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The Early Days of IPSC


Patrick Sweeney

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Another oldie: twenty-plus years ago, IPSC was still the wild 'n wooly arena of armchair commandos (today we call them mall ninjas) and wannabe mercenaries. But there was also a core of those who had "been there and done that" and were the real deal.

One guy I know went off to Africa on safari in the early 1980's. He schlepped a pair of Weatherbys along, and his 1911. Back then, a competition gun was still a carry gun, so it was his regular match gun: a 5" .45 with all the bells and whistles in vogue in 1982: essentially a box-stock Kimber today.

After he gets back, we're at a league match and someone asks him about "the incident." Seems he and the PH were sitting around the campfire when three terrs come walking in, cradling AKs. They figure to "negotiate" with the PH over the hides and horns. Since they got the drop on the camp, and the camp rifles are racked, they don't bother to point their AKs, they just keep them cradled in their arms. And they don't pay any attention to our friend, probably because he "just" had a holstered pistol.

At this point, one of the listeners asks the hunter "What were you doing?" His reply: "Waiting for the beep." (Talk about proper mindset, and letting your match conditioning work for you instead of against you!)

The crazy thing is, I've heard two ending to the story: One, at the league, that they talked the terrs into only taking the meat, and leaving the hides and horns. The other, from a close friend of the hunter, and sometime later, was that the terrs got excited, went for their guns, and about three seconds later had all been drilled twice each with 230 hardball through their sternums. Which is how I happen to know that if you want to dispose of bodies in the bush, you don't bury them. Leave them far from camp for the hyenas, and turn the AKs in for the (then) government bounty.

So, the next time someone quibbles over a stage design, that "in real life you wouldn't stand in the open...." or something like that, consider that the stage designer may have done just what he's testing you on.

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Another Second Chance tale: SC is where I met "Big Al." Al Kulovitz spent his career with the Cook County Sheriff's Police. Al was/is 6' 8" and not skinny. For a while he was an evidence technician, taking crime scene photos. (No, he doesn't know Marg Helgenberger.) He had a looseleaf binder of crime scene photos he'd taken. He'd show off the book to an audience of ever-changing viewers, who would drift in, stay until they saw something that they couldn't take, and drift off. My favorite was the guy who tried to torch his house for insurance. He turned on the gas stove and left some kind of a timer to ignite it. As he's standing in the front door making sure he's gotten all the "good stuff" out, the cloud of gas finally finds its way down the basement stairs to the pilot light of his furnace. The resulting blast blows him out the door, and he lands on some railroad tracks. You guessed it, there's a train coming. (Could I make this stuff up? Not a chance.)

Later Al rose to Leiutenant, and retired. For a while he ran the SWAT Team, or one of them.

At Second Chance, the firing line was "right there." You were on the sidewalk with a plexiglass screen behind you. The timers were right behind that, and the rest of the shooters and spectators behind them. The nearest spectator was closer behind you than the pins you were shooting were in front of you. I had just spent some quality range time whacking pins with my 870, setting a new record in the shotgun individual, and walking off, there was Big Al. "That's it" he said "We're putting you on the list." List, what list? Is this some special group? Maybe he needs someone for a Three Man team? "What list is that, Al?"

"The list of people we aren't going to go in to get. We get a call for your address, we're just going to surround the place and burn it down."

A compliment, from a guy who knew his stuff, on the streets and in competition. I still send him christmas cards, with a fake return address.

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I've also seen "Big Al's scrapbook of fun," the original Faces of Death in still-life format.

During my first year at Second Chance, Al was a participant in one of the greatest practical jokes of all-time, which featured me--the newbie--as the hapless victim:

At 3 o'clock in the morning on my way up to Central Lake, driving alone in my car full of guns and ammunition, I managed to hit a deer on the outskirts of Chicago. I pulled over and was checking the damage when another guy stopped to check on me and let me know the deer was flopping around on the shoulder of the interstate highway. So I did what any normal small-town kid would do, right?--I backed up to the deer, put on my hearing protectors, and euthanized it with the nickel .38 Bodyguard Airweight I had in my pocket. My car was drivable, so I headed on down the road and pulled in to Central Lake later on that morning.

When I told the story, all my buddies laughed and laughed, picturing the image of me standing along the turnpike with a flashlight in one hand and a J-frame in the other, wearing Peltor muffs, with other cars whizzing by. (I was young and dumb and just thought I had done the right thing, right? Never really thought about Chicagoland gun laws and such stuff.....)

So then Ayoob decides it would really be hilarious to make up this whole story about how it wasn't really a deer that I hit and then had to shoot--that in fact I was an Aryan assassin who had actually killed an elderly south-side man on his way to the Elks lodge, and then fled the scene to a secret right-wing enclave in northern Michigan. He spends two whole days going around with a video camera, pretending to be a Geraldo Rivera-type investigative reporter, filming this entire "60-minues" style fake "WLFI news" story. Of course, the news piece includes interviews of the various "investigators" working the case (including Kulovitz and Evan Marshall, and about a dozen other Second Chance regulars).

(I have no idea this whole jerk-job is going on, mind you, even though we're all staying at the same resort.)

For the culmination of the "WLFI news" presentation, Ayoob sets up the camera in the cabin where I can't see it, then coaxes me in from outside by offering me another Rolling Rock. He's got some local cop from one of the little towns up there in on the scam--in full uniform--hidden back the hallway. Mas knows I will come through the door bragging about winning the OSS shoot-off earlier that morning, so the cop is cued to walk out as soon as I say the words "two thousand bucks." Within thirty seconds I say the magic words, the cop steps out and says "Michael Carmoney? Place your hands behind your back, you are under arrest!" I practically shit my pants, look over at frickin' Ayoob, and he's totally deadpan. I slowly stand up, inform the cop that I have a J-frame in each of my front pants pockets (when in Rome...) and proceed to get handcuffed behind my back. I am completely stunned and confused--I have absolutely no idea what is going on.

Then all at once everybody (including the uniformed cop) starts howling with laughter, and Mas walks over and presses the stop button on the videocamera. The "WLFI news magazine" show has ended with the live on-air arrest of the infamous "Thunderzap Bambi Killer."

It was an absolutely phenomenal gag. As elaborate as it was, nobody squealed, and I never saw it coming! After the adrenalin subsided, I laughed too. I'm smiling just thinking about it now, as I remember all the uninhibited fun we had during Second Chance week every year. Everybody who went up there over the 25 years of that match came back with wonderful stories to tell. I guess I'm especially fortunate to have my favorite Second Chance memory on videotape!

(Someday when the statute of limitations finally expires, maybe I'll be persuaded to tell the story about the lit quarter-stick of dynamite in the backseat of the car. God, those truly were the days.....)

Mike

Here are a couple old SC photos--although I had moved out to Iowa by then, I was still on the Mass. Rifle Ass'n pin-shooting team--here's our crew:

MRA Crew

Here's me on the line with my Nowlin 25-2 in one of the Winchester shoot-offs. Looks like Herb Beck and I are in perfect synch, the hammers on both guns are captured in mid-pull:

Winchester Shoot-off

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Then there's the practical joke perpetrated on Mas: He leaves the range and gets back to his cabin one afternoon (Second Chance was in northern Michigan, in resort country, and we all rented cabins to stay) and he finds a raccoon in the driveway. It is sluggish, has foam in its mouth, and is moving slowly in broad daylight: all signs of rabies. He calls the local Sheriff to report it, and they tell him to take care of it. "Hey, you're the local law enforcement" he says. They tell him since he's up for Second Chance he's probably got a lot of guns, shoot the thing himself and don't get bit.

Mas goes out, and by this time it is up in a tree. He maneuvers so the tree will stop his shots after they go through the critter, and starts shooting. Embarassingly enough for a Master Blaster, it takes him (depending on who is telling the story) four to six shots to bring it down. He uses a stick to shove the carcass in a plastic bag and stuffs it in a spare cooler with ice, in case the Sheriff gets a report of someone bitten by it, and they have to test the brain for rabies, and settles down with his manual portable typewriter to pound out the next article he's working on.

Someone finds out about the incident, and sets Mas up. The next morning, one of the shooters sends his kid to Mas' cabin. (A kid Mas doesn't know) When Mas comes to the door (knowing him, packing a gun while in his pajamas) he sees a kid holding a collar and leash. "Mister, have you seen my pet raccoon, Fluffy?"

Mas is so crushed by this that he immediately begins packing his stuff. If he's just offed some kids pet, then SC isn't going to be any more fun that year. The howling pack of fellow shooters, laughing their butts off, waving leashes, is barely enough to convince him it is a practical joke, and get him to thinking about retribution.

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I never saw Mas packing a gun while wearing pajamas, but somewhere in my Second Chance stuff I have a picture of him sitting at a picnic table with a Rolling Rock in his hand, wearing nothing but a pair of nylon running shorts and a nickel J-frame in a SFAS ankle rig. He called that his own version of condition white.

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Now there's a photo I would not want to spend too much time looking at, for fear of going blind.

OK, personal experience and the evolution of equipment. Back in the early 1980s, the cool shotgun to have was the Mossberg 500 8-shot. I kid you not. The big advantages were the tang-mounted safety, the open loading port, and the capacity and not needing an expension tube to get 8 shots. We now know that the 870 is superior, but only because we now have mag tubes, large-head safeties and anti double-feed lifters.

Oh, and you had to have a sling on it

So, I'm working at a radio station in Flint. Country music, big listener base, and I'm the new guy. That means I work every one else's vacations, sick time, basketball games, etc. And when I'm not filling in for others, I'm working either 10PM-2AM or 2AM-6AM. The 10-2 shift means I get off work right after the midnight shift starts at the local auto plants, of which Flint had a bunch back then. I'd get all kinds of phone calls from listeners of the female persuasion, telling me they had freshly-baked cookies, cake, etc, etc. They probalby also had husbands who drank too much.

After a few close calls I stop accepting invitations, but that doesn't put an end to trucks parked out in front of the house I was renting. Trucks that looked oddly familiar. So, I kept my Mossberg 500 over the door. At 6'4", and long-armed, I could reach it faster than if it were leaning beside the door. Parked just like we discussed in The Gallery(AR at the Ready), top up, muzzle right.

I get back from the station one night, and after going to bed hear somene trying to open the outside door. I get up and get the shotgun, and as I'm reaching the attempts get a lot more vigorous. I snatch the gun down and start to twirl it, to get it pointed right. It snags on the hook, and I jerk it. The sling was caught, and came loose, but the pivoting shotgun now spins around as I fumble with it, and the recoil pad catches me right in the shorts. I fall to the floor seeing stars, the shotgun falling on top of my head, and try to get the damned thing pointed in the right direction. By the time I succeed, the noise is gone.

I found out the next day that my neighbor had gotten out of the bar late, and was drunkenly trying to enter the wrong (looked like the right) house.

I learned a bunch of things that night: long guns in overhead racks are best stored upside down, muzzle left. Slings must be tight. Shotguns hurt when they hit you. And not every noise in the night is an outraged husband or blood-sucking mutant.

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Geez, the more I write the more I remember. Someone's going to have to confiscate my computer one of these days, just to stop me.

Back in the early days, there was no such thing as a specialist shooter. You were expected to be able to hold your own with whatever you had. Yes, 1911s won matches, but other guns could too, and a real "practical" shooter could win with whatever he had.

So my buddy Glenn goes to dive with the Detroit PD dive squad. He's a certified dive everything, and had more hours diving than some on the PD had breathing regular air. He shows up at whatever precinct they meet at, and someone mentions that where they're going is in a bad part of town. (Now, when a Detroit copper tells you the place you're going is "a bad part of town" pay attention. There may not be on-call artillery support.) Well, before they can let him carry, Glenn has to shoot the qual course. "Got your gun?" Someone asks. "No, I thought we'd be diving, so I didn't bring it." (Actually, back then, Michigan had a "must qualify" CCW law. If you didn't meet the CCW boards often arbitrary requirments, you didn't get one. And when you did, it was often restricted, like Bank-Work-Home. Glenn's didn't cover diving with the PD, so he didn't want to let on he was packing.)

They hand him a DPD-issue 5" pencil-barrel S&W M-10.

No one has a holster. So Glenn dumps enough ammo in his right front pocket, loads the S&W, and goes out to shoot the qual course. With the M-10 "holstered" in his pocket, reloading from his pocket without speedloaders. Not only does he shoot a passing score, he shoots well enough to make "Expert."

They tell him "Next time, bring your own gun."

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Geez, the more I write the more I remember. Someone's going to have to confiscate my computer one of these days, just to stop me.

Patrick,

funny, I was just thinking that this was a great beginning to a cool sports book --- or in the alternative, that this thread could become your personal blog. It's one of the highlights of my day.....

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Yes, it is very cool thinking back and remembering all the people and things that took place back when...

Like going to your first Nationals/World Shoot....watching the Super Squad for the first time, meeting Jeff Cooper for the first time...Gunsite for the first time...man on man with Chip McCormick, meeting Charlie Kelsey, trying to figure out if some of the local hot rocks were cheating you and how they did it, or were they just that much better than you....trying to get on the leading edge of pin gun/comp advancements...your first Steel Challenge...meeting all the greats and near greats of the sport...

Super cool....

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OK, another blow to the "in the old days we were all practical, real-world shooters" myth. One of our Forums own, John Hurd, was a regular at my gun club back in the early 1980s. We were running 3-gun matches back then, and while we were starting to build comp guns for handgun, the rest was pretty much stock. The high-tech guys had Colt 3X scopes clamped in the carry handle of their ARs, and Choate shell carriers for shotgun ammo, the rest of us are shooting iron sights and reloading shotguns from bags or pockets.

We have a club 3-gun match, which in those early days was usually a stage of each. We're doing the walkthrough on the shotgun stage, and John gets this evil grin on his face. It is a pretty straightforward stage; 17 rounds with a barricade, window, a couple of shooting boxes. All poppers.

When it comes time to shoot, John pulls out his guncase. And keeps pulling. He extracts (as I recall) a Winchester Super-X1 (or whatever that gat was called) with the longest goddamned magazine tube I've ever seen. The barrel is a standard 26 or 28" skeet tube and the magazine is a foot longer for sure. And it holds....17 rounds.

Oh, the screaming, the wailing, the cursing. But the rules do not prohibit it, so he uses it. The end result was clear, he was going to win the stage. The second place shooter managed a 66% factor against his shotgun, with third place barely breaking over 50%. One faction wanted to prohibit such guns, but couldn't figure out how to word it. Others wanted to build their own.

We solved the "problem" in an easy way: for the rest of the season, every shotgun stage had a plethora of doorways, windows and shooting ports. Trying to maneuver a five-foot shotgun through all that wasn't easy, and I don't recall seeing that shotgun much after that match.

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This one is marginally IPSC related: the guy I was hanging with wanted to talk about this new "combat shooting" called "IP-Sick" We were a two-man team in a local archery league, and he worked for Ford Finance. One of his optional jobs was as repo man for FF. With the inside info (where they lived, where they worked, etc.) he could easily snatch up cars. And he could also take the correct keys with him.

But he needed an assistant, someone to drive him to each car or truck.

For those of you who may be thinking "Wow, that's a romantic, adventurous way to make some spare money." think again. You are taking back vehicles from people who can't make the payments. So how are they going to get to what work they might find? But I was young, stupid, adventurous and willing to make extra cash.

For a while it wasn't too bed. After all, when someone stops making the payments on a vehicle that costs half as much as the house they are living in, you have to wonder if they shouldn't have bought an Escort instead of a Mustang. But it really started wearing on me when the holiday season came, and we had to ditch the backseat full of christmas presents at the curb before taking the car.

Since we're such nice guys and shoveling out the stuff (clothes, stereos, presents, I was crossing my fingers against finding guns, drugs or a dead body) I'm walking up the houses with him, instead of waiting at the corner with the vehicle we drove to each house. At one place the lights come on when we start the engine and back out, and as we drive off the front door gets flung open and I hear "boomboomboom" as buckshot whistles past us and rattles through the trees.

That was my last run. I wasn't going to make twenty bucks a repo, while taking fire, just so Ford Finance could keep the stockholders happy.

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My buddy Eric Viers (who won the OSS Pin Gun event at Second Chance some time in the mid-'90s) also did a stint of repossessing cars--on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, of all places. (And he ain't no Indian.) That was back before his 12 years working on the road as a professional rodeo clown.

Years later, Eric called me up one night to see if I would go along with him while he went looking for someone who had jumped on one of the bail bonds he'd written. I told him I'd go along and he said, "Good--bring your Benelli." (We never did find the guy, I guess the bond got forfeited.)

Now there's somebody who oughta write a book.....heh-heh!

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We have a club 3-gun match, which in those early days was usually a stage of each. We're doing the walkthrough on the shotgun stage, and John gets this evil grin on his face. It is a pretty straightforward stage; 17 rounds with a barricade, window, a couple of shooting boxes. All poppers.

When it comes time to shoot, John pulls out his guncase. And keeps pulling. He extracts (as I recall) a Winchester Super-X1 (or whatever that gat was called) with the longest goddamned magazine tube I've ever seen. The barrel is a standard 26 or 28" skeet tube and the magazine is a foot longer for sure. And it holds....17 rounds.

THe story is pretty close but it was a 15 round 870 ( I do have a 15 rd Super X1 ) it was 14 poppers and in the parking lot as I left was informed that to make it a level playing field only 10 in the mag at the start, would be allowed from then on.

I made those mags for "Rolling Thunder" and Richard saw right thru that in a hurry and only allowed 8 in the mag to start..... Nobody likes creativity!!!!!!!!

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John, this is my story, so I'm telling it the way I remember it. :lol: Remember, "Trained Professionals Only." I never heard about those tubes and Richard, but it doesn't surprise me. I started shooting Teams the year after Rolling Thunder was changed to the 3-man format.

For those who weren't there, Rolling Thunder was as close to an air strike as you could experience in the civilian world: A four-man team, each with a table (The old flat 8-foot tables) with (help me out here, John, 8 or 10?) pins lined up across each of them. The team had: one handgun, one pump shotgun, one auto shotgun, and one pistol-caliber carbine or SMG, set for "semi" only. Everyone was allowed backup guns.

On the start signal, they'd hose tables until all pins were down. The Chaos, the noise, the sharp firing angles as the righthand guy tried to pick up deadwood from the left edge of the lefthand shooters table!

It was magnificent, and a royal pain in the butt. It took too much time, what with getting guns and backup guns loaded, and then unloaded at the end. It took four tables, when the whole setup and range procedure was built for three-table sets.

Richard finally changed it to 3-man, with no backup guns unless you were the handgunner using a revolver. It ran a lot faster than RT, but still ran slowly, so the 3-man was something you didn't see a lot of until the last day and a half of the shoot, when the range crew could stack the line full of nothing but teams.

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Thanks. Another recollection, and a little bragging. Did you know about the PEE? The Premature E****lat**n Event. It had a few different formats, but basically it was you, with a loaner smg, and targets. For a few years it was IPSC Option targets, and you had to place a five-shot burst on each of seven targets (thirty rounds in the gun) and your score was multiplied by each target's score. You'd think a perfect score would be hard, but it wasn't. A couple of the guys in our club had a knack for trigger control, and soon Gary and Bruce Britt were posting multiple perfect scores.

Once the event got to the point of "how many perfect scores can you post?" Richard changed it.

The final iteration was falling plates. Plastic plates that the bullets passed through, reset with air pressure. Now speed, not a metronome shooting pace, won. You had to have the gun (the first year for this format was with loaner MP5s from H-K) on Full, otherwise shooting was up to you. We killed those guns the first year. Even rotating four or five guns, the shooters lined up and were blasting from 9AM until 5PM. We went through buckets of Cor-bon ball 9mm ammo, which was provided as part of your entry fee. Use the provided ammo and have a malfunction, and you'd get another run. Use your own, no price break, and if you have a malf your time is as-shot.

The plates were ten yards out or so, and spread on almost a 180 degree spread, at different heights, from just below waist to high chest height.

Then someone got the bright idea of giving Richards guns a rest (he had to use his own, once we'd killed the loaner H-Ks) by allowing Handgun PEE. I used my Radar Gun. A 6" .38 Super with a Commander slide 1911, with ported barrel weight. That gun was named the Radar Gun becasue I had used it to win loot on the Handgun LRPF, which had falling steel bowling pins, one of which was 90 yards out. I could hit the far pin with scary regularity with that gun.

My HG-PEE load was a 95 grain fmj, at 1050 fps. (The HG-LRPF load was a lot hotter.) I shot the standing record, handgun or smg, and won a Beretta M-92PS. For the four or five years we shot the event in that format until SC ended, not only did no one beat my record, few even came close: From the rail, eight plates and a designated stop plate, in 2.73 seconds. As I recall, one or two shooters broke the 3-second mark in that time, and most years the winning times were usually just under 3.5.

Some guys would enter SC just for the week's free food and a chance to shoot machineguns all week long. Me, I was there for the loot.

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I think maybe the PEE event was the one event I never tried during my years at Second Chance! I was always more of a front-range guy, and typically I would do better on the main events than the side matches (although I could generally put myself in the money on 8-pin and sometimes Subway, and ran a pump gun on some decent 3-man teams). Finally won a gun on BCBC the last year I went, never did worth a crap on LRPF or HG-LRPF.

Remember the year(s) when they had the event where they threw clay aerial targets from a trap machine, and you had to try to hit them going away with handgun bullets? That was kinda fun. We had a local blow-hard shooter that always claimed he could shoot pheasants with his .45 comp-gun--after we all realized it was actually possible to hit aerial targets with a little practice, we decided maybe we almost believed him after all!

The man-on-man shootoffs were great too. I got lucky and won the very first Second Chance shootoff I ever entered (now I'm braggin' a little, I guess). The prize money was great (although Richard threw the cash all over me from his perch and I had to grovel around gathering it all up)--only problem was, he threw a Master Blaster patch down at me along with the money. So I never got a chance to milk the system!

I was never there for the true glory years of Second Chance prize tables....they were before my time. By the end things were getting a little chintzy, with more used junkers in the prize cases and fewer HK91s, Benellis and M29s....(although, he gave away a motorcycle one year as a prize, I can't remember who won that). Even so, SC was a true experience I'll never forget!

Mike

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The motorcycle! Oh, those brothers from Kansas. They drove all the way to SC in a minivan, with all their gear, clothes and guns. When it came time to pack, they practicaly had to smear vaseline all over the bike to wedge it in with the rest of the gear and loot.

The PEE was on the Front Range, off to the right, past the Tower of Murder. Now that was a strange event.

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