Joshua "Freebird" Wescott's Story

Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1999

Well, to begin with, my name is Joshua "Freebird" Wescott and I’m a 17 year old senior at Manteo High School here in Manteo, North Carolina. I live on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, for you all that have never heard of the town of Manteo. During the school year, I work a construction job after school and on the weekend, and in the summer, I work on a charter fishing boat out of Pirates Cove Marina. I am currently taking classes in networking administration, and I am debating whether or not to continue my studies in college. As of right now I have still not decided.

I found this page about a week and a half before I achieved my record. I used to play JezzBall in school as a way to pass time before it was time for the class to end, but never had time to have any score worth mentioning. I found it again and put on my computer about six months ago. Since then, my friends and I have been playing it, and have had somewhat of a competition going on. We started out with scores anywhere from 300,000 to 600,000, and at one time it only took 250,000 points to make it to the hall of fame. Finally one day I had my mind set to break a million points, and after a couple of hours, I finally did it. After that I thought I had mastered JezzBall, that was until I found the JezzBall web page. After reading the top 20 list I realized my score was just a joke compared to what the real records were. After seeing this page, I had my mindset to achieve a high score. The main reason I was always losing, was either cause I didn’t have time or just finally got sick of playing the same game. Anyway, I decided then that I was going to at least get 20^th place, just so I could see my name up there for a little while. I started a new game and after a couple of days of playing it either after work or late at night, I found that I had reached level 49. Previously I had only made it to level 35. I reached level 49 and after playing it over and over, I finally was able to get a high enough score to make it to the hall of fame. I thought about stopping there, some where around 11 million points, because my friends were bugging me about not letting them play, but knew that if I didn’t have a higher score that it would soon be beaten. After a couple more games, I was able to get 13,175,092 points and it was then that I decided that it had to end. My friend Josh D., having watched me beat level 49 over and over wanted to try his luck at it. Until then Josh D. had never played any level over 30 balls. I let him try and quickly watched my game that had gone on for over a week, come to a sudden stop. He was able to trap somewhere around 20 balls. I guess this game could have gone on for as long as I could stand it, or until my computer froze up, but I think maybe this score will be enough to stay up there for a little while. Since then I have yet to have the patience to start a new game, but when my score gets bumped off, I’m sure I’ll be back…

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