And many many other famous people through the years have played with tops.
Besides me, I know of these examples from science...
James Clerk Maxwell, arguably the greatest physicist of the 19th century, played with tops throughout his life. He also put them to very good use as scientific instruments -- e.g., when he founded the modern theory of color vision.
There's also a famous photo of
Neils Bohr and
Wolfgang Pauli, arguably two of the most famous physicists of the 20th century, bent over a tippe top on the floor in total fascination ca. 1920, I think.
No idea how often these two played with tops otherwise, but ideas extended from the classical spin of a top soon became the abstract quantum spin of a large class of elementary particles, including the electron. Quantum spin is now a cornerstone of quantum mechanics.