Tempo, Timing, and Triggering
From the “Gun Room” column by Steve Smith, July/August 2008
Ever see a golf tournament on television and it’s tight right to the final hole? It takes a four-foot putt to win or to send the match to a playoff. The pro addresses his ball, then, in a manner quite unlike all the other putts you watched him strike that day, he takes no time, stabs at the ball, and it drifts by the hole and he loses. Or, he stands over it so long that his mind puts breaks in the green that aren’t there, the ball drifts by the hole, and he loses.
Carefully avoiding the word “choke,” the nice announcers talk about pressure and that sort of thing. Eventually, one of them is likely to use the words “tempo,” or “timing,” something like: “He didn’t strike that putt with his usual tempo – he seemed to rush it/stand over it too long, and the putter face wasn’t square as he came blah,blah,blah….” It happens, and sometimes it only has to be, “Two bucks says you blow this putt, Smith.”
I was in Texas hunting quail, and Josh Manahan, the young fellow I was approaching the dogs with, had hit a few and missed a few, not bad for someone whose entire wingshooting experience up to this point had been ruffed grouse and woodcock in his native Maine. Josh, of course, was our essay contest winner and was having, if you could believe him, the time of his life – he tells you about it elsewhere in this issue. Watching him shoot earlier with Chris Dorsey, the third hunter, I thought I’d spotted his problem when he did miss – his tempo.
If we can learn from our mistakes, we can also learn from our victories, and as the covey came off the ground, Josh folded up a bird that was cutting right to left across his field of fire. From the way he had positioned himself, it was obvious he’d expected the birds to flush right, toward me (they rarely do), and this cutter took him by surprise, at which point his grouse-shooting reflexes took over and he instantly puffed the bird.
New shooting situations sometimes make us wonder if we left our experience and reactions back home. If a long time North Dakota pheasant hunter finds himself hunting ruffed grouse and woodcock in the Upper Peninsula clearcuts, where the birds are up and gone like wisps, he pretty quickly figures out he has to go about things pretty quickly. A miss is not a mystery, there’s none to be solved – it’s all about the cover.
But reverse that: Take an Eastern grouse hunter, like Josh, and put him in the wide open, and the misses aren’t so easy to figure out. But they are. It’s all about the tempo: Josh hit most of his shots when he was in his normal tempo and missed most of them when he wasn’t.
The seemingly endless skies of Montana and Iowa and the Dakotas, or Utah, Idaho – anywhere in the West – too often make us think we have a lot of time, and if we’re used to shooting quickly, we dawdle and our normal tempo is thrown off.
The grouse and woodcock seasons open early in Michigan, where I live and work (when Jake proofreads this, he will be tempted to change “work” to “am employed”), so they are my first bird contacts of the year. The shooting is both thick and quick, the cover still in the greens of high summer. When I get a chance – or can wangle an invitation – I sometimes but not nearly often enough head for Ben Williams’ home in Livingston (the best hunting lodge in North America) to chase his Huns and sharptails, almost always still in September. The first day or so at Ben’s I don’t shoot any better than I do in the grouse woods. Part of that, of course, is a lack of talent, aging muscles, dimming eyesight, a bad left ankle and right knee, jet lag, and dandruff. The rest is because in the big and wide and open, I feel like I’ve got all day, so I dawdle, my tempo, such as it is (I can’t putt, either) is thrown off. And I miss, usually twice.
Ben, ever the gentleman, will always have a few encouraging words along the lines of, “I can’t figure out which shot was the one you missed the most with – you feel alright?” And his dogs glare at me.
Like a golf swing, a shotgun mount and swing should be both effective and repeatable. Just as a hacker doesn’t swing his driver exactly the same way twice in a row, a beginning wingshooter doesn’t mount and shoot exactly the same way until he’s got a lot of empties and calendar pages piled up around his feet. For example, I have seen myself shoot on videotape – you can do the same thing with a video camera on a tripod or in the hands of a pal. From the time I start mounting the gun until I pull the trigger, I am the most successful if the total elapsed time is in the neighborhood of one second or a bit over. If it runs to two seconds, mostly I miss. If I snatch at a bird in less than a second, mostly I miss. These times may sound very quick, but in reality they aren’t. Try it yourself with an empty gun – in your mind count one-thousand-one-one-thousand-two. Start counting when you start mounting. I think you’ll see your timing is about what mine is.
Good tempo can also be aided by good gun fit and good trigger pulls. A stock that fits won’t slow you down and ruin your timing while you try to fit yourself to the stock. Even if a not-so-well-fitting stock is on a gun you’ve shot for years and are familiar with, that helps.
Trigger pulls are often overlooked and some people never think about them. But light triggers that go off when you want them to without conscious effort – though not hair triggers – are a great benefit to timing. A good trigger, at least for me, seems to allow the gun to fire when I think I want the gun to fire, like I’m touching the gun off with my mind. Sounds weird when I write it, but if you are a competitive shooter or have made a real study of shooting, you know what I mean.
Even if you’ve had a good gunsmith work on your guns’ triggers, they have a tendency to get heavier over time (the trigger, not necessarily your gunsmith), so it’s a good idea to have the pulls checked every few years. The established standard is that the trigger should fire with a pull equal to half the gun’s weight. If you have a double-trigger gun, the second trigger should be 25 percent heavier than the first.
If you watch a good shooter in action, no matter what the angle or range or speed of the bird, the timing from the beginning of the mount until the shot is triggered varies only by tiny fractions of a second. A video camera at a sporting clays range or with a couple friends, a ground trap, and a box of clays will show you what your timing is. It’s actually easier to remember what you see on the videotape and duplicate it in the field than you would think.
If you watch yourself on video, or watch a friend shoot whose style you’re familiar with, you’ll notice, I think, that when his normal tempo’s right, it usually means a hit. When that tempo is sped up, he gets both hits and misses; but when it’s slowed down, I think you’ll find the misses outnumber the hits. I know if I shoot too fast, or faster than normal, I still have a decent (for me) average; but things go south in a hurry when I dawdle.
A golfer who hits a putt faster than normal will still make a good percentage of them, but when you see him stand over it for a long time, you’re thinking to yourself, He’s gonna miss, and more often than not, he does. If we shoot too quickly, our mechanics can be faulty, but maybe not; when we shoot too slowly, our minds get involved, and then everything is faulty. Videotape yourself and see what I mean.
The issue in which this article appears, July August 2008, is available as a back issue in our Storefront.
