john schmidt said:
most of those stats are close but ive talked to almost everyone of those guys and most of those runs are lower than that like martin for instance is 382 he told me himself 9 months ago and ive only got 400 exactly but its great that anybody cares enough to ask.also ive talked to jimmy fusco and hes sure efren never ran over 250 and i promise you if he did he would not leave to eat and not try to continue after hes ate. although if efren wanted to be the greatest 14.1 player he would be the best if not one of but right now hes not. anyway i like the 14.1 talk keep it up. john schmidt
Hey Mr. Schmidt. I was going to write, also, that there is no way that Efren would have just stopped and left. You hear these kinds of stories a lot, and I'm not sure how they get started.
Mike Zuglan claims his high run is only in the 180s, and he only did that one time as part of a bet. He says every time a game ended, he would just stop, bar none. I agree that most of the time a player like Zuglan would do this, even on a 150-and-out, perhaps. But he NEVER kept going to see what he could do? Very, very difficult to believe.
In my opinion, and what I think Mr. Schmidt (I will call you that because you are my idol, lol) is alluding to, even the great players are HUMAN. They want to see what they can accomplish. They have devoted their lives to this game, and it's just not believable to think they'd never be interested to see what they could do when everything was rolling right.
Also, and I am not trying to denounce a guy after he's passed, but I doubt that Ervolino ran those 300+ a few years ago, Vahe. I know that story was going around, but when it was, he was playing a lot at Amsterdam West. Ginky and Mika had both just run 250+ in a span of only two days or so. Ervolino wanted to beat it, so he kept trying... but he was having trouble running 30s. The next week, he was playing out on Long Island and the story was that he ran over 300. Could it have happened? Sure. But not likely from how he was playing at that point in his career.
Sadly, the fact that it was printed in BD might not mean so much. I stopped automatically believing their claims when they actually printed that Ginky had only started playing straight pool 1 month before winning the Amsterdam Open in 1999.
The only reason I'm bringing up that last part about Johnny is because the original intention of this thread was to talk about official runs that probably happened... I would say this one probably didn't. But since Johnny was a 300-ball runner anyway, maybe it doesn't matter.
On a side note, I hope someone can get an accurate high run for Jack Colavita. What a player he was.
- Steve
[Note: The tone of this post is probably harsh but not meant to be... I'm in a rush and don't have time to edit it...]