  We study certain exclusive decays of high spin mesons into mesons in models
of large N_c Yang-Mills with few flavors at strong coupling using string
theory. The rate of the process is calculated by studying the splitting of a
macroscopic string on the relevant dual gravity backgrounds. In the leading
channel for the decay of heavy quarkonium into two open-heavy quark states, one
of the two produced mesons has much larger spin than the other. In this channel
the decay rate is only power-like suppressed with the mass of the produced
quark-anti quark pair. We also reconsider decays of high spin mesons made up of
light quarks, confirming the linear dependence of the rate on the mass of the
decaying meson. As a bonus of our computation, we provide a formula for the
splitting rate of a macroscopic string lying on a Dp-brane in flat space.
