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Franco said, "'I was trying to do ridiculous things in my act, four and five ping pong balls, nine rings and seven balls. Then Bobby helped me tone down the numbers and put my most commercially viable and solid tricks together into an act. "

Franco can do nine rings, and works up from three to seven without stopping in his act, but thinks nine or ten is a totally impractical trick for the nightclub circuit. "I haven't performed in a place yet that has a ceiling high enough to do nine," he said.

Michael Kass, the IJA's 1980 Fargo Convention Seniors champion, agrees with Franco. "Numbers aren't worthwhile," the Princeton University senior said. "In the time it takes to get good with seven objects, you can learn just about everything there is to know about, say... cigar boxes. You can only perform seven for a couple of seconds as a finale to your act, while you can work a whole routine out of cigar boxes or three clubs. I worked on seven balls long enough to convince myself that it's more worthwhile to concentrate on other things."

The long hours it takes to work seriously on numbers may give a solitary, stationary individual a better chance at a world record than a performer.

One interviewee commented, "I'm always impressed to see what can be accomplished with irrational dedication, and that's what it's going to take to set any new juggling records."

Not many of the 17 entrants in last summer's IJA seven object competition are professional performers, despite their skill with numbers. As one IJA director observed, "Though it's not universal, many numbers jugglers seem to be solitary individuals. "

They are persistent, repeatedly analyzing what is wrong inside their patterns and working to correct it on the next try. Ron Graham from Murray Hill, NJ, notes, "Every throw is a bad throw and it's up to the other hand to correct it."

Graham, a hobbyist himself, tried to improve his chances by devising a waist net to catch drops at an easily retrievable height when he practiced six and seven objects. It conquered the theorem that balls always go into the most inaccessible place in the room, but Graham found the arrangement almost too efficient. "I lost the natural rest period that comes when you bend over to pick up your drops, and got tired after a short workout," he explained.

Graham has dreamed of many ways to try to slow gravity in order to increase the numbers he can juggle. But turbulence created by his hands doomed the underwater experiment, balloons turned out to be too light and balls fitted with parachutes just didn't work.

His one real chance lies 238,857 miles away, where the Moon generates only 1/6 as much gravity as the 16 feet per second per second that holds us to the Earth's surface.

"I've always thought the Apollo astronauts blew a great chance by hitting a golf ball up there instead of juggling," he said.

According to Graham's calculations, the possibilities for jugglers on that heavenly body are staggering. "In 1/6 gravity, there'd be time for a 41 ball cascade if you could toss each throw to a peak within a half-inch of each other," he said. "But with a little practice, anyone could probably master 17 or 19."

Graham's conjectures suggest that the space age will create a new category of universal, as opposed to worldly, juggling records. It is a wide open category so far, and anyone hoping to make their mark should consider it. After all, most jugglers will tell you that it's probably easier to qualify as an astronaut and be sent to the Moon than it is to juggle 10 balls here on Earth!