Top Gun Slaps Leather--Balloons Bite the Dust

Holed up in a little shack off Frontier Town’s Main Street, Stan Sweet, 59, carefully rubbed some baby powder on his holster and lamented the pressures of being top gun.

Soon, he would step outside to face an unflinching, heartless foe in a World Fast Draw Assn. contest--a red balloon. True, Sweet would be allowed to adjust the balloon to any height. And he’d get all the practice draws he wanted, a privilege not accorded 19th-Century gunslingers, none of whom was ever known to have said, “Hey, Wild Bill, let me take a couple of warm-ups, all right?”

But Sweet also knew that unless his trusty Colt .45 spit out its unburned bits of powder to within a quarter-inch of the target, the balloon would survive.

“Some people think that because we use blanks and there’s no one shooting back that there’s no tension involved,” said Sweet, a television weatherman in Roanoke, Va. “But I’ve seen guys with their knees shaking. There’s peer pressure.”

Unfortunately for the competitors, there’s not much money pressure, the kind that results when big purses are offered.

Sweet, who estimates he makes “maybe $1,500” a year in winnings as world champion, was gunning for a first prize of $88 on a recent weekend before a handful of spectators in the frontier-replica town.

Originally, he and the other deadeyes had hoped to be slapping leather this day in the World Fast-Draw Championships at the Pismo Beach Clam Festival. But after sponsoring the event in 1984 and 1985, the clam folks dropped the sideshow this year for insurance reasons, forcing cancellation of the championships. It was a disappointment for fast-draw fans comparable to the time Wild Bill Hickock and John Wesley Hardin decided not to test each other in the streets of Abilene, Kan.

So, in order to stay sharp, association members were holding a shoot in Colton, near San Bernardino, which in some ways was a more appropriate location anyway.

After all, Wyatt Earp had lived in Colton as a youth and his brother Virgil was elected the town’s first marshal in 1887. One newspaper account termed the Colton of that period as “the toughest town untamed” in California, though locals say the title was exaggerated.

Still, whatever Colton’s legacy, only 17 big-irons showed up to challenge Sweet.

These are tough times for the World Fast Draw Assn.

The 30-year-old, Tustin-based group’s membership (about 500) has fallen to half of what it was in the early-1960s when television Westerns inspired an interest in the art. Tom Wentz, a fast-draw instructor and promoter, attributes some of the group’s problems to an undeserved black-hat image.

“All those Westerns got people interested in fast draw,” Wentz said. “But then guys would drive out into the desert with live ammo and every time they had an accident, the newspaper headline would say, ‘Fast Draw Artist Kills Friend,’ or something like that. We got a bad rap. We don’t use live ammo and if you’re even seen with it at an event, you’re eliminated.”

“We have a better safety record than Little League baseball,” says Chairman Dick Plum, who fires off a monthly newsletter to 300 subscribers.

Nor were the group’s fortunes enhanced a few years ago when a gun company dropped out as a sponsor after one fast-draw winner boasted in his victory speech that he had used a rival’s brand.

In those days, when the world competition was held in Las Vegas, celluloid cowboys such as Clint Eastwood, a legitimate fast-draw practitioner, would perform at events. But Eastwood’s a mayor now.

The closest thing to a celebrity in Colton this day was Sweet.

Admittedly a “frustrated, would-be cowboy,” he took up the hobby after hosting a television segment on fast-draw shooting several years ago. “I’ll practice four hours a day when I’m in training,” he said.

Fast-draw artists are aided by peculiar-looking holsters that no dude would have dared wear in the Old West; they project two to three inches out from the leg on leather arms. “The secret is, you snap your hips forward, your back back, and the gun sort of just falls into your hand,” Sweet said. He pantomimed the shots. “Pow! Pow! Pow!”

A devotee of the “fanning” method of slapping the hammer back with his non-trigger hand, he remembered the day he drilled a balloon in 20 one-hundredths of a second, an association record.

“I was just wild that day!” the weatherman said, pantomiming again. “Bam! Bam! Bam!”

Of course, Sweet admitted there’s no comparison between drawing against balloons and against desperadoes.

“What made a gunfighter back then wasn’t quickness but courage--firing steadily while bullets flew past you,” Sweet said. His rivals here ranged from 68-year-old Harlan Smith, who calls himself “one of the last of the thumbers” (he cocks the hammer with the thumb of his shooting hand) to 28-year-old Randy Blakemore, a professional drummer who is legally blind and walks on a prosthetic leg.

Shooters’ marks are measured from the time a starting light flashes to the striking of the target by the powder. (A miss adds one second to the score).

The winner sports the lowest cumulative time for three events: firing at a single balloon from eight feet, at two balloons from the same distance and at a silhouette from points of eight to 15 feet.

The competition, as expected, came down to a duel between Sweet and Dan Gosserand, a tall, 33-year-old Alhambran who, for geographical reasons, might quite possibly qualify as the Fastest Gun in the West.

Sweet waited in the shed while Gosserand fired in the last event, the double-balloon. Their scores were nearly even.

“He’s going too much for speed,” Sweet said. “Those misses can kill you.”

Sure enough, Gosserand shot wide at one balloon.

“Now we separate the men from the boys,” said Sweet, donning his earplugs and walking out onto Main Street.

The weatherman took a couple of practice draws. Then, he calmly plugged every balloon to stave off the challenger and win the match. Gosserand glumly shook hands with him and walked off into the smog.