fling the boomerang. He has femoroacetabular impingement, or FAI. It’s a condition where an extra bone grows along the bones that form the hip joint. Sargis gives himself a few more years of throwing.
“I was just laughing cause it (throwing the boomerang) is not smart, probably,” Sargis said. “I shouldn’t be doing probably any of this, but I think that I probably have five more years of really getting away with it.”
The disease isn’t degenerative but can be quite painful.
He’s not slowing down right now. In fact, he’s considering ranging, or throwing the boomerang around some local landmarks, in town soon.
Sargis' favorite Tulsa park is Dream Keepers. That was the most suggested park on the original post for him to throw. That's also where he gave some tips on how to sling the boomerang, though he admitted it’s just a fun pastime.
Sargis said you want to throw the boomerang at a 45-degree angle and in a similar way to how you’d serve a tennis ball. If the boomerang is thrown wrong, it will fly straight up and behind the person throwing it. If that happens, it can be very entertaining. Sargis enjoys teaching people how to throw and the funny results of first-timers.
“I love showing new people, because sometimes when it does that, it’ll come back in so fast that it will sink into this very coarse and rough ground,” Sargis said. “It will stick in like Excalibur. It’s so sick.”
Sargis knows how to catch the boomerang but opts for looking cool sometimes. It can lead to some bruises, but he enjoys going for style over substance when he’s boomeranging.
“The way you want to start catching it as a beginner is to clamp it, but this thing is all about style. Nah, I’m kidding,” Sargis said.
He is pretty good at kidding around. Sargis turned a silly purchase and joke post online into a community of friends in Tulsa.
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