RHODESIA AND THE ORIGINS OF IPSC
RHODESIA AND THE BEGINNINGS OF PRACTICAL PISTOL
I J Larivers
(The article was originally published in MAN Magnum magazine)
Stepping back and taking a look at what the International Practical Shooting Confederation has become over the years, one cannot but stand in awe. Currently shot in over a hundred countries around the world, it is unquestionably, to paraphrase Col Jeff Cooper, the Formula One of sport shooting, and arguably the largest such discipline in the world. And unlike most sport shooting disciplines, it is less than forty years old.
Over the years, there has been a necessary paradigm shift in the sport, to where it is now the world’s foremost action shooting platform. Very little of the ‘practical’ aspect remains; perhaps not a wholly bad thing, given today’s pre-occupation with political correctness. In the early days of the sport in the United States the main impetus was Jeff Cooper’s insight and vision. In Rhodesia and South Africa much of what was to be put into Practical Pistol was a result of the ever present terrorist threat.
I shot my first ever Practical match in Rustenburg in 1984, when I was on contract to the Bophuthatswana government as a conservation officer. Then, it was as much a training exercise for whatever might crop up at the next roadblock, as it was a sporting event.
I’ve always been interested in the history of things, perhaps because everything seemed so much simpler back in the ‘good old days’. And I’ve periodically toyed with the idea of writing about IPSC’s origins and put the idea on the back burner. Two things finally convinced me to do this, at least in my own (adopted) country, which was one of the founder members of the sport.
The first was when I attended IPSC’s World Shoot XV in Bali in 2008.
The 1977 world champion, David Westerhout, still has the Rhodesian first place team trophy from a world championship held in Austria in 1976. There is clearly no mention of IPSC on it, as the match was promoted as a “combat pistol” competition. Wanting to clarify, I asked a member of the IPSC executive committee which had come first: the Austrian shoot or the Columbia Conference. The answer was “Oh well, you know the matches back then weren’t very big, maybe a hundred shooters”. In other words, “How would I know?”
In all fairness to him, when I got back to Zimbabwe I asked Dave Westerhout the same thing and he said he couldn’t remember either, and he had attended both!
When one looks at the significance of IPSC today, one would think that there would be a ‘keeper of the keys’ or some such who would be responsible for looking after the history. The IPSC website today enlightens folks to the fact that the Columbia Conference was indeed held in May, shortly before the Austrian shoot, so presumably time was the culprit in not staging it as a true IPSC match.
The second incident that gave me pause for thought was the occasion when I was asked by my Regional Director, Tara Maidwell, at a shoot in Bulawayo, to do a write up on Zimbabwe as an IPSC region in an upcoming issue of IPSC World magazine. This I duly did, and sent it off. A reply came back requesting the year in which we had joined IPSC. I explained what I had already written in the text that we were a founder member of the sport, and that Dave Westerhout had represented us at the Columbia Conference in 1976. A couple more confused emails ensued, until I realised that they were perplexed because Dave was the delegate from Rhodesia, the inference being when did Zimbabwe really join IPSC? A short history lesson followed and all was, I thought, clear. We really shouldn’t lose track of these things.
Fortunately Dave still shoots on my range in Harare, as does Lionel Smith who was also a member of the 1976 Rhodesian ‘team’ in the Austrian championships. Lionel shoots the same .45 Colt semi-auto that he shot in the ’70s, and Dave, who won the 1977 shoot with a Browning 9mm, has recently seen the light and started shooting a single stack Colt .45. So there is still a wealth of information available, anecdotal and substantive, on the early days of Practical Pistol in Zimbabwe.
Dave tells an engaging story of when the Rhodesians travelled to Austria for the 1976 match in the face of international sanctions. Just to be on the safe side, they didn’t travel as a group, and in those much simpler days when taking your pistol and ammunition with you wasn’t the bureaucratic nightmare it is today, they all professed to have sort of ‘bumped into’ one another on the flight when they arrived. What a coincidence!
State security agents left them in no doubt that they knew they were the Rhodesian pistol team and there was no way Rhodesia could officially field a team. Well, Dave countered, since we all happen to be here (coincidentally) with our pistols, maybe we could shoot as ‘The Lions’? Officialdom grudgingly accepted this, and ‘The Lions’ duly won first place in the team event. There was more than a little embarrassment at the prize giving when, in the presence of the security men from the airport, the Minister awarding the medals announced that the first place team was ‘The Lions’, “but of course we all know they’re the Rhodesian Combat Pistol team”, thus giving as official an approbation of their participation as was going to be allowed.
In May of that same year, American Combat Pistol shooters Dick Thomas and Franklin Brown had convened the first-ever get-together of like-minded shooters from Belgium, Great Britain, Japan, New Zealand, Rhodesia, South Africa, the United States and West Germany to craft the sport of Combat shooting into a recognised international discipline, which was represented by the fourteen nations at the conclusion of the conference. The legendary Col Jeff Cooper, known equally well as an accomplished marksman and a contemplative philosopher, was unanimously elected as IPSC’s first President.
Up to this time the only international pistol competition had been at the Olympic Games. Now, there was a dynamic new sport that tried to balance equally a shooter’s score, the time he took to complete a course of fire, and the power of the handgun he used. There’s been a lot of lead and copper downrange since then, and the growth of the sport has been phenomenal.
Jeff Cooper had been advocating combat style shooting as a sport since 1956, and his mindset wasn’t unique. Many others were doing the same thing in a number of different countries, essentially just making it up as they went along but independently evolving the same basic principles. Up until IPSC was born, though, there had been no standardization of rules, targets, scoring or match administration. The three major cornerstones of the sport which emerged from Columbia were power, speed and accuracy. They remain to this day, suitably brushed up into Latin, the motto of the sport, ‘DVC, Diligentia, Vis, Celeritas.
Firstly, handgun calibres were classified as either ‘minor’ or ‘major’ depending on the relative power of the cartridge. In the old days a ballistic pendulum was used to test competitors’ ammunition. It comprised a steel plate which was first calibrated using factory ammunition. Back in the early days shooters’ firearms were pretty much going to be either ‘minor’ 9mms or ‘major’ .45s. The bullet strike on the plate translated into a value of momentum, from which it would have been possible to calculate its velocity and kinetic energy. However the pendulums worked much more simply, the strike displaced a spring-loaded pointer on a scale, and a competitor’s ammunition had to equal that for ‘minor’ to achieve a score at all, and ‘major’ to achieve a higher point score. The whole idea was that if the shooter could excel in both speed and accuracy with a more powerful firearm, he deserved more points. Today, while still found in many a physics classroom, the ballistic pendulum has long since been replaced by the modern electronic chronograph.
Accuracy was rewarded as in all shooting sports by shots placed in various scoring zones. The early targets had ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, and ‘D’ zones which carried progressively fewer points. The ‘A’ zone carried the same value for both ‘major’ and ‘minor’ and ‘minor’, but hits in the other zones carried fewer points depending on the power factor.
Then, the time factor was added. The concept of the Comstock scoring system, initially conceived by Air Rhodesia captain Tony Weeks, is that whatever your points are at the end of a course of fire, they will now be divided by the time it took you to complete the course – effectively points scored per second.
By the end of the Columbia Conference, one big question was where the following year’s world championships would be held. Amazingly, in the face of international sanctions and the ever present spectre of the bush war, Rhodesia won the honour.
It wasn’t often in the last days of the bush war that Rhodesia received much in the way of international sporting exposure, and in 1977 they not only hosted the match, but Dave Westerhout emerged as the world champion, for which he was later named sportsman of the year. In second place was Peter Maunder, also of Rhodesia and Raul Walters of the United States took home bronze. Westerhout was quoted after the match as saying, “We won because we made fewer mistakes than the Americans did”.
Championships now take place every three years. Practical Pistol has continued into the 21st century in Zimbabwe, with competitors attending every world championship since the sport’s inception. In the background there’s the subtle, knowing inference here that David Westerhout was really the first IPSC world champion because 1977 was the first year a world championship was held under its auspices.
I hope that IPSC itself one day decides to document its history, before too much is lost.
PHOTOS
\1. Rhodesian Practical shooting in the beginning: Figure 11 targets and stopwatches.
2. Rhodesia "leatherslap" shooting in the Save River, 1959. David Westerhout on the left.
3. David at the time of the 1977 World Shoot.
4. Col Jeff Cooper (l) on the range in Salidbury, Rhodesia.
5. The Rhodesian first place team trophy from the 1976 Austrian shoot; clearly not an IPSC match.
6. David Westerhout today.
7. IPSC in Rhodesia, circa late 1970s.
8-9. The glossy shoot book from the 1977 World Shoot.
10-11. The working copy of the 1977 shoot book.
12. The original 'Rhodesian Wall' from the 1977 shoot in use in the 1990s.
13. Zimbabwe's team at the 2009 IPSC Level 4 All-Africa Championships in South Africa.
14. In 2012, Zimbabwe hosted the Africa Area Level 4 in Bulawayo.
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