State Championships and Cheap Shots

This past weekend, instead of camping in the great outdoors, or more like taking a shower with my clothes on in the great outdoors, I was competing in the State Sporting Clays Championship.  I competed in and won my first shooting competition when I was a mere 16 years old. Since then, there's been years where I couldn't seem to lose, and others where I couldn't buy a win if I had all the money in the world. I have shot tournaments the size of what seems like a bunch of buddies going out to "shoot shit" in the woods all the way up to the National Championship.  I have shot tournaments in nearly every western state.  While competing I have had some very interesting and unique experiences ranging from drag queens on the River Walk in San Antonio, TX to spending the night in a tent in Mount Vernon, WA.  However, what happened this year at my State Championship has never, and I hope never will again happen to me.

After shooting very respectfully the first two rainy days of the competition, I was only a couple targets down from the lead. As is tradition at these competitions, groups of shooters usually get together and go to dinner then out for a couple drinks, this weekend was no exception. Plentywood and I joined up with a group of shooters that had come from Washington and Idaho to compete in the out of state category.  We had a good dinner at a relatively new restaurant and then after the group thinned a bit decided to hit the local watering hole for a couple after dinner drinks.  We naturally went to the closest place which happened to be where Plentywood and I ended up the night before. We had one drink there and decided it was time to move on to a bar where we fit in a little better - Off to the old Horseshoe.  When we arrived there we were sadly disappointed, the band that was scheduled to play that night had cancelled, well more like they decided not to show up.  Oh well. Drinking and bullshitting it was then.

As the night progressed we were having a grand old time and Plentywood seemed to be getting along great with all my shooting buddies - usually a rare feat when it comes to them interacting with women.  Then it happened.

All of a sudden one of the guys that was out with us went crashing to the floor behind me. As I turned around to see what happened there was a local guy with his chest all puffed out saying "there's plenty to go around for everyone." Next thing I know I'm surrounded by cops and people asking me if I'm okay. When I turned my head back to my table of comrades, the local decided it was a good time to sucker punch me - well in this case it was an elbow, knocking me out cold. I was out for somewhere around a minute and half to two minutes.

I've been knocked out before, and on some of those occasions it was by my own doing. I have, however, never been knocked out from one blow that I didn't even see coming.  While I don't really mind the fact that I got knocked out, the thing I do mind is that there were no words exchanged between this guy and anyone from my group, other some of us asking what was going on.  I filled out all the necessary paper work saying I was fine, gave my account of the experience to the cops and sat down at our table to regain my composure and sense of what was happening around me.  After about an hour longer we decided it was time to call it a night.

When I woke up in the morning a short 6 hours later for the last round of the competition I was greeted with a headache and a somewhat uneasy feeling of not knowing whether or not I was going to be able to even finish out the competition.  I gathered up my belongings from the hotel room, left Plentywood to sleep in for a while longer and headed off to the range.  When I got there I saw everyone from last night and we exchanged the obligatory "how are you feeling today?" questions.  I decided it was probably a good idea to try and shoot some warm up to see how it was going to feel and see if I could even think about shooting the final 100 targets.  After the first warm up pair I shot, I knew that I was in for a long day and decided to save the punishment for the targets that mattered.

We all headed out to our respective starting stations and began what is hopefully going to be the most painful and un-enjoyable round I ever shoot.  All throughout the round I kept having to tell all the passing squads my account of what had happened the night before. It might be because I'm fairly well known in the shooting circle, or it might have been for some other reason, the the story seemed to have spread like wildfire amongst the shooters. I did get a couple comforting remarks from some of the shooters that seemed to be very impressed that I was even attempting to shoot after the night I had.  I managed to struggle through the final round of the competition, shooting mediocre at best. I no longer needed to stick around in the hopes that I was going to end up in a shoot off after the afternoon rotation had finished. Once off the course, I loaded up my gear, said goodbye to a couple of shooters I won't see again until late summer and started the drive back home.  Guess I'll just have to wait until next year, and stay out of the bars, so I don't ruin my chances of taking home another State Championship Buckle.