Pray for the Clay...in May

I am not merely waxing (pathetically) poetic in this post, I am revealing one of my semi-Hero powers, that of turning finely-cast light ceramic disks into fragments, with an average score that would garner me a 'C' were it a 100-point quiz. I am a Sporting Clays shooter on occasion, and occasionally a successful one as shown here:
That's me (the lummox in the red shirt on the right) and my brother (to my left) posing with Averill (far left) and Patrick (the Todd Robbins-looking dude in the middle) DeLoache as the winning team for the First Annual ACU Shoot for Success, a Sporting Clays tournament held last year.

Sporting Clays has been described as "golf with a shotgun", and given my wild inaccuracy at golf this would not seem to be the sport for me. Compared to others who are artists with a 12-gauge, it isn't. My brother is the Bwana Devil with a shotgun, with no training and no practice he broke 78 clays out of 100, but then again he has the nervous system of a cat. His skill is really remarkable to people who shoot regularly who find out that he, in fact, does not. In typical terse and self-depreciating fashion, he passes off finding and hammering flying clays that escape many others. "It's a shotgun. I shouldn't EVER miss," he says, and all I can think is that if he's this good with firearms untrained, there are Jihadis in Al-Anbar that should be thanking their god that he's not in a Marine uniform and parked behind a Barrett M107 and within a mile of them. But I digress.

Shooting with the DeLoaches was really neat, they showed up to support the other beneficiary of the Shoot, the Texoma Youth Camp. With this hybrid team of ACU and Texoma supporters it seemed inevitable that we would win...after the fact. There were some shooters there that dwarfed us in talent, one twenty-something whippersnapper broke 92, but the reason our whole team won was that our whole team did fairly well -- Averill shot 77 (with a 20-gauge no less), My Bro broke 78, I got 70 and Patrick, who was 15 at the time, got 56 with a pump gun, no less. You meet the nicest people on the shooting range, and that day was no exception. When we won, the collective response was pretty much, "Whoa, that's random." It was a very pleasant surprise.

The 2006 ACU Shoot For Success tournament will commence on May 6, 2006, at the Elm Fork Shooting Park in Dallas, a gem of a shooting range in the Trinity River bottomlands just a few miles from downtown Dallas (and people wonder why I love Texas?).

My brother and I will be there in the dust of that parking lot awaiting you. Do you have the Mediocre As Shooting Skills Go Stuff to beat us? We, and the ACU COBA, the Texoma Youth Camp and the V.W. Kelly Scholarship Fund would like you to register to find out. And then show up on May 6 to see if you can pry the First Place Team prize from our slightly sweaty and shaky hands. It's for a good cause, the ammo is included in the registration fee and so is lunch. You're going to eat on May 6th, right? So register to eat lunch and consider the shooting as free entertainment. You don't have to be really good or even in practice to enjoy it -- the Bro and I proved that you CAN win without practice, hard work or (in my case) natural ability.

If we can, so can you.