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Several years ago, in a daring publishing experiment, 113-year-old Sports Afield
magazine changed its editorial focus. The hunting and fishing magazine became an
adventure-oriented publication that seemed like an earnest hybrid of Backpacking and
Men’s Journal. But the experiment failed—circulation fell from 507,000 to
460,000 within five years. Just recently, the magazine was sold and the publisher vowed to
return it to “its original grass-roots niche format.”
Amend “grass roots” to read “duck-blind.” The moral of this “guns
and hooks” publishing tale is that hunters and fishermen don’t want to read about
backpacking vacation spots or how to get in shape for cross-country skiing. Fitness means
how the shotgun fits against the shoulder, how the rod and reel play out the line.
I have a friend in Colorado who is a long-distance runner and hunter. He is equally
comfortable with a Remington as he is clicking off miles in his Reeboks. (Cyclist and Tour
de France champion Greg LeMond also enjoyed hunting, but his brother-in-law accidentally
shot him during a wild turkey hunt; LeMond almost died from blood loss.) My Colorado buddy
has been hunting and fishing since he was a youngster. But he hunts for a reason: to
provide food. He loves venison. He cures it himself. It saves him a trip to the
supermarket.
He is opposed to the idea of hunting as a thrill sport—it is a pastime for those who
revere nature and who understand the human’s place in the evolutionary food chain.
Hunting should be practiced by those who don’t waste what they kill.
Yet when a coyote ran off with one of his dogs, my friend wanted to start hunting coyote.
He wanted to get even. He feels conflicted between vengeful bloodlust and the philosophy
of not killing anything unless you eat what you kill. He solved his dilemma by getting a
new dog, which he now keeps indoors.
The connection between shooting and sports is very much a part of the Olympics. The winter
biathlon combines skiing with shooting. The modern pentathlon demands prowess at shooting,
fencing, horseback riding, running, and swimming. Both sports are a holdover from an era
when “gentlemen” were supposed to excel in the soldiery art of combat. Because the
upper classes did not have to toil in the fields or mines, these sports provided a healthy,
physical outlet.
According to an official web site for the Olympics, the pentathlon’s genesis was as
follows: “Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the Frenchman who revived the modern-day Olympics,
was personally responsible for the return of the Pentathlon in 1912. He felt it would
stimulate world relations, and insure peace, if soldiers of the world’s armies could
find a mutual interest in friendly competition.”
“When de Coubertin modernized the Pentathlon at the turn of the century, he drew upon
his own image of what an all-around warrior should be. He came up with the notion of a
Napoleonic liaison officer who is called upon to deliver an important message. The officer
is first required to mount any horse drawn from the line and ride it over rough terrain and
obstacles. Riding in enemy territory, the officer fends off foes, first with his pistol,
then with his sword. When the officer’s horse is brought down, he is forced to swim
across a raging river and then run through a thickly wooded forest in order to finally
deliver the urgent message on foot.”
But the pentathlon is no longer a marquee event in the Olympics. Other non-militaristic
sports such as gymnastics, volleyball, basketball, and swimming have gained in popularity.
Then the other day, as I was reading a New York Times article on the Russian war in
Chechnya, I came across an odd sentence buried towards the end of the news report which
described the fierce resistance that the Russian army was facing by rebels holed up in
Grozny. One of the rebels was a former female member of the Russian biathlon team who had
signed up to fight as a mercenary to earn money.
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