Veterans Wigger and Nygor Win National Shooting Championships

Veterans Lones Wigger of Columbus, Ga., and Don Nygord of La Crescenta each won national championships Sunday in the 25th annual U.S. International Shooting Championships in Chino.

Wigger, 47, who has won more than 100 medals in world-level competition, added to his string of victories when he captured the smallbore English match event with an aggregate score of 1,790 of a possible 1,800.

The event is shot with open-sighted .22-caliber rifles from the prone position. The target is 50 meters from the shooter and the 10-point scoring ring is less than one-half inch in diameter.

Wigger’s score was three points better than the 1,787 scored by second-place finisher Ernest Vande Zande of Colorado Springs, Colo. Tony Leone of Arlington, Va., who was leading going into Sunday’s final round, finished third with a 1,786 score.

Wigger’s daughter, Deena, won the comparable women’s event Friday, and the pair became the first father-daughter duo in history to win national shooting championships in the same year.

Nygord won the standard pistol event with a 1,716 score of a possible 1,800. Don Hamilton of Kingston, Mass., finished second with a 1,709 and Jerry Wilder of Plymouth, Ind., was third with 1,708.

The standard pistol event is shot with .22-caliber semi-automatic pistols in three phases. There is a slow or precision phase, a timed phase where the shooter has 20 seconds to shoot five shots, and a rapid-fire phase where five shots must be fired in 10 seconds.

The shooting championships at Prado Tiro, the 1984 Olympic shooting facility, continue through July 6 as some 600 marksmen from across the country vie for berths on the U.S. Team and for 16 different national championships.

The competition is staged by the National Rifle Assn. and the San Bernardino County Parks Department.