by Hap Rocketto
Simply not athletic enough to play baseball, my childhood passion, I was fortunate enough to come upon rifle shooting. Shooting played upon my athletic skill set, that of being able to stay still for long hours and to think.
I have never lost my love of baseball, which started at my Grandpa Jack’s knee. My mother’s dad was an immigrant and passionately embraced all things American. After shooting is there is anything more American than baseball? He was a devoted family man, a steadfast opera fan, and a rabid fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Sitting with him on a Sunday afternoon in Brooklyn we listened to either a radio broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera House of Bizet’s Carmen or The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart or a Dodger game from Ebbets Field. He would describe the intricacies of an opera’s libretto or the tactics of Walter Alston ordering Gil Hodges to execute a drag bunt with equal insight and facility.
He also scared my brother Steve and me to death with tales of Dodgers who went to the dark side such as mangers Leo Durocher who went to the evil Giants or Casey Stengel’s tenure with the detested Yankees. His personal boogiemen, and therefore my brother’s and mine, were Phillies’ center fielder Richie Ashburn, “a very dangerous man on the base paths” according to Grandpa Jack, and Giants pitcher Sal “The Barber” Maglie, nicknamed so because he pitched inside-shaved in baseball parlance- to hitters. Ironically he sported a five o’clock shadow.
On the other hand were his well loved Brooklyn neighbors “The Boys of Summer”, men such as Hodges, Snider, Robinson, Podres, Zimmer, Reese and Koufax. A particular favorite was catcher Roy Campanella.
Campanella, like most players in those days, was a man of little education making, perhaps, twice as much as an average working man, and had to have a source of income in the off season. Campanella’s was a liquor store in Harlem. Driving home from the store in late January 1958, just before the Dodgers were to move to Los Angeles, he hit a patch of ice, ran off of the road, and struck a tree. The impact broke his neck leaving Campy a quadriplegic.
After Herculean efforts on the part of Campy and his medical team, he was able to gain enough mobility to be able to sit in a wheelchair and carry on an active, if limited life. Part of what kept him going was a job as a spring training coach with the Dodgers where he was given free rein over new catchers.
In The Two Lives of Roy Campanella, by Neil Lanctot, 12-time All-Star catcher Mike Piazza spoke of his mentoring under the Dodger great and baseball Hall of Famer. Piazza recalls that, “He told me how important it is to emphasize repetition, so that things become second nature. You don’t want to be in a situation where you ask, “What do I have to do? You just want to do it.”
Campanella struck at what may be the keystone of good rifle shooting as nothing pays off in shooting as much as consistency. One gains consistency by constant and diligent perfect repetition of the basics until they become a conditioned reflex, second nature. Constant perfect practice trains the muscle memory so that being the tiniest bit out of position is noticed. The kinesthetic training becomes so ingrained that the mechanics become unconscious actions allowing the mind to be free to concentrate upon sight picture and conditions. Ejecting the spent cartridge case, spotting the shot, reloading, and returning to position are done without any conscious thought on the part of a well trained rifleman.
It also reflects on being prepared for an unexpected event, a dud cartridge, an unexpected cease fire, or rain. Preparing how to deal with the unexpected, well in advance, means that one won’t be taken off guard and that prevents a negative effect on performance.
On the other hand there are two of my favorite American Transcendentalists philosophers and essayists, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and their take on firearms and training.
In his classic, Walden, Thoreau opined that, “We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected.”
Emerson’s earliest writing was a series of essays. Two, “Gifts” and “Self Reliance” are particular favorites of mine. “Self Reliance” is an exposition of one of his repeating themes, that of the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow his own instincts and ideas.
“Self Reliance” is the source of one of Emerson’s most famous quotations, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” In this view Emerson was in agreement with Campanella, one has to practice true consistency-constant perfect practice-as opposed to false consistency to avoid the hobgoblin that is a bad shooting habit.
I suspect that if Campy, who left school at 16 to play ball in the old Negro League, ever heard the name Emerson he would have probably associated it with the radio sitting on his bed side table and not the eminent academician whose thoughts on training were in accord with his.
