The Early Days of IPSC

[Patrick Sweeney]

OK, back to IPSC. 1984, the Nationals were held in Phoenix. I drove there from Michigan in my 1983 Ford Ranger: 4-cylinder 2.0 liter engine, carbureated, with a 4-speed manual transmission. Why? Because Ford had a deal. They wanted to get a lot of the new trucks out on the road, and bring the cafe standards up. So, anyone who could lease a Ford vehicle could get one of these. Ford would take care of maintenance, insurance, and you only had to pay 80% of the standard lease rate. So, I leased it at $90 a month.

In the middle of New Mexico, with the *thumb rest [generic]* flat to the floorboards, I was passed by not one, but two Grayhond buses. The only way to get that truck of mine over 55 was to drive it off a cliff.

The match was at the Black Canyon range. The area across the highway was empty, so shooters were going across the road to warm up, practice standards, and set up stages to practice. Sometimes there was more shooting south of the road than north (the range side.)

Jeff Cooper and the Gunsite crew had brought the Apitir. Think of a big, inverted "V". The steel plates would slide down the tracks of the V from the center when you yanked the rope. Yank with your strong hand, draw and hit the plates to knock them off. The closer to the center they dropped, the higher your score.

I'm watching this, thinking "I can do that" when some kid hobbles up on crutches. He's got one ankle/foot seriously wrapped. He steps up, pays his money, sets the crutches aside, and on the yank we barely see a draw and then hear "Whck/tinkWhck/Tink" and the plates fall into the closest boxes to the center.

My first sight of Jerry Barnhart shooting.

Jerry had jumped into the hotel pool Monday night, and sprained/broke his ankle. He wrapped it tight, and squirmed boots on, then hobbled around on crutches. He shot each stage without the crutches, then went back to them to take the weight off his foot until the next stage. As I recall, he placed something like 7th, on crutches.

One stage had a door on a window you had to lift to shoot through. Rather than shoot strong hand ony, shooters would simply put their head under the door and let it bonk them on the head to shoot freestyle. By the second day we all had a hotel washcloth to put into our hats, as more than one shooter came off that stage bleeding from the door handle screwheads that bashed them on the top of the head when they let the door drop.

My load that year was hard-cast 265 grain swc and (I forget how much) 452AA. In the afternoon the wind racing up the mountain meant the poppers had to be set so heavy to keep them from being blown over, they wouldn't fall if hit. So the RO told shooters "Get a hit, and you've got it. Don't wait for it to fall." Me, I didn't worry. Momentum trumps almost all, and all the poppers fell when I hit them, without hesitation. With the power factor then fo 175 (or was it 180?) I had those 265s going close to 700 fps. The steel was going to fall.

[tightloop]

Ahhhh, the Black Canyon Shootout....I was there too....stayed at the same motel as Jerry and saw him jump into the pool .....what a freak thing.....

What a great guy...

[Patrick Sweeney]

Did you watch the movie? S&W had a film clip they shot of a stainless 39/59 (I forget exactly what model) cycling. They had shot it with a high-speed camera, at a thousand frames a second or more, and watching the pistol cycle through a magazine of ammo took fifteen minutes or so.

The real scream was watching Tommy Campbells trigger finger, coming off the trigger it nearly crashed into the front of the trigger guard. Every time. So much for the controlled trigger re-set while shooting at warp speed.

The other amazing thing was watching the parts flop around. The safety and slide stop bounced and vibrated the whole time. The longest wait was between shots. We'd sit there in the dark for most of a minute while Tommy got his finger off the trigger, then back on, pressed the trigger, and dropped the hammer. Then the gun would spend five seconds film time cycling, the slide would trundle back and forth, spitting out the empty and we'd start over.

Tommy later commented that trying to get the gun working, with the big, hot lights, and not waste film, he worked himself into a massive flinch the next time he went to shoot, he was hitting the ground in fornt of the target. That, and the hot lights burned the hair off his hands and near arm.

[Patrick Sweeney]

Which reminds me, along with a conversation I had at the club whilst thrashing the BHP with friends. That Nationals, 1984, our club sent seven people. There were what, 200, 250 shooters, and our club sent 7. Oh, the glory days. And one of the glories was our gunsmith: Dan McDonald. (All bow.)

Dan knew guns. In the days before pages and pages of the Brownells catalog full of high-zoot 1911 parts, he made his own. I saw a straight trigger on a "McDonald Gun" years before seeing it anywhere else. I saw just about everything from him first. I saw the first multi-port comp. The first full-profile comp. (Before seeing such things in the pages of American Handgunner, our usual source of things new and improved.) I saw a McDonald ambi before I ever saw a Swensen.

When the latest AH came out, with the custom gun of the issue, we'd open the centerfold and put a McDonald Gun down next to the photo to compare build quality. The photo almost always suffered.

He built integral-cone full profile comps the hard way: He'd bore a 2.5" bar, then thread it for the barrel and taper-cut the cone on his lathe. Then he'd fit the coned barrel to the gun. Once done, he'd slab off the excess comp steel in his mill, before hand-filing it to a perfect match in profile. In 1983. He had a comped Super built a day after we heard of their being the winning gun on the West Coast. Probably because he'd been building Supers before, just for other gun games.

Dan would build you the most efficient comp he know of at the time your gun was in-process. If you had a "better" idea he'd go with what you wanted. But if what you wanted wasn't the best, you weren't going to get a free new comp for something better.

You did not have to "break in" a McDonald Gun. It was test-fired and zeroed when you got it.

Why'd he quit? His dad owned the gun shop. When dad sold the shop, he (Dad) moved to Florida, to literally sell seashells by the seashore. After a couple of years of gunsmithing on his own, Dan figured the money and weather was a lot better in Florida. I can't say as I blame him.

To this day, a gun for sale will be snapped up right away with the uttered assurance "It's a McDonald Gun." If you know what one looks like, you'll know if the seller is telling the truth.

He shot in our club for eight years, he taught me gunsmithing, and you know what? I don't own a McDonald Gun. How's that for irony?

[Patrick Sweeney]

OK, "The Tower of Murder" at Second Chance. This came from the overheated imagination of Richard Davis, channeled through too much reading of Flash Gordon. Apparently, the evil what-his-name bad guy had a tower where he or his minions could climb up and just shoot someone at random. I'm not really clear on it, as I never saw the serials, or read the books. I just saw the (really, really) bad movie.

So Richard builds this tower, and puts a drum of water in the ground at the base. The Event is simple: You climb the tower, load the loaner SMG, and dump a full mag in one burst into the water. Floating on the water are something like 20 or 25 ping-pong balls. You must sink or splash out of the water all you can. At first blush, this seems like fun.

In one afternoon, everyone hates it. Think about it; someone climbs a tower with an SMG. We have to stop the whole front range, and everyone in the PEE area has to clear to a safe angle. The ping pong balls have to be counted into the water, then after the gun is cleared, the floaters counted. It eats up incredible amounts of time. We just stop shooting it, so we can concentrate on other events. Richard loves it, so it stays as an event you can enter, but it fades away.

Not like the Viking Spear episode. On the back range, on the BCBC (the shotgun slug event) you had to master a strange skillset: you had to mow down falling steel plates out to 90 yards with slugs. Ten plates. Then run to the over-under shotgun, launch the two clay birds and blast them (bonus time off your run) and then run to the table where your handgun was waiting. There, you had a dummy grenade you tossed into the port for more time off. Finally, pick up your handgun and shoot the last falling pins and stop plate.

One year, instead of the grenades, there was a Viking spear. You had to throw the spear, and you got extra time off for a sufficiently bloodthirsty war cry as you threw it. This was too much. Without consulting or conspiracy, we just refused to throw the spear. Shooter after shooter left it lying against the bench. By the third morning (of a nine-day shoot) the range crew just left it in the storage shed.

You were never bored at Second Chance. Sometimes puzzled, occasionally embarassed, but never bored.

[BSeevers]

I would have thrown the spear. With the war cry.

Why did I never attend Second Chance?

[Ben Stoeger]

Yeah... I would throw the spear to. That sounds like a hoot!

[Patrick Sweeney]

The spear was not some chintzy copy. It was something you could actually kill man or bison with. Seven feet long, big blade, heavy. You only had to pick it it up once and heft it to realize that shoulder problems were in your future if you spent an afternoon chucking that thing.

Now one about our host. I was at one of the Steel Challenges in the early 1990s. From my recollection, it had to be one of the ones moved out to Bakersfield. I arrive, and while I'm walking around, I hear the buzz: "Brian's getting out of shooting." I walk up to the exibitors tent, and there is our future host, standing behind a table piled high with gun boxes. All kinds of guns. I looked them over, and I see things like a Springfield Armory blued 1911 with a three-digit serial number. S&Ws by the bale, all new and in their boxes.

After looking for a while, I ask him. "Brian, what's up? The rumor is, you're getting out of shooting." He looks at me a bit embarassed, glances right and left, and says "Pat, I can't get the door to the spare bedroom closed." I do some quick math, and know his problem. "So, how's it going?"

For those not around in the early days, guns was prizes. A local gun club's annual IPSC championship would give away a gun or two. Any State, Sectional or Area match had guns. The Nationals had tables of guns, and Second Chance had a truckload. Bianchi Cup, PPC matches, club matches and even the occasional raffle adds to the total. At that point in time, Brian had been shooting for over twelve years. Most of that time he'd been winning. Theoretically, he could have gone to a match with a gun as a prize thirty times a year. Second Chance had the potential of adding five to ten guns alone. Add in sponsor-provided blasters, and the occasional "Hey, that's cool, I've got to buy it" and you have quite the total. Even more than I had.

And what do you do with prize guns? Toss them in the closet or safe. Unless you own a gunshop, with a ready retail counter, selling a prize gun is always an "I'll do it later" deal.

My mental math had told me Brian could have had the "problem" of more than 300 guns, which dwarfed my paltry 92 at the time. And I knew how much storage space my guns took. There were guns I knew I had, but couldn't find. There were guns I'd turn up, and think "Where in the hell did this come from?" Brian had me beat.

We should all have such problems. Every time I read a survey on gun ownership, I have to laugh. The "average" gun-owning household owns 3.7 guns, or some such statistic. God, I'm not sure I know any shooters who don't own a couple of dozen. I suspect that many of the surveys are seriously distorted by the "What would my neighbors think" phenomenon: People adjust their answer to reflect what they think the survey results will show, so they don't appear odd. My suspicion is that ownership is greatly under-reported, both in the numbers of who owns, and the amounts they own.

[Duane Thomas]

Apparently, the evil what-his-name bad guy

Ming the Merciless.

[Patrick Sweeney]

Right! They say that memory is the first thing to go. Who are all you people?

[Tman33_99]

Right! They say that memory is the first thing to go. Who are all you people? 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

NO...Memory is the SECOND thing to go.....I forgot what the first is.

[Carmoney]

Apparently, the evil what-his-name bad guy

Ming the Merciless.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

you mean "Mink the Merciless," right?

[Patrick Sweeney]

Then there were the shootoffs at Second Chance. You think shootoffs after an IPSC match are high-pressure? SC was much more. The format was simple: the whole damned line full of shooters. Thirty shooters. Each Supertable, three tables with a five-foot wide box on it, has three shooters. Five pin, standard set.

On the start gun, you and the other two guys on your supertable have to broom your pins off before the others do. Your competitor is standing shoulder to shoulder with you. You can see his pins.

Everyone gets an entry card. If you win your bout, you get a punch in the "win" column. If you lose, you get a punch in the "lose" column. Two losses, and you're out. Except Richard has this quirky sense of humor, and he institutes "Dead Man's Revenge." If the table schedule calls for you to be shooting another set, except you just got your second loss, you still stay on the line. You can eliminate the guy who just elimated you.

As a result, once the first flush of shooting was done, and the remaining shooters were re-shuffled, you could have a table of three guys all eliminate each other, and none would proceed. You had to stay on top of your game, or end up back in the stands.

The luck of the draw was everything. I once went to the line right after Mas Ayoob's name was called: Oh shit. Mas and I ended up next to each other, but on different tables. I shot sucky times, something like a 4.8 and a 5.4 set of runs, and won both. Mas shoots a 3.4 and a 3.8, loses both and sits down. (The timers timed the tables, in case there was a close bout.)

Then there was the endgame. When it got down to the last three, four or five shooters, Richard would have them move to the middle sets of tables. Their cards would be re-shuffled, and they would be assigned tables. While they were setting up, Richard would have the prettiest pinsetter (did I mention he hired local High School girls as pinsetters and timers?) would would walk in front of the shooters, waving the money. Five or ten thousand dollars, cash.

He did this on both categories, Ordinary Standard Shooter, and Master Blaster. The winner of the OSS got the loot, and was promoted to MB status for NEXT YEAR. So, the winner of the OSS Shootoffs would always be courted that year by the MBs for their teams. OSS S-O winners were expected to spend a lot of their winnings in a frenzy of Optionals, for they were both hot and marked. Hot in that they were winning, and marked in that next year they would be in with the real killers, the Master Blasters.

Once the money-waving, table-assigning and pinsetting was done the shooters would load up and shoot for loot. You'd see top-notch Master Blasters, name shooters having to do a reload to clear a five-pin table. I watched Brian, shooting against a couple of other killers. All three went for broke, and left deadwood. For a moment they just stood there holding empty guns, then realized that no one had won. Brian dropped his wheelgun and did a New York Reload, while the other two clawed magazines out of their belts to reload their empty .45s. I forget who won, everyone was so busy laughing and shouting "Reload!" we almost didn't notice.

[Matthew_Mink]

Apparently, the evil what-his-name bad guy

Ming the Merciless.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

you mean "Mink the Merciless," right?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Bout time I got a new nickname.

[Flexmoney]

Patrick (not that I am a gamer...this jsut popped into my mind from somewhere. ),

With all those people on the line, shooting at once...what did anybody shoot at their competitions table and give them a mess "splash" of pins/dead wood?

[Patrick Sweeney]

I'm sure it occurred to some, but I never heard of anyone doing it. First, there wasn't time. You had to down yours before the others downed theirs. Second, there was no way to do it and not be "outed." Second Chance was like shooting IPSC in a phone booth. You were almost literally shoulder to shoulder, and the timers were standing a few feet behind you. Everyone watched the pins, and it would be immediatly obvious if someone shot on the wrong table.

As a mistake, it would have been good for a laugh. As a strategy, it would have been good for getting your sorry butt banned from SC, or at the very least shunned like a leper by all the other shooters.

There were some shooters who were shunned as if they had open, oozing sores. But that's another story.

And I'm making the motion here and now for "Mink the Merciless." Do I hear a second?

[Merlin Orr]

Apparently, the evil what-his-name bad guy

Ming the Merciless.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

you mean "Mink the Merciless," right?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Bout time I got a new nickname.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

HMMMmmmmm! Bout time indeed? Spin off thread called for? How bout it Flex?

[Carmoney]

If we're playing the name game, I'd like to propose this one as well:

bountyhunter: "the quicker-picker-upper"

[geezer-lock]

There were some shooters who were shunned as if they had open, oozing sores. But that's another story.

And I'm making the motion here and now for "Mink the Merciless." Do I hear a second?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Second "Mink the Merciless", perfect for the job description.

Surely you can tell the story (and the why) even if you don't "name names"?

geezer

[Patrick Sweeney]

I'll think about it, but some of them became pariahs for reasons that cannot be revealed to the light of day in mixed company.

However, the Subway Event at Second Chance can. Richard Davis had/has an active imagination. And an inquiring mindset. A shootout caused him to think about the long-range lethality of ammo, and how to design away from it.

What he came up with was the "ThunderZap" cartridge. A light plastic projectile, hollowpoint, propelled at truly impressive velocities. But so light that velocity dropped off, and at 100 yards you could catch them with your bare hands. How fast? A long-barreled .38 could start a bullet at over 2,000 fps.

The effect on test media (gelatin, beef, pork, sides of beef, etc.) was impressive. Gory, even. Unfortunately, it did not catch on. So Richard had a warehouse full of ammo. (He was never one to do things small. If he thought ammo would sell, he'd manufacture a ton of it.)

He then used it for an event: The "Subway Event" (a convoluted naming process instigated by what's-his-name, the guy who shot the would-be muggers in a NYC subway) was simple: you used a range gun, with range ammo, on five pins. Since the ammo wouldn't knock the pins off the table, you simply had to tip them over.

Richard knew the group he was dealing with, so you could not use your own gun. I asked him, and he said "Sweeney, I don't know what you'd do, but I know you'd do something to get an advantage. And all the others, too. No way."

The guns? S&W M-65, stainless .357 3" fixed sight revolvers bought surplus from a police department. All sighted in for ThunderZap, but you had to figure the hold-off for yourself. Even with loaner guns, strange ammo, and figuring out the sights, we posted impressive times. It didn't take long before you had to shoot under four seconds flat to "be on the table."

One day, a cold, rainy and overcast day, I was watching someone shooting the Subway. And I noticed that each hit would cause a small jet of flame from the pin. The velocity was so great the super-heated plastic skin of the pin was creating a dull white jet of flame.

Once the ammo was gone, the Subway event went into history. Richard put the guns into the prize table, and I won one. Since I shot the Subway every year, and eventually used all the guns, I now have a prize gun that was a carry gun before I competed with when it was a range gun that I used for a while as a competition/range/carry gun after I won it. Talk about full circle.

And too bad about the ammo, it would have made a great load for Air Marshals. Puree-d Al Queda, anyone?

[Carmoney]

I'll admit I liked the Subway event a whole lot more before they added the Thunderzap crap into the mix. That ammo was horrendously, god-awfully overloaded (typical of Richard's mindset), and you had to literally beat the ejector rod against the wooden rail to dislodge the bulging, primer-flattened empty brass--causing the cylinders to fall clear off some of the guns, and the ejector rods to bend on most of them.

I suspect the reason Thunderzap didn't sell is that somebody convinced Richard that the stuff was +P+++ and not safe to distribute to the general public. Fine for us Second Chance shooters, though.....

The Thunderzap ammo also hit way way low even at 25 feet, causing you to have to aim at the necks of the pins to get hits in the fat part with most (but not all) of the guns. So far, so good.

The real problems started when some of the shooters started taking the guns off the line, sometimes even off the range back to the cabin (which was not really a problem if the girls down front knew ya). One year there was a notably "good" M-65 that hit pretty close to point of aim--one of the shooters did a quick action job on it back at the cabin, he and his buddies shot the event, then they conveniently "forgot" to return it until the last day of the match. Obviously, many of us felt this went beyond the usual spirit of gamesmanship that Richard had chided Sweeney about....

Still--all that said--a fun concept, and a fun event.

Mike

[Patrick Sweeney]

I recall that what we used before was some 125 JHP +P or +P+ load. You'd sign up for the event, and one of the timers would slap an S&W down on the table for you, and hand you a paper cup with eighteen rounds in it, a cup for each three-table set. You learned right away not to sign up for more than two or three sets, otherwise you'd be shooting your last tables with a wheelgun so hot you needed gloves to handle it.

And I didn't find the low hits with Thunderzap a problem; I just used the red ring on the neck of the pins as my aiming point.

Which leads me to the next musing: planning for SC. As those who have been there know, you could be shooting a dozen or more events. With different guns. I eventually worked up a notebook, one of those multi-folder stiff-cover report thingies, with the metal tabs for two holes in the top of the paper. Each page was an event. I noted the gun used, what load it took, the sight picture or aiming point (red ring on Subway sort of thing) and which table to shoot it on, if it mattered.

Why? Here is a list of guns for the last few years I shot Second Chance:

Main Event

Pin gun: Comped 1911, 45ACP, 200 Speer hollowpoint @ 1050 fps

Stock Gun: "Stock" 1911 (mag na ported through slide & barrel) .45, 240 flatnose @850

Space Gun: Comped, dotted, single stack Suepr, with 125 jhps @ 1400 fps

Optionals:

Winchester Shootoff: Pin gun, with Winchester 230+P JHP

8-Pin: S&W 25-2 w/ 230 FMJ @ 850 fps

9-Pin single stack 1911, 9mm, 115 jhp @ 1200

Handgun PEE single stack Super 100 fmj @ 1150 fps

Space Gun: Comped, dotted, single stack Super, with 125 JHPs at 1400 fps

Two Man: Pin gun w/ pin gun load

Mixed Doubles: Pin gun w/ pin load

Shotgun Pump: 870 w/ S&B 12 pellet 00 buck

Shotgun Auto: 1100 w/ S&B

Three man: Either pin gun, or 870 or 1100 with S&B 12-peller 00 buckshot

BCBC: different 1100 from 3-man, 12 ga slugs, HgnPEE gun and load

LRPF: AR-15, 63 grain W-W softpoint @ 2300 fps

Light Rifle: Ruger 10-22 & whatever was accurate that year

PEE: range guns and range ammo

Subway: range guns and ammo

When the Handgun LRPF was on (two or three years when we couldn't shoot rifles on the back range) I had a single stack 1911 Super, an 80's era competiton gun, loaded with 125 JHP's at 1400 fps.

Eleven guns, with eleven loads, for seventeen events. Plus spare and backup guns, extra ammo, cleaning equipment and maintenance tools.

The most common vehicle parked at SC? A large truck with heavy-duty suspension. How else can you haul all that?

[Patrick Sweeney]

At our club match/special classifier in the snowstorm yesterday, one of our long-time members recounted his first IPSC match. (This would have been mid-late 1980s.)

"I showed up with my Sig 226, a bunch of magazines, and a lot of practice. I saw all the (named a few large shooters) fat old guys with their single-stack .45s and figured I could beat them. I looked over the first stage and figured I could shoot it in about 35-40 seconds. The first guy through was one of the biggest, and he shot it in 19 seconds. and all anyone had to say was 'Nice run, Bruce.' I got my ass whipped that day."

I wonder how many of our prospective shooters go through the same thing, but don't come back? They get told at the police academy that they are hot sjit, or they beat up the guys at their rod & gun club in the annual "combat" matches, and figure they can run with the big dogs. Then they show up at a USPSA match, and the only guy they beat is using a walker? What's up with that? It must be the guns! Forget that they got creamed by three women with L-10 gear, two guys with wheelguns, and the entire cadre of Production shooters with box-stock 9 mms.

After Mike told me that story, I looked around at the rest of the squad and wondered how many of them went through the same thing?

Maybe we need to not only help first-time shooters get safely though a course, but explain to them at the end or the match that everybody there went through the same thing on their first day. Trust us: It gets better.

[Stuck in C]

Exactly. A lot of shooters come to our local matches, are suprised at the speed and accuracy displayed, and instead of trying to increase their own abilities just don't show up again. We have two regular shooters from the sherrif's department that just about own Production division-with their duty gear, Glock 20's and full power 10mm ammo (so much for it being the guns). Many other police and deputies have shown up; but don't like being beat by us old fat civilians and they don't come back-which is too bad.

[Matthew_Mink]

We get both kinds at our club. Some of the new guys see it, and want to do it, and stick around to learn. A few years back we had some hothead cops show up, some of them left before the match was over!