More on Matt Wins Bronze in London

Browns Mills NJ native, takes bronze in 50-meter three-position rifle

Published: Monday, August 06, 2012, 8:47 PM     Updated: Monday, August 06, 2012, 9:02 PM

By Dave D'Alessandro/Star-Ledger Columnist 

http://www.nj.com/olympics/index.ssf/2012/08/london_olympics_matt_emmons_a.html

LONDON — He’s won a few medals, and he’s flubbed a few more. Maybe Matt Emmons will be always respected for the former and infamous for the latter, but neither factoid says as much about him — neither is nearly as illuminating — as the way his opponents think about him.

We learned this after the Jersey guy tore open his soul Monday for everyone to examine, before earning a bronze medal in the 50-meter three-position rifle competition.

By now, you know his story — he’s the guy who fumbled two golden chances for medals at Athens and Beijing, and beat thyroid cancer — but you don’t watch sport shooting very often, so it’s hard to know the collateral damage it creates. It’s not like you can see it. This is not a game for men who traffic in Category 5 meltdowns — twitchy, shirt-tugging, dozen-tics-per-minute guys of fan-friendly vulnerability.

This sport is a quadrennial obscurity for most Americans. Even a great triumph, such as the one the Emmons experienced at the Royal Artillery Barracks, would merit a quick mention on NBC, and only as a homeopathic dose of some producer’s inner soldier fantasy.

That’s how we felt before Monday. And now we’re here to tell you we were dead wrong: This is the most mentally exhausting, nerve-wracking experience you’ll ever see — at least the way Emmons does it — and it’s more than an appreciation you get from his ability to hold a 14-pound gun for 90 minutes and blast a pinhole through a quarter-sized target 50 meters away time after time after time.

This time, he nearly suffered a fate worse than ’04, when his crossfire cost him a gold medal at Athens; and worse than ’08, when he bricked a deciding shot (yes, it’s a hoops term, use your imagination) that cost him another.

Lamentable failures, but old news. Or so it seemed during the three qualifying rounds of 40 shots each, as Emmons was solid during the prone position round, superb during the standing position series, and a straight shooter during the kneeling position set.

“He’s been pretty positive since 2008,” said his wife Katrina, the Czech Olympian who has three medals herself. “It’s just really tough when you have some — excuse my word — asses reminding you. Some of them on purpose, some of them making fun, which was not nice.

“He’s had to overcome that, and it was hard. Because it made him sad that people remember him more as (having) failed rather than a success.”

So now he was one shot away from a silver medal again, in the eight-man finals competition, which involve just 10 standing shots.

Just to clarify: Targets in the finals shrink. Now these shots are akin to hitting a bullseye the size of a dime from more than a half-football field away, and he had scored six 10’s in his seven previous shots.

Pure. Confident. It is a skill that requires inhuman concentration.

That’s when the Browns Mills product chose to remind us that the difference between calamity and serenity is about an inch, and largely influenced by a runaway heartbeat.

“I did everything I could to try to calm my body down,” Emmons said. “On the last shot, I was just shaking so much, I thought, ‘Okay, Matt — take your breaths, do your normal routine, and when you get on the target, start putting pressure on the trigger, and just keep going. Don’t hold up, don’t try to dress it up, just make it the best you can.’ ”

And with the memories of ’04 and ’08 swirling in the heads of everyone in the building, Emmons squeezed the trigger — very prematurely, it seemed — and the bullet pierced the target.

A gasp echoed throughout the hall as the board flashed a “7.6,” indicating it was a few inches southeast of the bullseye.

“I was jumpy,” he said. “I made a mistake.”

It was the worst shot — by far — of the Finals round.

Somehow, Emmons lived to tell about it, because he finished with 1271.3 points to 1271.0 for a Frenchman named Cyril Graff.

After 130 shots over five hours, Emmons earned his bronze by a decimal point. If Graff scored a 10.8 on his last shot instead of his 10.4, Emmons finishes fourth.

“Just to be on the podium is a special thing,” Jersey’s greatest marksman said. “The last four years have been tough. There’s been a lot of buildup, and I had the weight of the world on my shoulders — about how I was going to perform, how was I going to do on the last shot.”

He was gracious when that last shot brought bronze, just as he was when it brought heartbreak. This, however, cannot be expressed as well by scribbling strangers as it can by his peers, one of whom happened to set the Olympic record in this event Monday.

He is Niccolo Campriani, the splendid shooter from Italy who looks like an amiable corner grocer, who interjected an unsolicited remark that would make Emmons’ eyes moisten at the press conference.

“If I can comment here,” Campriani said in eloquent but heavily accented English. “It’s not how you win, but how you handle the loss that tells you whether you’re a champion or not.

“Matt is an unbelievable person. The way he managed Beijing, the way he was able to smile after 10 minutes, and that was the most impressive thing I ever saw on the shooting range. He is a model for me, he’s absolutely an inspiration, and I am really happy he is with me today, because he’s a great champion.”

Matt Emmons wins Bronze in London

Matt Emmons, of Browns Mills, NJ wins the bronze medal in shooting in London

London Olympics: Matt Emmons, a Browns Mills native, takes bronze in 50-meter three-position rifle

Published: Monday, August 06, 2012, 8:47 PM     Updated: Monday, August 06, 2012, 9:02 PM

http://www.nj.com/olympics/index.ssf/2012/08/london_olympics_matt_emmons_a.html

LONDON — He’s won a few medals, and he’s flubbed a few more. Maybe Matt Emmons will be always respected for the former and infamous for the latter, but neither factoid says as much about him — neither is nearly as illuminating — as the way his opponents think about him.

We learned this after the Jersey guy tore open his soul Monday for everyone to examine, before earning a bronze medal in the 50-meter three-position rifle competition.

By now, you know his story — he’s the guy who fumbled two golden chances for medals at Athens and Beijing, and beat thyroid cancer — but you don’t watch sport shooting very often, so it’s hard to know the collateral damage it creates. It’s not like you can see it. This is not a game for men who traffic in Category 5 meltdowns — twitchy, shirt-tugging, dozen-tics-per-minute guys of fan-friendly vulnerability.

This sport is a quadrennial obscurity for most Americans. Even a great triumph, such as the one the Emmons experienced at the Royal Artillery Barracks, would merit a quick mention on NBC, and only as a homeopathic dose of some producer’s inner soldier fantasy.

That’s how we felt before Monday. And now we’re here to tell you we were dead wrong: This is the most mentally exhausting, nerve-wracking experience you’ll ever see — at least the way Emmons does it — and it’s more than an appreciation you get from his ability to hold a 14-pound gun for 90 minutes and blast a pinhole through a quarter-sized target 50 meters away time after time after time.

This time, he nearly suffered a fate worse than ’04, when his crossfire cost him a gold medal at Athens; and worse than ’08, when he bricked a deciding shot (yes, it’s a hoops term, use your imagination) that cost him another.

Lamentable failures, but old news. Or so it seemed during the three qualifying rounds of 40 shots each, as Emmons was solid during the prone position round, superb during the standing position series, and a straight shooter during the kneeling position set.

“He’s been pretty positive since 2008,” said his wife Katrina, the Czech Olympian who has three medals herself. “It’s just really tough when you have some — excuse my word — asses reminding you. Some of them on purpose, some of them making fun, which was not nice.

“He’s had to overcome that, and it was hard. Because it made him sad that people remember him more as (having) failed rather than a success.”

So now he was one shot away from a silver medal again, in the eight-man finals competition, which involve just 10 standing shots.

Just to clarify: Targets in the finals shrink. Now these shots are akin to hitting a bullseye the size of a dime from more than a half-football field away, and he had scored six 10’s in his seven previous shots.

Pure. Confident. It is a skill that requires inhuman concentration. 

That’s when the Browns Mills product chose to remind us that the difference between calamity and serenity is about an inch, and largely influenced by a runaway heartbeat.

“I did everything I could to try to calm my body down,” Emmons said. “On the last shot, I was just shaking so much, I thought, ‘Okay, Matt — take your breaths, do your normal routine, and when you get on the target, start putting pressure on the trigger, and just keep going. Don’t hold up, don’t try to dress it up, just make it the best you can.’ ”

And with the memories of ’04 and ’08 swirling in the heads of everyone in the building, Emmons squeezed the trigger — very prematurely, it seemed — and the bullet pierced the target.

A gasp echoed throughout the hall as the board flashed a “7.6,” indicating it was a few inches southeast of the bullseye.

“I was jumpy,” he said. “I made a mistake.”

It was the worst shot — by far — of the Finals round.

Somehow, Emmons lived to tell about it, because he finished with 1271.3 points to 1271.0 for a Frenchman named Cyril Graff.

After 130 shots over five hours, Emmons earned his bronze by a decimal point. If Graff scored a 10.8 on his last shot instead of his 10.4, Emmons finishes fourth.

“Just to be on the podium is a special thing,” Jersey’s greatest marksman said. “The last four years have been tough. There’s been a lot of buildup, and I had the weight of the world on my shoulders — about how I was going to perform, how was I going to do on the last shot.”

He was gracious when that last shot brought bronze, just as he was when it brought heartbreak. This, however, cannot be expressed as well by scribbling strangers as it can by his peers, one of whom happened to set the Olympic record in this event Monday.

He is Niccolo Campriani, the splendid shooter from Italy who looks like an amiable corner grocer, who interjected an unsolicited remark that would make Emmons’ eyes moisten at the press conference.

“If I can comment here,” Campriani said in eloquent but heavily accented English. “It’s not how you win, but how you handle the loss that tells you whether you’re a champion or not.

“Matt is an unbelievable person. The way he managed Beijing, the way he was able to smile after 10 minutes, and that was the most impressive thing I ever saw on the shooting range. He is a model for me, he’s absolutely an inspiration, and I am really happy he is with me today, because he’s a great champion.”

The room, filled with roughly 40 reporters from about two dozen countries, broke out in applause, as Emmons reached over with his right hand to affectionately rub his friend’s shoulder. Then he blinked back tears again.

He is 31, and there could be more Olympics. Regardless of what happens next, know this: Emmons never allowed failure to define him, and he’s eager to share his new mantra: “It’s winning a bronze, not losing a silver,” he said.

He might have pulled the trigger at the wrong moment, but it was good enough. It’s not golden, but it’s something close to it.

Dave D’Alessandro:ddalessandro@starledger.com

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/aug/6/london-olympics-2012-matt-emmons-takes-bronze-for-/?page=all - pagebreak

Matt Emmons‘ final shot of the Olympic 50-meter three-position rifle competition was terrible. Again. Only this time, he was thrilled.

After seeing gold medals — or any medal, for that matter — slip away with last-bullet debacles in Athens and Beijing, Emmons finally made his way to the Olympic medal stand in the three-position event Monday.

A score of 7.6 on his final shot might be dreadful for someone at the elite level, but good enough for Emmons to win bronze at the Royal Artillery Barracks, the fourth and final medal for USA Shooting at the London Games.

Emmons won a 50-meter prone rifle gold at Athens and silver in the event at Beijing, but he is best-known for his Olympic misfortunes.

He was the leader with one shot left in three-position at Athens in 2004, then somehow managed to shoot at the wrong target. In Beijing, Emmons again led with one shot left. That time, the gun went off before he was aligned with the target.

Jimmy and his Dad

        Jimmy and his dad at the Stars & Stripes America's Cup compound, Freemantle, Australia, 1987.
[photo copyright. To use please contact billkelly3@gmail.com]

“I was supposed to have been a Jesuit priest

Or a Naval Academy grad

That was the way that my parents perceived me

Those were the plans that they had

But I couldn’t fit the part

Too dumb or too smart

Ain’t it funny how we all turned out

I guess we are the people our parents warned us about”

“We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us About”

We are all products of our environment, and the child-rearing environment of the early fifties was pretty straight-forward. Like most of the other war babies I know, I come from a fairly dysfunctional background. My parents worked for as far back as I can remember. I know that’s where my worth ethic came from. They were typical middle-class Southerners in most regards, but there were also inherited traits that set them apart.

My father was a man of simple rules, though he could be totally unpredictable. We were well-known along the Gulf Coast as a seafaring family, but when World War II broke out, my father joined the Air Corps. I guess we have a hidden flying gene in there among all that salt water. My mother was the visionary. She loved music, musicals, and anything that had to do with the arts. She had attended college for two years before the Great Depression sent her out into the workforce, where she stayed for nearly sixty years.

My father’s idea of my future was hinged to the past. He saw me working on a boat. My mother taught me to dream and expand my horizons beyond family traditions and my childhood surroundings. They sure as hell did some things that I loved them for and some things that really pissed me off, but I still love them and love to go back to Alabama to visit….

I had made it a habit of coming home whenever I bought a new plane. It had become a ritual and a good excuse to visit my folks and get the approval of my purchase from former Army Air Corps master sergeant J.D. Buffet. Dad and I had never really talked about his flying days. I was so enamored of the exploits of my grandfather that I forgot that my old man had had a few adventures of his own. All I really knew was that he had been a flight mechanic in the war and had worked on B-17’s in Maine, B-25’s in Africa, and C-47’s in India. Now that we were both older and I had become romantically involved with airplanes, it became a wonderful opportunity to stay in touch with my dad. He had ridden with me in every airplane I had owned, and there had been a lot of them…

One day we had come in from a grueling day of multiple takeoffs and landings on the Cumberland River and I was venting my frustration about crosswind when my dad casually said, “You should try one with a fire on board.” He proceeded to tell me a flying story that made my day of training look like an afternoon at the spa.

He had been flying over the Himalayas from his base in India on a test flight in an old C-47. There was just the pilot, co-pilot, and my dad. They were cruising along when suddenly a fire light came on, indicating that the heater in the plane was on fire. It was located in the lower nose compartment. My father donned a gas mask, grabbed a fire extinguisher, and went down below. He found the heater ablaze and the fuel line that fed from the main fuel tank to the heater spraying aviation fuel, which immediately burst into flames. He managed to put the fire out and close the fuel valve. He picked up the headset that was connected to the flight deck to report to the pilots that the fire was indeed out. There was no reply. He climbed back out of the belly and found no one flying the plane. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the pilot and copilot preparing to bail out. They had failed to inform my dad of their intentions. The master sergeant ordered the officers back to the controls, and when they landed he reported them to the commander of the base and they were grounded.

“You never told me that story,” I muttered in disbelief.

J.D. never got to ride in the Albatross. To put it in old Army Air Corps terms, shortly before I bought it, he was ground zero for a direct hit, a hit from which he would not recover.

In early 1995 my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. He knew something had been wrong but wasn’t sure what….After the initial shock and once the devastating news had settled in, my father and I talked. Our conversations were more personal than they ha ever been…By the time he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, we had fortunately already made our peace. We had made it passed those testosterone-produced clashes that seem to be rites of passage for fathers and sons. But he was a fighter and in the next breath would come out swinging, ready to “take the bull by the horns,” as he put it. He never talked about licking Alzheimer’s like it was some kind of opponent he was going to defeat. He knew his fate. He told me he just wanted to so a few things he had never gotten to do. He was going to study his options and let me know.

When tragedy of such proportions occurs, the only thing you can do is hope that there have been some good times. It’s hard to catch up. My parents had gotten to enjoy the fruits of my success. They went to shows, hung out backstage with my crew and band, and acted like that was unique, wonderful, and very small group of people known as the parents of successful rock stars. They had traveled the world together, hoping to cruise on through the last part of their lives in the comfort of their nest, called Homeport. But that was not to be.

My father always had a great sense of humor. I think that’s where mine comes from, so I think he would be most pleased if I told this little story. One day I got a call from him, asking me to come to Alabama…I didn’t know if he would ask me to go to Mars on mainland China…We were sitting at the end of the pier. Pies on the eastern shore of the bay were not just structures that jutted into the shallow waters. They were not just shelters from the near-tropical summer sun. They were wooden islands…My father had overseen the construction of a pier that ran from the house on the bluff for the length of four football fields. It was his signature upon the landscape of the eastern shore…Since his retirement, the pier had been his base of operations….We were looking out over the shallow waters of Mobile Bay, savoring the day and the unique taste of fresh fried oysters on buttered French bread with hot sauce and tarter sauce, which mad eup the sandwich that’s synonymous with the Gulf Coast – the oyster loaf…

He drained the last sip of his Barq’s (rootbeer) and stared out across the bay. “You know what I was just thinking about?”

“What?” These days that could be a loaded question.

“Remember when you got thrown out of the sailing club for leaving the race and sailing all the way across the bay?”

I only had to think a moment about that major event in my misspent youth. It had been the same kind of day as today.

“You bet I do,” I said with a laugh.

“I never told you, but that was about as proud as I ever was of you. I mean, being the first Buffet to get a college degree was good, don’t get me wrong, but that time you decided to light out on you own, that was a moment.” 

Tears came into my eyes. I started to drift back to that incredible day…

“You know why I chose to fly instead of go to sea?”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it was what I wasn’t supposed to do. Looks like you have made a career out of that, doing what you’re not supposed to do. I’m proud of you, boy.” 

Today when I join him for his walks down the oyster-shelled driveway out towards old Highway 98 or down to the end of the pier, I think of the lines from a song that I wrote about a fictitious but favorite character of mine named Desdemona.

“Her heart is in the kitchen, but her soul is in the stars.” Change the pronoun, and you have my dad – J.D.

Jimmy Buffet – From “A Pirate Looks at Fifty” (Fawcett Crest, 1998)