In May 2010, Oakland Athletics pitcher Dallas Braden did what only eighteen other men have ever done in the history of baseball: he pitched a perfect game. There were no walks and no hits, and nobody from the opposing team ever made it on base. For a Major League baseball pitcher, it’s the pinnacle of achievement.
Growing up, our parents remind us that nobody’s perfect, but the truth is, someone does occasionally come along and do something perfectly. It’s rare, but these brief, fortuitous flashes of brilliance help inspire the rest of us.
1. The Perfect 10
Although Nadia Comǎneci is famous for achieving the first perfect score in Olympic gymnastics, what’s less well known is that she earned perfect scores both before and after her gold medal–winning routines. Comǎneci earned her first perfect 10 in 1976 in New York City at a gymnastics competition at Madison Square Garden, and she duplicated her success at that summer’s Montreal Olympics not once, but actually seven more times. Her first 10 was for her performance in the uneven-bars event during the team competition, and she earned six additional 10s on other apparatuses, leading to her individual gold medal. At the time, since no other gymnast had ever achieved a perfect score, the scoreboards weren’t even equipped to display the proper number; her “10.0” scores appeared as “1.0.” After the Olympics, she continued to score 10s in several events in meets across the world.
2. The PAC-MAN Wizard
In 1999, nineteen years after the iconic video game was first released, thirty-three-year-old Billy Mitchell did the unthinkable: he played a perfect game of PAC-MAN. That means he advanced through over 256 screens, gobbling up every dot, every piece of fruit, and every single ghost, and he did it all without losing a single life. The first twenty levels were progressively more advanced, while the last 236 were identical, and vanquishing them took several hours and earned Mitchell a total of 3,333,360 points. Mitchell had been an avid gamer since his youth, when he set a world record for the high score in Donkey Kong in 1982. Amazingly enough, Mitchell had retired from gaming at age nineteen to have three kids and run his family business, and he didn’t even resume playing until 1998.
3. All in the Perfect SAT Family
Of the 1.5 million high school students who took the SAT in 2009, the College Board reported that only 297 of them earned a 2400—a perfect score. That works out to about a .02 percent chance of perfection for any given student, but in one family, lightning struck twice. Three years ago, Tiffany Hsu of Irvine, California, earned a perfect 2400 on her test, and this year, her younger brother Thomas earned a 2400 of his own. Both students reported that they didn’t focus too much on test-prep classes or cram sessions. Thomas even told KTLA News that schoolwork comes naturally, and that he didn’t want to invest time in an SAT prep course because it would interfere with his time messing around on the computer. “I just don’t feel the need to do that well,” he said. Tiffany reported that their success wasn’t due to any specific action on their parents’ part. She said, “It’s just gradually encouraging your kids to read, and making academics a priority.”
4. Hole-in-One Beginner’s Luck
Seasoned golfers, prepare to be infuriated. Most players wait years to achieve a perfect golf hole—the impressive hole in one. Many golfers go their entire lives without ever accomplishing this unique feat, but Unni Haskell, a Norwegian immigrant living in Florida, didn’t have to wait long at all. After relocating to the Tampa area, Ms. Haskell decided to take a few golf lessons with a local professional, and after eight sessions, she decided the time was right to play a real hole. On her first swing, at the first hole, on her first round of golf, Haskell hit a hole in one. While she was thrilled about the perfect shot, it took a while for her to realize what all the fuss was about. “I didn’t know it was that big of a deal,’’ she told the St. Petersburg Times. “I thought all golfers do this.” Other amateur golfers have achieved the same feat, but the paper estimated the odds of an inexperienced golfer’s getting a hole in one on her first try as being only about 1 in 12,500. The only real problem, as far as Haskell’s instructor could see, was that after that shot, there was nowhere to go but down.
