Shooting: Golf with A Recoil

If you have any lingering doubts about your status as a centered, harmonious, serene person of calm temperament and placid, contemplative mind, there’s no better way to confirm it than to spend an hour or so blazing away with a shotgun.

I’m not talking about pulling a Dirty Harry and cleaning out some vermin-infested saloon. No. That’s strictly for slope-browed, mouth-breathing malcontents with no imagination, no coordination, no eye. No sense of time and space and the joyous, ethereal, instinctive oneness of man and nature.

No, to truly plumb those primal depths you need to go trapshooting.

That’s right, blasting little green Day-Glo discs out of the air. Think of it as golf with a recoil. Or a game of eight ball with ear plugs. The object is baby-simple, but the route you take to get there might well be through a copy of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”

I wasn’t prepared for it. I thought you pointed, squinted, said “Pull,” missed and got a sore shoulder. That’s what happened about 20 years ago, during my first and only round of trapshooting. Out of a round of 25 shots, I hit three. I started believing that hot guns such as Robert Stack had something mystical going for them. As it turns out, they did.

So, two decades removed from my virgin debacle, there I stood in the Irvine foothills on one of the trap ranges of the Orange County Shooting and Training Center, trying and failing to wipe a silly, self-satisfied grin off my face as one little green disc after another disintegrated downrange. Brian Ballard had rummaged around in my unconscious mind and had pulled out Buffalo Bill.

Ballard looks less like a Zen master than the kind of guy you’d love to go to the ballgame with, but the Olympic shooting team ring on his left hand tells you otherwise. He shot for the United States at Seoul in 1988 and was an alternate on the 1984 team. This means that with a shotgun in his hand, Ballard is Luke Skywalker with a light saber.

On Fridays, he teaches humble novices like me how to conceptualize, visualize and harness the natural human instinct for blowing things out of the air.

Pursued thus, shotgunning is not John Wayne stuff. It is noisy art.

It was made all the more satisfying by my use of my grandfather’s old Remington Model 870 .16-gauge, a gun he had willed to me nearly a quarter-century ago and which I had never fired. After a good cleaning and oiling by a gunsmith, it looked sleek, well-used and capable.

Ballard showed me how to hold it: for trap, hard into the hollow of the shoulder, left hand loose on the pump handle, the ball sight positioned just below the far edge of the little concrete bunker, or house, from which the birds would be thrown in any one of five random directions away from me. Feet planted at shoulder width, knees slightly bent, weight slightly forward. Say the magic word . . .

“Pull.”

Out spun the bird with a soft whiz, gently arcing over the field strewn with shattered fluorescent green chips. I jerked the barrel up and yanked the trigger.

I remembered that thump: short, sharp, definite, jarring. And that throaty bang. Nice and primal. A fine, authoritative obbligato to the tightly focused mind.

Only it wasn’t tightly focused. The bird whirled blissfully on, untouched, spun into the ground and shattered like a cheap china tea saucer.

Ballard was untroubled. Keep the head erect and don’t move the gun with your arms, he had said earlier. Do it by rotating your body. But he let all that physical stuff drop quickly. That wasn’t the heart of the matter, and it wasn’t my problem. I wasn’t reacting instinctively to the flight of the bird, wasn’t mentally blotting out what Ballard called “that big, smoking black pole in front of your face” and boring my eyes in on the green bird.

And not just the bird itself, but a specific small point on the bird. It was going to come winging out of the house at about 30 m.p.h., Ballard said, too fast to focus on at first. But in about half a second it should condense from a blur to a definite shape. Then you pull the trigger. Look at the bird, not the barrel. Visualize the shot. Don’t force it. Don’t swing too fast.

In fact, don’t think. Everybody, Ballard said, knows instinctively how to point a finger directly at a sparrow flying past. You just do it. Smoothly, uncritically.

Another bird sailed away. Another miss. And another. And another. Each time, Ballard asked if I could tell him where the shot had gone: low and right, high and left? Each time, I told him instantly. Each time I was right. Why was I missing? Looking at the barrel instead of the bird. Thinking too much.

Don’t think.

Up flew another bird and up went the barrel. But this time I didn’t see it. What I did see was the bird exploding in all directions, radiating away from the center of a direct hit. I remembered a line from “Bull Durham,” as the mentally frantic pitching phenom Nuke Lalouche switches off his mind and instantly lays in a blazing strike: “God, that was beautiful! What’d I do?”

Truth began to reveal itself. There were a few more miscues, yes, but the percentage of birds turning to talcum powder in the air began to rise dramatically. One, two, three in a row. The gun began to feel comfortable, friendly, useful. I almost stopped hearing the kaboom. Ballard was smiling and nodding. It felt wonderful.

I ran out of shells. I wanted to highball it down the hill for another few hundred boxes. I wanted to grab Ballard and beg him to teach me more. I wanted to hear him call me Grasshopper.

My grandfather’s magical bequest slid back into its case. I saw him that night, in a grainy photograph on my piano--young, booted, broad-shouldered, confident, a shotgun crooked in his arm, ducks draped over his shooting jacket.

He would have called it good marksmanship. A Zen master might call it centeredness.

I’d like to call it a good beginning.

* Orange Coast Shooting and Training Center, 11501 Jeffrey Road, Irvine. (714) 559-4525. Hours at the shotgun site: noon to midnight Wednesday and Thursday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Cost per round (25 targets): $5.50 for non-members, $4.25 for members. Lessons (Fridays, by appointment): $50 per hour, plus cost of targets. Rental guns: $1 per round. Ammunition: $6.35 plus tax. Eye and ear protection required (safety glasses and ear plugs available at the range).