According to Tom Knapp, "When you're an exhibition shooter, every day is your birthday." Could there be a better credo for a life well-lived?
From Sporting Clays: "Wingshooting" August of 2013.
When Every Day Is Your Birthday
by Randy Lawrence
Exhibition wingshot and entertainer Tom Knapp was a shooting star, and not just because it said so on his website. Knapp was a shooting star because he burned brightly across the skies of our sport with a hot light that, like a meteor’s, was far too fleeting. When he died in April of 2013 of complications from pulmonary fibrosis, he was but 62 years old. But oh what a life he lived.
There the thousands of trick-shot appearances fronting sponsors like CZ-USA, Benelli USA, Federal Premium, and Winchester, making magic with their guns and ammo. There were the appearances on the History Channel’s Sharpshooters and Discovery’s Shooting Star and the “show and tell” clinics Knapp hosted in the teeming dove fields of Argentina. And of course there are the world records, the most recent coming in 2004 during a show in Murfreesboro, Tennessee: ten hand-thrown clay targets, each broken with an individual shot. The feat was clocked at 2.2 seconds.
Knapp had honed that part of his act from seven birds to eight, then nine. In an interview woven into longtime cameraman Jason Steussy’s video tribute, Knapp offers a glimpse behind the sheer physicality of the record.
“Adding one more target to that stack, bringing the weight of that stack of targets to up over three lbs., trying to get that many targets up to 60 feet in the air, and give myselt time to strike each one separately…It’s a major physical challenge,” Knapp admitted.
Go ahead. Pick up 10 standard clays. First, figure out how you’re going to hold them in one hand. Next, think about how you’re going to throw them high enough and in a place where you can safely shoot at each of them separately.
Oh…and then there’s the part where you fling the shotgun to your face and smack one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-NINE-ten clay targets in far less time than it took to type to type those numbers.
It’s fitting that Knapp broke those ten clays for an audience in Tennessee, the Volunteer State being the home of his exhibition shooting idol, the Showman Shooter himself, Herb Parsons.
Knapp would often recall how, as a BB gun-toting 10-year-old back home in Minnesota, he sat entranced in front of the family black-and-white TV during one of Parsons’ variety show appearances, waving his Winchester Model 12 repeater like a magician’s wand. If a future shooting star wasn’t born that day, he was at least kindled.
Parsons, a pitchman working under Winchester’s brand, was a maestro of the handgun, the company’s iconic lever-action rifles, and, of course, the scattergun. He pioneered the pulverizing of everything from heads of cabbage to radishes to handfuls of eggs hiked back between his legs like a football center, his
Winchester pump lying on the ground. Parsons would snap the eggs, whirl to snatch up the shotgun, and break those “cackleberries” from a crouch. For pyrotechnics, he hung a can of gasoline over a candle inside a steel drum and blew the whole ensemble into a glorious flaming finale – all done while cracking wise, extolling the virtues of Winchester guns and ammo (and firing the imaginations of future show business liability attorneys everywhere!).
Ironically, Parsons, like Knapp, would leave this earth far too soon, dying of a heart attack during surgery for a hiatal hernia. He was 51. Certainly Knapp adopted some of Parsons’ plays into his own game, including Herb’s old line that the targets weren’t “hard to hit. They’re just easy to miss.” Parsons himself worked routines from his own mentor, Winchester traveling shooter Adolph “Ad” Topperwein, who, along with his wonderfully named dead-eye wife “Plinky” had enthralled crack shot fans for decades. Just as Knapp would later be inspired by a Parsons television appearance, so would Parsons, a freshman in high school at the time, be star struck when he had the chance to see the Topperweins perform live.
Parsons had cred on another sort of firing line as well. He won the pro division at Vandalia’s Grand American Trapshoot in 1953 and was a fixture on the trap and skeet All-America ssquad that Sports Afield named annually.
But beneath all of that beat the heart of a hunter, particularly a bird shooter. With the same flair and dedication he brought to his act, Parsons established himself as a world champion waterfowl caller, marketing calls and instructive recordings as a sidelight to his firearms gig. In the duck blind he took shots as they came, filling his game strap off the end of a Winchester Model 42 .410.
Parsons brought his sons Jerry and Lynn into the game fields as well as behind the exhibition shooting table, sharing with them his love for the shooting sports. In fact, in a story written a number of years ago by Sam Venable of the Knoxville News Sentinel, Venable credits Parsons with the old saw, “Go hunting with your boy today, and you won’t have to hunt for him tomorrow.” Parsons signed off at the end of each performance with the trademark line, “It’s just as important to be a good sportsman as it is to be a good shot.”
Knapp became an out-of-this-world shooter; he was always a hunter, the consummate sportsman cut from the same cloth as Parsons. He loved good dog work, wild country, a wry story, and a hearty laugh. He was an ardent family man whose delight had been days afield with his grandchildren. And he loved to shoot. Lord how that man loved to shoot. “When you’re an exhibition shooter,” he once claimed in a promotional video for Benelli firearms, “every day is like your birthday.”
The great Annie Oakley copped to shooting some 40,000 practice and performance rounds a year. Knapp has said that had Winchester not stepped in to sponsor his ammo during the early years, he may well have lost his house, so consumed was he with the volume of shooting required to hone his act.
“This is my business,” Knapp told one interviewer. “It’s my passion, and it turned into an obsession.”
How else could he toss eight clays in the air at once and break every one with a pump gun? Shoot an aspirin out of the air with a vintage-style 22 or pass a .45 Long Colt bullet through the eye of a washer tossed up in the sky? Flip forward spent hulls from a pump shotgun and shoot them on the wing? Toss a golf ball out in t front of his gun and “slice” it to the right, “hook” it to the left, then “drive” it directly out and away? Fold five doves almost before the first hits the ground? Put a shell in his mouth, toss an empty gun in the air, fling a clay bird out and away, catch the gun, load the shell, and then break the bird?
I’ve watched that last one over and over. In fact, I’ve watched all the Tom Knapp videos I can find, along with the Herb Parsons stuff, as well as a clip Thomas Edison made in 1894 of Annie Oakley shooting aerial targets with a lever-action rifle.
All three shooters were uncommonly strong, even the wiry, 5’ tall, 100 lb. Oakley. Watch her hands as she deftly manages those rifles through stationary and flying targets. Watch Parsons and especially, Knapp heave targets with studied, almost insouciant dexterity, shoot one-handed, over-handed, under-handed, behind the back, between the legs. There’s power in every move.
A shooting instructor of my acquaintance once chirped that Parsons’ ability to break the tiniest of targets with his gun held aloft over his head proved that gun fit was overrated. Nonsense. It only proved that Parsons’ vision and reflexes were, if anything, underrated. Oakley was meticulous about the fit of her rifles and shotguns, the grip of her handguns. Likewise Parsons and Knapp, who could arrange their shooting stance around anything out of the box but staked their reputations on guns that matched both physique and technique.
It’s so evident in film that when their guns are cheeked, their mount is not just consistent, but consistently perfect. Watch how incredibly still they keep their heads regardless of what machinations they’re carrying out with their hands or even their feet.
Finally, think about the ferocious level of focus evident in so much of the incredible footage filmed looking down the black hole of Knapp’s gun barrel. There is also that commitment, the courage, even, to dare to break the shot exactly when, where, and how it must be taken to be successful. The great ones do not bring that level of performance sometimes. They bring it every time.
Like his idol Parsons, Knapp had a signature salutation of his own: “Think safety first and then have a good hunt.” Tom Knapp practiced precisely what he preached – on the exhibition stage, on the prairies, in the aspen brakes of his beloved Minnesota, in marshes, pit blinds, and dove pegs up and down this hemisphere. In countless eulogies and farewells, he is feted as our sport’s most affable and well-spoken ambassador, always making wingshooting look fun, smart, and honorable.
Rest easy, big fella. Thank you for reminding us of just why we love this grand game.