War Games
If you were lucky enough to be a member of the San Diego Dynasty, the most dominant team in the 25-year history of competitive paintball, you would almost never wear a shirt. Your torso would be chiseled, as bronze and dark as an old penny, and dappled with round welt scars like cheetah spots. You would wear Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses, nylon board shorts and shiny sterling rings on your fingers and thumbs. You probably wouldn’t have to work a day job, but you might anyway, perhaps building custom cars or smashing stuff at construction sites. You would live in the Pacific Beach section of San Diego, where the party meets the ocean.
Cruising the main thoroughfares--Grand and Garnet--from east to west, you’d pass long stretches of sky-high palms, beach sundry stores, upscale Cali-Mex cantinas, wood patio bars and 24-hour taco shops, all the way west to Mission Boulevard and the boardwalk, where vagrants with dreadlocked beards and beet-red skin camp, and thready-veined boys on long boards hiss past bikini-clad girls on beach cruisers with 12-packs of Pacifico cradled in handlebar baskets. You would be one of the best paintballers on earth, a supernova in a sport most people have no idea exists. Seeing your picture in paintball magazines would be old news, though you would never grow tired of it. Nor would you grow tired of seeing yourself in paintball videos or signing autographs for kids who idolize you with the same intensity that I idolized Roger Clemens when I was about the age of most Dynasty fans--between 9 and 16. You would have groupies. The pages of your passport would be covered with stamps from exotic locations, places such as Buenos Aires and Malaysia and Majorca. You would think of the other members of Dynasty less as teammates and more as brothers, and you would inform people of that fact often--that you love each other very, very much. If you were lucky enough to be one of the members of Team Dynasty, you would have a certain awareness that you have been blessed by the gods.
Chances are, when most people think about paintball, they think: war games. They think about rednecks hiding in the forest disguised as bushes and wielding markers (paintball-speak for guns) that look like real assault weapons. If that is indeed the case, then they don’t know that paintball is the third most popular action sport in the world (behind skateboarding and in-line skating, but ahead of snowboarding, BMX biking and surfing). Nearly 10 million Americans (predominately male) participate in the sport, though only 6% of them play competitively.
The game is, essentially, capture-the-flag, but with more strategy. Competitive paintball is played in a number of formats; depending on the tournament, teams may play with three, five, seven or even 10 members per team. Instead of rocks and trees, the pros seek cover behind brightly colored inflatable bunkers that sound a hollow ping when hit by a high-velocity projectile. When a player is struck by a paintball, whether it’s on the head, chest, foot or on part of his or her equipment, that player is eliminated. In seven-man paintball, the most popular format, the field is always 180 feet long and 100 feet wide, but the number of bunkers--35 to 40 are routinely used--and their arrangement on the field vary from one tournament to the next.
Paintball’s massive audience moved ESPN to produce an eight-episode series of the U.S. Paintball Championships from Miami, which currently is airing. The sport is a billion-dollar-a-year retail industry, and the pages of a handful of magazines devoted to pro paintball often feature Dynasty’s Alex Fraige, Ryan Greenspan, Angel Fragoza, Yosh Rau, Quincy Boayes, Johnny Perchak and Brian “B.C.” Cole hawking apparel and high-tech markers that look more like gas pump handles than machine guns. These advertisements lay bare Dynasty’s accomplishments: four World Championships and three Triple Crowns, a title that requires winning the professional division of the American Series, the European Series and the World Series. No team had ever won the Triple Crown before Dynasty.
To those outside the paintball community, the irony accompanying the public adulation surrounding Team Dynasty is that this group of young men, who are renowned for winning pantomime battles, is flourishing in the heart of San Diego, a community that is responsible for training real soldiers and that knows, perhaps better than most, that war is not a game.
Friends asked me several times while I was researching this article: “Do you think those paintball dudes would totally kick ass in Iraq?”
It’s the type of question that infuriates Team Dynasty members and paintball advocates who spend a lot of time fighting the idea that paintball is a dangerous war game, part of our culture of violence. Such perceptions prevent the sport from being embraced by the mainstream, they say.
But paintball wasn’t intended to be a mainstream pastime. It was a survival game conceived to settle a dispute between two friends, a New York stock trader named Hayes Noel and a writer from New Hampshire named Charles Gaines. According to a 2004 Sports Illustrated article by Gaines, Noel believed that the survival instincts he’d learned living on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and working on the trading floor would outperform those of Gaines, not just in an urban environment but also in the woods, an environment in which Gaines had been raised, and with which Noel was almost wholly unfamiliar.
To settle the bet, Gaines, Noel and 10 others--including a ski shop owner, a forester and three writers--took to the woods of New Hampshire in June 1981. Each man was dressed in camouflage and shop goggles and was equipped with a Nel-Spot 007 bolt-action pistol (the kind used by ranchers to mark cattle), a supply of paintballs, extra CO2 cartridges, a compass and a map of the 100-acre game site indicating the whereabouts of four flag stations and home base. Twelve flags hung at each station. The objective was to be the first man to arrive at home base with four different colored flags and without having been shot by another player. According to Gaines, stockbroker Noel spent most of the afternoon cowering in a bush. And the forester, who never fired a single shot and was never seen by another player, won the game.
Following the competition, one of the writer-participants, Bob Jones, wrote the first Sports Illustrated piece about the game; later the other two scribes had articles published in Time and Sports Afield. All three reflected on the unbelievable adrenaline rush that accompanied the hunt. Each article was met by an overwhelming number of letters from readers requesting instructions on how they, too, could play. Gaines, Hayes and ski shop owner Bob Gurnsey responded by selling a starter kit that included a Nel-Spot pistol, paintballs, a compass, goggles and a rule book. They called their creation the National Survival Game. Before long, it would be called paintball. It took practically no time for the game to find its way to Canada, Australia, France and Denmark. These days paintball is played in more than 50 countries.
There are a number of compelling anthropological theories about why it became so popular in the U.S. One is that paintball caters to the American infatuation with guns. Social scientists such as MIT’s Hugh Gusterson say this fascination has been hard-wired into our collective psyche. “America’s obsession with guns and gunplay has its origins on the Wild West frontier. All real men needed to know how to use a gun--it was necessary to their survival,” he says. “Now, it’s more necessary for men to have mathematical and linguistic skills, but the fascination with guns has endured.”
In 1994, James William Gibson, a sociologist at Cal State Long Beach, published a book called “Warrior Dreams.” Gibson argued that in the post-Vietnam years of the late 1970s and early 1980s, a new paramilitary culture took hold of America. It was a time of “Rambo,” pulp action novels, military thrillers and magazines such as Solider of Fortune, and those generally depicted good men acting alone or in small groups--and beyond the aegis of a corrupt command authority--to defeat evil men in armed combat. It offered men a fantasy identity as powerful warriors capable of healing the wounds of defeat in Vietnam and battling other perceived foes, such as liberals, feminists and illegal immigrants.
As part of his research, Gibson played paintball at a complex where one course had been designed to resemble a Vietnam village and another to look like the crash site of a Nicaraguan supply plane. “This was definitely a war game,” he recalls, and he didn’t find that surprising. “From the time of the Greeks up until firearms became fairly reliable in the 18th century, sports like wrestling, fencing and archery were also a form of combat training.” As early as the late 1980s, paintball players were abandoning fatigues in favor of motocross clothing resembling the uniforms worn today by Dynasty and other professional teams. Governing bodies such as the National Professional Paintball League were formed to regulate play. To rid the sport of the stigma of violence, insiders began referring to paintball guns as markers. And bunkers were redesigned to look less like military installations and more like playground toys.
For all that, Gibson has reservations about paintball as a sport. “The problem,” he says, “is that you’re still drawing on somebody.”
Proponents of the modern game wave off such criticism. “Paintball isn’t a war game,” says Eric Crandall, a former paintball player and Team Dynasty’s longtime manager. Players consider themselves to be athletes. If they wanted to go to war, they say, they’d enlist.
Anyway, says Chuck Hendsch, president of the National Professional Paintball League, the explosion of paintball’s popularity has more to do with the world’s largest retailer than with war. “Paintball was only introduced into major sporting goods retailers in 1997, and in Wal-Mart in 1995,” he says. He also notes that a case of paintballs that used to cost $125 now sells for $50.
Gaines, one of the game’s creators, once said paintball could be seen “as a metaphor for the efficacy of teamwork, for universal cause and effect and for the manner in which consequences evolve from sequential decisions. And some people will even tell you that it is a sure and ugly metaphor for war. We don’t believe that is so, but I am not out to argue the point here.”
In the parking lot of San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium, the National Professional Paintball League has set up a campus of vendor tents, sound stages and portable bleachers for the fourth of five events that will decide the Super 7 World Series of Paintball. Six turf fields are spread over acres of pavement. Two hundred teams from as far away as Stockholm are jammed into area hotels. Preliminary-round games for amateur and semi-pro divisions are scheduled to begin Friday, and 18 professional squads, including Dynasty, are slated to play the first of their eight opening-round matches Saturday morning.
To win a game, a team must eliminate all seven of the other side’s players and capture the opposing flag in less than seven minutes. The teams that survive the first two days return to compete for the $25,000 prize pot.
Before it all begins, Dynasty’s players spend hours walking the field, ducking behind bunkers, analyzing shooting lanes and formulating game plans. Ryan--sinewy, with light brown hair, wearing a backpack but no shirt--kneels with a clipboard in hand, huddling with his teammates: “From the back bunkers we’ll have good shots off the break, but it’s not going to be easy to stand there and rap on the center brick, especially if [Sacramento XSV captain Rich] Telford is going to run to that Popsicle and pick off guys who are making secondary moves.” Everybody nods. Ryan points toward the center of the field: “I think that Carwash right there is our command center.”
The Popsicle? The Carwash? I ask Brian to translate: Bunkers are referred to in shorthand, according to shape: A Can resembles a soda can; a Rollie, or Rollie Pollie, is a Can positioned on its side; a Snake, perhaps the most vital bunker because of the shooting angles it allows, is low and long and laid along the sideline.
Squatting next to Ryan, Oliver Lang draws lines and arrows on a map of the playing field. Widely considered the greatest paintballer ever, he turned pro at 17, the youngest to do so at the time, and made a name for himself by single-handedly shooting all five opposing players during the finals of his first pro tournament.
“You ever played before?” he asks. I shake my head. B.C. flashes me a look of disbelief. He has blue eyes that communicate an intense exuberance and a fleshy scar on his cheek from a bar brawl. Johnny approaches, and B.C. tells him, “Hey Johnny, Alex has never played paintball.” Johnny, who is tall with a great rack of muscle spread over his shoulders, says, “No way.”
We walk to the sideline, where the rest of the team is sitting in a circle on the turf. B.C. walks up behind Oliver and pops a pimple on his back. A chorus of “Ewwwws.” Alex says: “B.C., that was gross.”
Friday morning, when Dynasty has no matches scheduled, team members gather around an ancient Lincoln Continental in the Qualcomm parking lot. The car belongs to Yosh. It is rhino-sized, gold, metastasizing rust. A racing stripe runs up the center of the hood, shark’s teeth have been painted on the fenders and 16 bombs are stenciled on the rear quarters.
Yosh has thick black hair and a mouth creased on both sides from constant laugh action. He bought the car from his older brother for $100 and cut off the roof with a Sawzall--instant convertible. B.C. describes the bombs, saying: “There’s one for every girl that Yosh has hooked up with in the back.” Yosh insists this isn’t true, but tells me that he and some of the guys drove his last car out to the desert and shot it up with AR-15s and shotguns. “Then,” he says, “we strapped some explosives to it that I bought on the Internet and blew it up.”
Paintball magazines and videos often portray Team Dynasty as young and wild-hearted and free. Many of the profiles fixate on the house where most of the players lived--an 11-bedroom affair a block from San Diego State--until late in 2003. The house was christened with 13 consecutive nighttime keg parties. Everything reeked of stale beer. They had pets--a pit bull, two chickens, a pig named Peach and a duck that lived in B.C.’s shower. The living areas were so dirty that it wasn’t advisable to walk around with bare feet; kitchen conditions eliminated thoughts of cooking; mushrooms sprouted in the bathroom.
It’s commonly held that the team’s closeness and chemistry are the main reasons Dynasty has won nearly every tournament it has entered in the last four years. Alex and Oliver were 12 years old in 1996 when Alex’s mother brought them to Mare Island Paintball Games--a 40-acre facility in Vallejo with a castle for players to hide in and an abandoned van to seek shelter behind--for a 200-man paintball free-for-all.
“I rented a pump gun, which is totally weak,” Alex recalls. “I remember not shooting anybody all day long and I got shot a whole bunch of times.” Still, Alex was obsessed; he and Oliver began playing at every opportunity. In May 1997 they entered the Mare Island Cup as members of the Monkeys. Also in attendance, as members of the A-Team, were Yosh and Ryan, two schoolmates who’d discovered paintball in the backyards of Sebastopol. The tournament was a bust for both teams--the Monkeys didn’t win a single game and the A-Team didn’t do much better.
About this time, the boys met Eric Crandall, a recent high school graduate who, with the help of his parents, had bought a hefty percentage of the Mare Island facility. After the boys had another tournament under their belts, Crandall brought the four of them to San Diego to play in the Great Western Series, a West Coast tournament series that, in the 1990s, hosted some of the best talent in paintball. “We’d never seen anything like it,” Oliver recalls. “Just the presence of pro players was, like, unbelievable. And, of course, Eric [Crandall] threw us right into the meat grinder.” When asked about that weekend, Crandall sniggers and says, “We got slaughtered.”
The experience, though, filled the boys with pure hot eagerness. They read the magazines and festooned their bedroom walls with photos. Crandall granted them unlimited access to his facilities and supplies. Just as they were gaining a deeper understanding of the sport, amateur teams started calling. The players disbanded and the boys joined teams in the NPPL’s amateur division. After a season apart, Oliver and Alex devised a plan to start their own team, the IronKids. They enlisted Crandall to attend to hotel reservations, rental cars and sponsorships. They recruited the best young talent in California, including B.C., a towering 15-year-old from Orange County, and Angel, a Mare Island regular.
Oliver persuaded his mom to buy plane tickets to the team’s first event in Las Vegas. From that point on, they sold the gear they won to finance tournament entry fees and travel expenses. The IronKids won all seven of the 10-man events they entered, and four out of the five five-man events. On road trips, all 12 players packed into a single hotel room. There were food fights; there was B.C. standing in the middle of an airport crowd making fart sounds with his arm. Why were Ryan and Yosh riding the baggage carousel? Who was setting off firecrackers?
The IronKids lasted only a season. Oliver turned pro, while the rest of his mates joined a team that went on to win the NPPL’s Amateur Division. Their success prompted a 33-year-old paintball veteran named Chuck Hendsch, now president of the NPPL, to form a new pro team. By all accounts it was Ryan who came up with the name, despite Alex’s protestations: There was a Chinese restaurant near his home in Northern California called Dynasty.
When members of Team Dynasty gather at the baseline of the field before the beginning of a match, they huddle up and place their hands in the center so that their outstretched arms resemble spokes of a wheel. Their blue-and-black uniforms and protective gear resemble futuristic anti-contamination suits. They shout words of encouragement laced with profanities: Let’s go! Focus! Come on! Right! Now! The crowd will grow quiet as one Dynasty member begins calling out to his mates “D-Y-N-A-S-T,” and the response from the chorus, a full-throated “Y!” The call is repeated “D-Y-N-A-S-T” and the response--”Y!” With each repetition the chant escalates until they reach a frenzy.
Seconds before Dynasty’s first match in the qualifying round, I’m standing just feet from the team huddle, protected by a 20-foot-high mesh net from the volley of paintballs that will soon be hurled in my direction at 300 feet per second. The crowd is three deep around the perimeter of the net; everybody is craning for a better view. The opponent, Redz Sedition, is 50 yards away, obscured from view by the maze of paint-scarred bunkers. The huddle breaks. A referee standing at the far sideline raises his arm and hollers, “10 seconds.” The Dynasty members all squat slightly, turning their torsos and marker barrels toward the netting behind them. “Five seconds.” A hush falls over the crowd as we all stand here. Waiting. The arm drops. The referee shouts, “Go.”
Players on both ends of the field scatter like startled quail. Johnny runs to the back-left Tombstone. B.C. dives into the middle Temple. Oliver sprints to the Chubby. Every movement is purposeful and precise, almost mechanical, except there’s a strong whiff of aggression, like some kind of animal scent. When Quincy runs through the center and is shot in the chest, Ryan immediately fills his place in the midfield Carwash. The gunfire crackles like bubble wrap. I step closer, inches away, trying to process what I’m seeing, and a stray paintball pops against the net and a satiny spray of orange paint spangles my face. The front line of Dynasty players advances and the second line follows. It’s difficult to see any of the Redz Sedition players, except after they’re shot--standing with an arm raised, walking toward the kill box where they’ll wait for their team’s inevitable demise. I have paint in my eyes and in my mouth. Ryan jogs to the opposite end of the field and takes the Redz flag. The game is over. The whole affair takes 26 seconds, about 3 1/2 minutes less than a typical non-Dynasty match.
Between games players lounge under white tents bearing their teams’ names: the Portland Naughty Dogs and the Stoned Assassins, the London Nexus and Stockholm Joy Division. Crowds of chipmunkish kids gather around tents pleading for autographs and jerseys. The ground in the paddock is stained orange, green and yellow--the standard colors of competition paint. Paintballs litter the asphalt. It’s impossible to walk without hearing them pop under your feet. I’ve been here less than 20 minutes and my left shin is covered by orange spatter.
Ryan stands in full uniform not far from the Dynasty tent, narrating a match in progress on the field behind him to a TV reporter from a local news station. To avoid getting paint spray on his pants, the reporter has his cuffs rolled up to his calves, revealing hiking boots, white crew socks and pale, hairless legs. When Ryan finishes narrating, the reporter does his wrap-up and introduces the next segment with a wide smile, “And now, we’re going to find the country’s fastest Chihuahua.” Motioning toward the playing field, he says to Ryan with a toothy grin, “Maybe we should get the Chihuahuas out there!”
Ryan smiles and walks away. It occurs to me that paintball is caught in a kind of definitional Catch-22. It’s either labeled a combat sport or reduced to a novelty, something cute that you see on the evening news, like Chihuahua racing or competitive hula hooping. I submit that paintball is a beautiful and complicated sport, one that requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness and speed, sheer toughness and that odd mix of patience and abandon that we call courage. It requires the simultaneous engagement of all the senses and an acute awareness of one’s location in space in relation to other moving bodies. It requires one to conduct the complicated calculus of risk and reward during moments of duress.
Ask most serious players what they like about paintball, and they’ll tell you about the buzz, the rush, the high. Paintball isn’t real war, we’re not in Iraq, but the hunt-or-be-hunted, kill-or-be-killed nature of the sport calls upon instincts that members of a civilized society rarely engage. Paintball has consequences--being struck with a projectile traveling at 204 mph is intensely painful, especially if that projectile hits you in an area unprotected by padding, such as your neck or under the arm or on the knuckles. This fear generates stress, causing the body to release a shot of adrenaline. The pupils dilate for greater acuity of vision. The liver emits chemicals that give us superhero-like powers of endurance, and also dull our perception of pain and enhance fast-twitch muscle fibers.
The sensation, I discover when I finally play with Ryan and Angel, is one of animal intensity--consciousness exists only in the present--and immense pleasure. It’s the same sensation, I imagine, upon which those slick new Army commercials prey.
The most devout talk about being sustained by paintball, about finding meaning in it, as though the sport is a path. And it’s a path they’re willing to follow no matter what the cost to career, education or personal relationships. When Oliver says, “Paintball is what I was put on this Earth to do,” I believe him.
On Sunday afternoon, thousands of spectators are in the packed-to-capacity bleachers awaiting the third and decisive game of the finals between Dynasty and Sacramento XSV. There’s a buzz in the air. XSV has defeated Dynasty in the two previous events, taking home trophies and prize money and leaving the world to speculate that Dynasty’s reign may be coming to an end. An on-field rivalry of the bitterest sort has developed between the two teams and their supporters. In the VIP section, the stairs bisecting the bleachers serve as a demilitarized zone separating hundreds of Dynasty supporters from the slightly smaller throng of XSV fans. When Dynasty and XSV met in the qualifying rounds, it was like watching two massive predators tearing each other apart. Dynasty lost, badly.
Dynasty’s difficulty defeating XSV is strategic. XSV has developed a grid-type defense that neutralizes Dynasty’s hyper-aggressive style of play. Game one of the finals had been a clinical demonstration: After losing two front players, XSV pulled back, shooting three Dynasty players before collapsing Dynasty’s defense, from left to right, and marching forward slowly, eliminating Oliver and then converging upon B.C. When the game ended, the Dynasty fans fell momentarily silent; XSV’s legion boomed, “Beat down city!”
As the team enters the field for game two, there is a rolling pock-pock-pock--the Dynasty faithful banging their thunder sticks. What follows is a 48-second bloodbath. Angel runs to the Snake off the break and wriggles his way up the sideline, protected by a steady stream of fire from B.C., and shoots three XSV players. After Oliver captures XSV’s flag, Angel faces the howling crowd, throwing air punches and pounding his feet on the turf.
The afternoon sun is hot and everybody seems weary and drunk from the free beer being served in the VIP tent. A rail-thin Dynasty supporter screams to the opposition’s fans: “I’ll kill you, XSV. I swear to God, I will strangle you.” A man on the XSV side stands and hollers, “Beat Down” and his comrades answer together, “City!” A young man from the Dynasty camp returns in kind, barking: “D-Y-N-A-S-T-” and his brethren respond with a bellowing “Y!”
Out on the field, the referee’s arm drops on the tiebreaker. Players on both ends scatter for cover. XSV quickly loses a pair of men. A moment later, it’s five on five as two Dynasty players enter the kill box. Still, in these early moments, XSV holds a distinct advantage: Thomas Taylor has sprinted halfway up the field and gained a crucial position, nestling up behind the Carwash. And XSV has shooters anchoring the backline; their gunfire suspends Dynasty. Angel can’t find the right moment to jump into the Snake; Oliver appears stranded in the back row; Ryan hasn’t made his move yet. Instead, they remain static--content to stay back and lay steady streams of paint.
For a moment I’m certain Dynasty will lose. Then Johnny connects on a long shot, giving Dynasty a five-on-four advantage. Soon it’s five on three.
Angel hops to the Snake. Ryan slides into a Dorito. When B.C. knocks out the XSV shooter positioned in the back-left Can, Oliver takes off. Sprinting the length of the field, he runs by the Carwash, turns and shoots--five on one now--and continues, galloping forward, turning, shooting. The crowd erupts. The guy sitting next to me tells his son, “That was all guts.”
In other matches around the country, Dynasty remains dominant. At the next Super 7 World Series, in Miami, I’m in the grandstand for the finals. That day in Baghdad, three Iraqi civilians died and seven others were wounded when a car rigged with explosives detonated. In Balad Ruz, northeast of the capital, 12 people, including four children, died in an assault on a minibus. And U.S.-Iraqi forces along the Syrian border were under attack by insurgents armed with light weapons and improvised explosives. I watch Team Dynasty defeat XSV in three straight games. Mission accomplished. And these days that has a certain appeal.