Brian R's LiveJournal has a post, "Let Us Now Bury Unfamous Men," evaluating some highly reputed quiz-bowl players.
When people speculate about the best players of given quiz-bowl eras (i.e. the people Brian is responding to (who may or may not be strawmen: I've spent enough time around the source he cites by name that I could probably reconstruct what they do(n't) actually claim, though it never seemed to matter enough to go into serious parsing), not so much Brian himself), they tend to overlook the change in one player's degree of dominance over time.
In general, the diehard players get better and better as they accrue knowledge and experience, to such an extent that if anything the change appears to accelerate. Then they leave the game once they find better things to do with their time. Maybe they come back after awhile, though it's not quite the same.
Subash completely owned the Intercollegiate Championship Tournament field one year. Nobody else playing qb that year could have given him a serious challenge. I don't think anyone coming out of retirement could have (they would have been rusty). Maybe somebody could have taken a time machine (or put him a time machine) and created a battle for the ages, but still. Up until that year, he was a very good player constantly improving, though the period of singlehandedly crushing opponents is brief.
That form of progression, not only of people but also of the game itself, makes it very unlikely that any one player (even Tom Waters) would be (to use Brian's formulation) "the game's best player over the course of two decades."
At some point, based results at summer tournaments, Hentzel may had a reasonable claim to be "the game's best player," though in the mid 1990s there were some major tournaments/formats where he was not the best player on his team.
Yaphe has had similar levels of dominance, though there was one year when he played in the ICT after a hiatus and didn't seem to have as much of an edge he used to have. (Highly subjective observation, I admit.)
Rostron's praise for Jeff Johnson is well placed, since I never saw him be anything other than a dominant player, though even at that, I obviously never got to see him play for Tennessee Tech (and place nondescriptly in a CBCI Regional field) several years before he picked up a buzzer at Harvard.
(If Harvard's quiz team had been more functional in the early 1990s, and publicized itself better, who knows what might have been different. Then again, maybe not much -- Jeff did learn of and join the team in fall 1994 (there's a chance, though not a certainty, that he's the same guy I remember talking to at the start of 1994-95 when that guy saw me put a poster up by the Science Center and asked if grad students could play; it's possible there was someone else with vaguely that look and dialect, or it's possible that this is a fabricated memory altogether), and played basically until he lost interest.)
Getting back to the post that inspired this one: I don't think that anyone literally claims that "Tom Waters was the best player in Year N, Year N+1, Year N+2, [etc.]" for some long period of years. I've always taken the claim to be that in evaluating the balance of his "career," nobody else played that well that long. But the things, few people play that long, period. It isn't a terribly useful thing to evaluate, since the ones who do play that long are sometimes derided (not unfairly) as "dinosaurs" for never moving on with their lives.
I think for historical assessment of quiz-bowl, "peak value" is significantly more useful than "career value." (Incidentally, that's the opposite of how I feel about baseball.) For anything where participation usually centers on collegiate status, the idea of a "career" is sort of silly anyway. So... was anyone else (at their absolute peak) better than Subash at his absolute peak?
(Yeah yeah, it was Hentzel who had the 19-tossup game where he came within "EZ-Bake Oven" of running the table. Without taking anything away from him or the achievement or the opponents, the best way to put it is that those questions were uniquely poorly suited for that opposing team.)
Posted by Matt Bruce at October 20, 2006 04:01 PM