Top 10 Toughest Single Game Accomplishments in Sports

Don’t expect to see any of these remarkable feats achieved very often. Welcome to WatchMojo.com, and today we’re counting down our picks for the top 10 individual accomplishments in sports.

For this list, we’ll be taking a look at the toughest accomplishments an athlete can achieve in a single game or match. That means records that occurr over the course of a season or a career, like winning the Triple Crown or hitting 500 home runs, don’t count.

Scoring a hole in one, otherwise known as an ace, is no easy task even for seasoned pros, as it requires an incredible amount of strength and precision, not to mention a whole lot of luck. In order to achieve a hole in one, a golfer must hit the ball from the tee and have it land in the cup with a single stroke. Depending on the size of the course, the difficulty varies, as most holes in one are achieved on par 3 courses. Aces on par 4 courses are extremely rare, and Andrew Magee is the only professional golfer to officially achieve such a feat on the PGA Tour during the 2001 Phoenix Open.

Playing goaltender in hockey or goalkeeper in football is hard enough, but to score a goal as a goalie or keeper is on a whole other level. In hockey, goalies tend to score when the opposing team has an empty net, giving the goalie an opportunity to slingshot the puck the length of the ice and into the abandoned net. In NHL history, a goalie has only scored 14 times. In football, it’s even more rare, as a much greater distance separates the nets. In the English Premier League, keepers have only managed to score four times, and only once has it happened in the MLS. What’s more, a keeper has never scored in the history of the World Cup.

Many experts believed that running a mile in four minutes was beyond what the human body was capable of. Englishman Roger Bannister disproved that theory by running a mile in 3:59.4 seconds in 1954. Since then, many male athletes have been able to run the mile in under four minutes, and it is now considered the standard for professionals. Currently, Morocco’s Hicham El Guerroj, who ran the mile in 3:43.13, holds the record. However, no woman has yet been able to run a four-minute mile, with the fastest time ever being 4:12.56 by Russia’s Svetlana Masterkova in 1996. But, as was the case for male sprinters, it’s only a matter of time.

While scoring three goals in a hockey game is no easy task, scoring a hat trick in football is even more difficult and happens much less often. A hat trick is the term referring to a player scoring three goals in one game. A team that manages to score three goals in a football game is already pretty impressive; so one player netting three goals is downright incredible. To give you an idea of how rare this is, in the last five men’s World Cups, there have been 318 matches, but only six hat tricks.

Quarterbacks who’ve managed to throw for 500 yards in a game deserve high praise, but we decided a running back rushing for 250 yards is even more impressive, as they have to run each and every one of those yards themselves, most of the time while fending off giant defenders. Only 12 running backs have achieved this feat, with O.J. Simpson holding the record as the only player to rush for 250 yards twice in his career - he ran for exactly 250 yards in 1973, and then for 273 yards in 1976.

A lot of bizarre things can happen in a baseball game. But perhaps no play is more bizarre than the unassisted triple play. The unassisted triple play is when one player makes all three outs in one play. While most of the other entries on our list require incredible athleticism and skill, this one is more about being at the right place at the right time. It’s only happened 15 times in Major League Baseball history, and every time it’s happened the same way. The fielder catches a line drive, touches second base, and then tags the runner heading from first to second. The last player to make an unassisted triple play was Eric Burnlett of the Philadelphia Phillies back in 2009, and it was a sight to see.

A quadruple-double is achieved when a player accumulates a double-digit number total in four of five statistical categories: points, rebounds, assists, blocks, and steals. Basically, the player has to dominate every phase of the game. A quadruple double wasn’t achievable in the NBA until 1974, when blocks and steals were recorded. Since then, only four players in the NBA have been able to achieve a quadruple double, the most recent being David Robinson for the San Antonio Spurs back in 1994. In college basketball it’s even harder to achieve, as games are 8 minutes shorter. The only player in men’s college basketball history to record a quadruple double was Lester Hudson from Tennessee-Martin back in 2007.

A score of 10.00 is the highest score possible for a gymnastic performance. For years, many fans of the sport thought the score was unattainable. That all changed during the 1976 Olympics in Montreal when Romanian Gymnast Nadia Comaneci scored the first ever perfect 10 during the uneven bars event. However, she didn’t just get one perfect 10; over the course of the 1976 Olympic games, she scored a 10 in seven events. After Comaneci’s amazing run, gymnasts receiving 10s became way more common. In 2006, presumably to keep things interesting, the International Gymnastics Federation replaced the old scoring system, with a new and more complicated one, where the maximum score varied in each event.

No one else embodies an accomplishment quite like Wilt Chamberlain embodies the 100-point game. In 1962, while playing for the Philadelphia Warriors against the New York Knicks, Wilt Chamberlain became the first and only person in NBA history to score 100 points in a single game. Even more impressive, he did this without making any three pointers, which didn’t exist at the time. The closest anyone else has come to scoring triple digits in an NBA game since was Kobe Bryant who scored 81 points in a game back in 2006. A handful of players have been able to achieve this astounding feat at the collegiate level, but it remains to be seen if anyone in the NBA will ever match Chamberlain’s unforgettable game.

Before we get to our top pick here are a few honorable mentions:
- Perfect Series
Bowling

- 147 Break
Snooker

- Nine-Dart Finish
Darts

- Hat Trick
Cricket

There have been over 200,000 games played in Major League Baseball history, but only 23 times has a pitcher ever pitched the elusive perfect game. A perfect game is when a pitcher prevents hitters from getting on base for the entire game. Not only does the pitcher need to be having the game of his life, but his teammates also need to be just as sharp in order to get the 27 consecutive outs needed. There has been a strange boost in perfect games of late, with six of them having come in the past seven years, but that doesn’t take away from how amazing an accomplishment the perfect game truly is.

Do you agree with our list? What do you think is the greatest Individual Accomplishment in sports? For more impressive Top 10s make sure to visit WatchMojo.com.