Myachis That Changed the World: Number 10

by Crazy Ivan


I've had it in my head for a while to write a series of posts about the most influential Myachis of all time.  To be fair, I've gone a bit grandiose with the title.  As far as I know, no single Myachi has yet changed the world.  Well, there was a Royal Tiger that played a pivotal role in taking out Osama Bin Laden but the details of that one are still classified.

This series will be focused on the much smaller world of Myachi and the sacks that made a pivotal difference in the way that Myachis would be made in the future.  I'll be grabbing certain sacks that I deem cornerstones of Myachi's history and presenting them over the next week or two in hopes of further illuminating the evolution of the game from an idea in Myachi Man's head to the reality we see today.

I've ranked 10 sacks by their influence but I should point out in advance that my rankings were necessarily arbitrary as were my choices of which Myachis to include and which to leave out.  It's impossible to objectively quantify the influence one development had on the future of the game.  If you take issue with any of my rankings once this whole series is published, please feel free to make your own top 10 ranks (preferably annotated) and I'd be happy to publish a few of those as responses to this series.

I'll begin with a sack that I just can't seem to leave off of any top 10 list of Myachis I put together...

  #10) The Calvin 

I should admit that the Calvin barely belongs on this list at all.  Part of me is force fitting it in here because it's my all time favorite Myachi and I think it belongs on every list of Myachis.  But part of me also sees a significant turning point that the Calvin allowed.  The Calvin was the first Myachi to really show us the absolute importance of breaking a Myachi in.

It's not an absolute, mind you, more the culmination of a long trend.  We already knew that a broken in Myachi was far better than a brand new one.  We already used the term "yummy" to describe a really nice Myachi and we already all had our own personal methods of breaking them in.

But up to that point, it was seen as the extension of an absolute.  A broken in Slater was a spectacular jammer but a brand new Slater was already a pretty good jammer.  A broken in EO Shag was a good jammer, but nowhere near as good as a broken in Slater.  Similarly, a brand new EO Shag was not as instantly jammable as the fresh-from-the-box Slater.

In other words, up to that point, we all would have agreed with the following statement:

If you take two brand new Myachis, one of which is a better jammer than the other, and you break them in equally, the one that began as the better jammer will still be the better jammer.

That was so universally excepted that we never would have bothered to make such a statement.  You just knew that.  Every sack gets better as you break it in, but one sack won't leapfrog over another if both of them are broken in.

But then along came the Calvin and changed everything.  If I had to rank the 1.0 series in order of jammability, it would probably break down like this if we were talking about brand new, never before jammed with Myachis:

1. The Dawg Diggity
2. The Black Butter
3. The Red Stripe
4. The Purple Haze
5. The Juice
6. The Leopard Lime
7. The Calvin
8. The Royal Tiger
9. The Eye of the Dragon

But if we were to take those same 9 Myachis and break them all in to a point where they could be said to be "yummy", the list would break down more like this:

1. The Calvin
2. The Dawg Diggity
3. The Black Butter
4. The Red Stripe
5. The Purple Haze
6. The Leopard Lime
7. The Juice
8. The Eye of the Dragon
9. The Royal Tiger

Notice that most of the Myachis in question stayed in the same spot.  The Leopard Lime and Juice swapped places because shag fabrics have a slightly bigger metamorphosis than phelvits and the Eye of the Dragon moved one place ahead of the Royal Tiger since the Royal Tiger has a characteristic stiffness that it's almost impossible to yummy up.

But the Calvin moved a whopping 7 places, all the way from the 3rd worst jammer to the undisputed king of the series.  Had it not been for that realization, we may have continued to underestimate the importance of breaking in a sack for a lot longer.  More importantly, if we hadn't known this there are some Myachis that might never have come into existence at all.  A few of those might have been Myachis we could have done without (the Vette, for example), but some, like the PigSkin, the Black Rose and the Diesel are Myachis much beloved throughout the movement.

If for no other reason than it taught as the value of patience when it comes to Myachis, I nominate the Calvin as the tenth most influential Myachi in the history of the game.  Keep checking back with us to see the rest of my nominees.