THE SHOOTING STAR : From Any Angle, Dan Reeves Is on Target

On a forthcoming segment of the TV show, “Bob Uecker’s Wacky World of Sports,” Uecker will look at you and say something like this:

“You know, when I was playing in the minors in California many years ago, there was a power hitter out there we were scared to death of. . . . I mean, what this guy could do to a baseball, you wouldn’t believe . . . “

Uecker will then pick up a ball, go into a windup, and say something like: “I used to tell our pitchers to go with high, hard ones, like this . . . “

He’ll pitch the ball into the camera. Click. Cut to Dan Reeves, who you’ll see taking dead aim at a baseball in the air . . . and blast it to pieces with a 12-gauge shotgun.

He picks up the ball, shows a gaping hole to the camera, and says to Uecker: “That’s what we do to baseballs in California, Bob--Bingo!”

Reeves, who calls himself “The Shooting Star,” was a championship-level skeet shooter 15 years ago, when it dawned on him he enjoyed warming up to shoot in competition more than he did shooting clay targets.

“I was warming up for a shoot one time by shooting targets from the hip,” he said. “I was aware of a commotion behind me and when I turned around about 700 people were giving me a standing ovation. That’s when the light in my head first went on.

“I’ve learned since then that free style shooting draws bigger crowds than skeet shooting. Trap and skeet shooting is a lot of fun, but unless you’re a shooter yourself, it’s not all that thrilling to watch.”

Today, Reeves, 36, not only shoots from the hip. He shoots clay targets from behind his back, with the gun upside down and with two shotguns simultaneously, shooting at targets sailing in opposite directions. He’s trap shooting’s Bob Cousy. But there’s more.

“Know what you get when you shoot a lemon?” Reeves asks.

He tosses a lemon into the air, dispatches it with one blast from the shotgun, and says “Lemonade!” The lemon comes back down in a fine mist.

Most would call Reeves’ act trick shooting, in the old tradition of Annie Oakley, a star of Buffalo Bills’ turn-of-the-century Wild West shows. Reeves prefers the term “free style shooting.”

He appears at county and state fairs around the country, at trap and skeet shoots, and at Kiwanis and Rotary-sponsored exhibitions.

At every show, the message is the same: Just watch and enjoy, don’t try it.

“The last thing I want is people trying to do what I do,” he said. “Even learning to shoot normal trap or skeet requires a lot of safety instruction. But this stuff (free style shooting) is three or four steps beyond that and to learn it requires really intensive safety instruction.”

The TV crew that filmed Reeves’ act recently picked up some groceries for Reeves, including:

--Eleven cantaloupes.

--One sack of lemons.

--One sack of tangerines.

--Four bunches of grapes.

--Three boxes of strawberries.

--Two sacks of pears.

--Two butternut squashes.

Tab: $58. For that, Reeves could have bought about 1,000 clay targets. But Reeves, who obviously enjoys it all, makes it seem like shooting citrus really is more fun.

Reeves also uses a .22 rifle in his act. He shoots grapes--individually, not by the bunch. And he also shoots aspirin tablets.

One of Reeves’ comedy wrinkles is to knock aspirin tablets and grapes out of the air, lobbed up in the air by his straight man assistant, John Morehouse.

Then, switching quickly back to the shotgun, Morehouse tosses up a baseball. Reeves fires . . . and misses.

Reeves: “John, check that ball carefully, I must have grazed it. There’s no way I can miss a baseball .”

Jones examines the baseball carefully, turns to the crowd and announces: “He missed it.”

With the .22, he warms up by turning charcoal briquettes into powder. For the TV crew he shot a couple of baseballs with the .22, after Morehouse had lobbed them overhead. On a direct hit, the ball would be driven perhaps 30-to-40 yards higher.

But switching to his 1940 Winchester pump, he gave new meaning to the term power. A direct hit with the 12-gauge drives a baseball about 100 yards straight up. We’re talking Babe Ruth popups.

Reeves can get serious, of course. He’s also a skeet instructor, charging $25 an hour. For years, he supported his free style shooting habit by working as a bartender in Redondo Beach. He’s still looking for sponsorship by a shotgun shell manufacturer.

“It’s expensive,” he points out. “I went through $4,700 worth of ammo in 1984. I’m already over $1,000 in 1985.”

And of course, there’s always the cost of lemons these days.