pronematch.com

by Hap Rockettto

Years ago at the start of my first war, I was a Naval Aviation Officer Candidate. I was much younger, somewhat slimmer, and, in the words of Roberto Valdez, “I didn’t know no better.” Under the tender ministrations of a cadre of U.S. Marine Corps Drill Instructors I became an expert at doing push-ups. There is a spot in front of building 603 at the Pensacola Naval Air Station that looks like Graumman’s Chinese Restaurant’s sidewalk because the imprints of my hands are still in the concrete.

The sin that seemed to keep me perpetually in the front leaning rest position pushing away Pensacola was that I lacked, according to Staff Sergeant A.W. Myers USMC, “attention to detail.”

A shooting match is made up of thousands of small happenings. Each one is important. Yet we tend not to think of what is happening as a series of very discrete steps towards success. Rather we view things as being more global. Each step in the integrated act of shooting requires attention to the tiniest of details. When we first begin to shoot we spend a good deal of time aware of the actions. After much practice many of the actions become second nature and only become noticeable when they are not done correctly. Attention to detail and consistency are the keys to success in the shooting sports.

The concentration on the details is what will make a match performance outstanding, not necessarily a winner. You cannot control the competition because you can only effect your own performance. What you must do is concentrate on each aspect of your performance. This intense concentration will make you feel that the match is happening more slowly. As a result your actions will be clearer to you. By breaking down the match into its smallest elements and concentrating on those elements you bring consistency to your performance. By concentrating on the individual elements – taking the match into sharp focus and before you know it the match is done. Quite possibly you might have not won but you may have turned in a personal best performance.

“Attention to detail!” still echoes through the passageways of my memory. Although I didn’t know it or appreciate it then SSG Myers gentle concern for my well being has paid off handsome dividends in my shooting.

by Hap Rocketto

Much of the world unfortunately, and incorrectly, views shooters in a less than a favorable stereotypical light. Popular culture and political correctness paint an image of criminals, and knuckle dragging, tobacco chewing, illiterate troglodytes armed to the teeth with guns while holding decent society hostage to their depraved lawlessness. While I will be the first to admit that that such behavior does exist I am the first to say that it is overplayed in the tabloid press far out of proportion to its actual occurrence.

I have found in my nearly half century of shooting that, quite to the contrary, almost everyone I have met has been law abiding and hard working. Shooters run the gamut from blue collar to military to white collar citizens who pay their taxes, belong to civic organizations, and seldom see a police officer in a professional capacity for more than a speeding violation.

Many shooters have risen to the top of their professions. I know of at least two judges, Jim Hinkle and Bob Lynn, a brace of Geology Ph.ds, the late George Stephens and Ginger McLemore, a gaggle of teachers, a few doctors and lawyers, and none of them stand on protocol. Each are just another one of the many sweatshirt clad folks you meet in the ready area or in the pits pulling targets with you. As a matter of fact if it were not for the conversations in those two areas you would never know if the person sharing the point with you was a butcher, baker, or candle stick maker.

A case in point was the time I was squadded with a man who seemed no stranger to hard work. He was well built, had a deep tan, his well calloused hand gave a firm handshake, and was well spoken. I would have taken him for a farmer or ranch foreman but it turned out that he was an archaeologist. I have shot with a member of the brass section of the Metropolitan Opera Company, more military men than I can remember, a furrier, a man who put lug nuts on cars in an auto factory, a railroad engineer, a bank president, and a few other’s who jobs might have qualified to be featured on Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs television program, but this was my first archeologist.

During the course of the week of shooting we did a lot of talking and I listened closely because his was a field in which I am interested. I had minored in Physical Anthropology while studying for my undergraduate degree and there is a strong relationship between the two fields. I had read a good deal about archeology and some of is more prominent figures intrigued me. Howard Carter, who made a “tiny breach in the top left hand corner” of a doorway in an ancient Egyptian tomb, revealing the riches of tomb of Tutankhamen to the world came to mind. Yigael Yadin the Israeli archeologist, politician, and the second Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces who did seminal work on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Speaking of the Middle East could one ignore Britain’s Gertrude Bell who studied Anatolian and Mesopotamian ruins. Bell, along with another British archeologist Thomas Edward Lawrence, better known as “Lawrence of Arabia,” helped to create the Hashemite dynasty in Jordan as well as Iraq. We talked of one of my favorite archeologists because, like me, Hiram Bingham lived in Connecticut, was a pilot, and a member of the Connecticut National Guard. As a Yale professor Bingham rediscovered Peru’s most treasured historical site, Machu Picchu, in 1911.

At the mention of Bingham my new friend told me of an archeological find of his own that, in some ways, rivaled Bingham’s, but was yet unpublished. He had missed Perry the previous year because he had spent the entire dry season deep in the equatorial rain forest of the Amazon Basin. He had been leading an expedition investigating a small but unusual overgrown clearing that had been spotted by satellite photography.

After weeks of travel by foot and dugout the party reached the remote site, established a camp, and commenced clearing the choking undergrowth that now clogged the once open space. As the centuries of creepers and vines were removed excitement mounted. The clearing measured out to be about 500 yards wide with a very low raised mound running its breadth close the verge of the forest. Fifty yards north and perpendicular to the mound was a series of some 100 sets of holes about 18 inches apart placed at about five foot intervals, another line of similar holes was placed 14 feet behind that line and at 100 yards was a similar row. A large earthen embankment had been raised behind the last set of holes and behind that the forest grew thickly. It had to be a smallbore rifle range! The discovery of a nearby stone slab engraved with depictions of human figures using primitive representations of firearms removed all doubt.

The archeological party then began to quiz the indigenous tribesmen about any folklore that might be associated with the prehistoric rifle range. Luck was with them as the tribe did have a strong oral tradition. One chronicle described how once each Moon the Ancient Ones followed a two day ritual celebrating the weekly days of rest by throwing themselves prostrate and worshipping the gods with “Blowpipes of Thunder.”

My friend was recording an interview between a wrinkled gray haired elder and an interpreter. Wanting to know how the sport had managed to vanish for centuries before rediscovery he implored the interpreter to “Please ask him if he knows why the Ancient Ones gave up the ritual of the “Blowpipes of Thunder”

The interpreter turned to the old man and repeated the query. The elder made a sweeping gesture at the jungle with his arm while giving my new friend a look to tell him he was dim, and replied tersely. “Simple,” was the translation, “they couldn`t get any good lots of ammunition.”

by Hap Rocketto

I married into a Rhode Island family that is loaded with male sports fans. Baseball, basketball, football, soccer, golf, hockey, tennis, lacrosse; you name it and their huge plasma TVs blare it forth almost 24 hours a day on one of the dozens of sports channels to which they subscribe. Most family events see them gathered in little clusters discussing the team or individual performance of the sport de jour. Except during baseball season I am usually on the outside looking in because baseball is my favorite; read that as the only, professional sport I follow.

America’s Cup racing was also on my watch list until they discarded the 12 meter yacht, and Dennis Connor sailed a catamaran in 1988, with the excessive commercialization that followed.

Although shooting is my passion, I also have the guilty pleasure of playing in the Westerly Adult Kickball League. My cousins by the dozens participate sporadically in golf, old man’s basketball, and softball at the local Y, but I am pretty sure that it is really just an excuse to get out of the house and have a frosty one with some old buddies, and there is nothing wrong with that.

That being said an unusual set of circumstances has led me to watch some collegiate basketball. My daughter Leah is a student at Syracuse University and during her freshman year the cousins suggested we visit Leah, because they are fond of her. But that didn’t mean I didn’t suspect that there was an ulterior motive, because they also said while we were there we might as well take in a basketball game. Knowing little of the sport, I didn’t realize that ‘Cuse has a nationally ranked team. Each year since, the cousins have picked out a weekend that happens to coincide with a significant Big East Conference game. One was a game against Villanova which turned out to set the record for the largest crowd for an on-campus college basketball game in NCAA history. I sat in the Carrier Dome, along with my cousins and daughter, to bring the total paid attendance to 34,616.

As I said I know little about the sport except that it was invented by Doctor James Naismith of Springfield College as a way to keep his gym classes productive when forced inside during inclement weather. From the comments I hear made by my cousins while watching the game with them I surmise that there is something more complex going on upon the hard wood floor than ten tall sweaty guys running up and down the court tossing a ball into a hoop. I just can’t see it.

The cousins would have me think that basketball is a tough sport, because, I as I said earlier, they are all now relegated to local level slow break competition. They have no idea of the level of competition at which I participate and that is why I know shooting is tougher than basketball. Come on, just how difficult is it for five tall guys to help each other to toss big ball into a basket? Granted basketball is more physically demanding than shooting a rifle but I think that blasting a quarter size groups into the center of the target at 100 yards all by yourself is a far more difficult task than working as a team to dunk a ball.

Therefore, in the style of late night talk show host David Letterman, I have constructed a list of ten reasons why rifle shooting is tougher than basketball.

10. When you get tired in basketball the coach just calls time out and replaces you with someone fresh. Not so in shooting.

9. When’s the last time a basketball player had to make a shot with the sun in his eyes?

8. How often does a basketball player have a perfectly good shot blown out by the wind?

7. If a basketball player places a shot a little higher than intended, no problem. The backboard causes the ball to bounce into the basket. No such luck in shooting.

6. Rifle matches commonly run all day. When was the last time you saw a basketball game run more than an hour or so?

5. If you’re not making your shots in basketball, you can just pass the ball to someone who is hot. No such convenience in shooting.

4. Rifle bullets travel around the speed of sound, 300 meters per second. Basketballs top out at around 15 meters per second.

3. A basketball player can shoot from anywhere on the court that is convenient and comfortable. All rifleman shoot from the same distance.

2. A basketball player may shoot as often as the opportunity arises and is not limited to the number of shots taken. A rifle match requires that each rifleman shoot the same number of record shots, if they shoot more then allowed then a penalty follows.

And the first reason why shooting is tougher than basket ball is if you miss a shot in basketball you, or a team mate, can just jump up, grab the ball, and try again. Try that in shooting.

The only real similarity between the two sports is that a competitor attempts to score points by shooting. In rifle it is through a hard hold and easy squeeze in prone, sitting, kneeling, and standing while in basketball it is via hook shots, jump shots, lay ups, or the dramatic, and ever crowd pleasing, slam dunk.

But I have come to like basketball in a way. It gives me a weekend of male conviviality with my cousins, of whom I am fond, and, most important of all, I get to spend some extra time with my daughter.