Hi Steve,
That's an interesting list, but a little hard to confirm. It would be nice to have a list of those who have run 100 in competition, which is a little easier to document and I think about as hard as doing 200 in practice.
Hi Bob,
I'll very respectfully disagree with you here on all counts
. What would you deem competition? Just world championships, or any tournament? If it's just world championships, you're excluding lots of players who never had the chance to play in one (not to mention we went about 15 very recent years without one). If it's any sort of competition, I'm not sure it's any easier to document than my list. I've played in lots of 14.1 tournaments, some more legitimate than others, but I wasn't aware of much official record-keeping going on in really any of them. Additionally, tournaments have all different formats and trying to tease out useful high run information from them would prove challenging.
I guess we disagree on the comparative difficulty of running balls in practice or competition, because if anything I find practice more difficult to put up numbers. Most top players I've spoken with tend to agree with me here. Even if I were to put myself in the mindset of someone who believed practice was easier, I don't think you could convince me that running 200 was equivalent to 100 in competition. 200 is a ridiculously tough number to achieve. All things equal, it's not twice as difficult as 100. Tough to even venture a guess as to how much more difficult it is; maybe somewhere in the order of 80 to 100 times?
Finally, my goal was to compile a list of all the living players with the skill set to do something truly difficult. Is it arbitrary? Of course. Saying that Zion or Jon Smith or Jim Gottier or Tom Walter (just to name some top NYC players who've come super close but never hit the number) don't belong here is ridiculous. Similarly, players like Gabe Owen (just picking a random great player who probably never plays 14.1 at all) won't be on this list but clearly would make it if they gave it a serious shot. But that would be a similar problem on the 100-in-competition list.
I know there will be a few names on my list that probably never actually ran 200 but I do believe that by and large it can be accurate.
Your list would definitely have merit, but it's another concept entirely in my opinion.
- Steve