by Dennis Lindenbaum
Don Green
The Georgia State Smallbore Prone championships were held the weekend of August 18-19 at RiverBend Gun Club. David Dye presided as chief range officer and made sure the competitors were selecting the correct targets for our unusual course of fire. The matches each day were a 50/50 mix of the international metric and conventional targets with iron sights on day one and any sights on day two. There were Dewar matches, Reverse Dewar matches and I believe an unprecedented Upside Down Dewar match as Wayne Forshee was found hanging a target in an inverted position. He just followed the old standard smallbore advice of “Keep ‘em above the line”. Not following the new tradition established at Camp Perry this summer, the governing board at RBGC opted to continue using targets manufactured by the National Target Co. instead of the new generation of Kruger targets. Therefore, we had no difficulty with shredded, broken and torn target cards during the weekend had the expensive targets from Germany been imported. Even the wet targets held together and were easily scored by Tom Suswal in the new stat office. It was cloudy, sunny, warm or wet at various times during the weekend, but conditions couldn’t have been better as wind was a complete non-factor. This match was a hold, aim and pull the trigger contest.
The complex match format yielded awards for Conventional, Metric and Grand Aggregate State championships. The Metric champion was Don Greene with a fine 1570 followed by Tennessee shooters Ed Foley (1565) and Mike Carter (1558). Don was far ahead after the first day of iron sights essentially assuring victory regardless of what anybody shot the following day with scope. Don elected to shoot irons each day making his win that much more impressive.
The results of the Conventional matches had Ed Foley with a 1598-116X narrowly edging out fellow Tennessee hot shot Howard Pitts who was close with 1598-108X. Don Greene (1595-114X) and Mike Carter (1594-110X) rounded out the top four. Same names, different ranking.
When the Grand Aggregate was tabulated, these four shooters placed as follows:
Don Greene (3165-193X)
Ed Foley (3163-198X)
Mike Carter (3152-177X)
Howard Pitts (3150-176X)
As the only Georgia shooter in this otherwise all Tennessee cadre, Don Greene repeats his performance from last year taking state championships in all three divisions and taking home the beautiful hand-carved plaque to mount in his bulging trophy room.
Twenty-five competitors from throughout the continental United States shot in all or part of the matches this weekend and everyone seemed to enjoy the novel format. The rest of the field who completed both days was:
Jimmie Fordham (3127) David Sisk (3081)
Richard Williams (3123) Keith Jarriel (3073)
Jim Holliday (3122) Ed Beckett (3052)
John Matthews (3113) Doug McNash (3033) Gus Youmans (3109) Bruce Young (3023)
Jimmie Holiday (3107) Mike Upchurch* (3125) AnySight Only Paul Sanford (3104)
Mark Skutle (3100)
Dave Rabin (3095)
The match couldn’t have been successful without the contributions of Tommy Steadman as match director; Linda Steadman, Tom Suswal and Paula Holiday running the stat office; Dave Rabin assisting with range set-up; and David Dye calling the match. Special thanks go to Dennis Lindenbaum who served as the jury chairman and, since he filed the only challenge of the weekend, had to be replaced on the jury so his target could be scored.
