You Gotta be Kiddin' Me ..... Chapter 3
In the year of 1990, there entered a man who was / is an unsung hero for British paintball.
As some of you guys would know, there wasn’t a domestic paintball publication at that time but a sharp-eyed individual recognised the beginnings of a trend … the paintball trend.
He decided he was going to start publishing a paintball magazine – his name is Matthew Tudor who went on to become a profound guiding light for me over the years and one of the few very guys I would actually listen to.
I might not have followed all his advice but the point was I suppose, I valued his counsel.
If I didn't follow Matt's advice, I generally got into trouble and so I came to trust his views more and more as the years went flying by at 300 fps.
His new-born publication was to be called ‘Paintball Games International’ …. little did he know, or indeed anyone else, for that matter just how successful it was going to be.
Matt is one bright guy [though he would invariably deny this in an act of uncharacteristic humility] he has an intuitive grasp of the publication business and so his expertise was brought to bear on publishing a magazine but there was a problem … after the magazine started publication, it was obvious, this sport of ours was unlike many others.
Paintball in those days was vastly different than it is now in terms of player demographic.
Reports of fighting and intimidation were rife such that if PGi covered an event and players/teams weren’t mentioned or reported on .. people got pi$$ed off.
Accusations of favouritism and impartiality would fly around our sport with all manners of threats and silly stuff erupting.
An example of this insane behaviour came from one gun manufacturer who called Matt up one day, and he had counted the number of pics of his company's guns there were in this particular edition of PGi .. I can't remember the exact numbers quoted but it was along the lines of, the guy who called had about 17 pics of his marker in the edition and his competition had 19 .. that's how crazy it got back then, paranoia ruled the roost and hardly anyone acted rationally, except me of course, I was a shining example of controlled behaviour ..
Matt was in charge of about 15 other magazines at the time but it was the paintball magazine that would prove to be the biggest pain in his ass.
I’m not really surprised when one of his other magazines was called Teddy Bear International – I can hardly imagine 3 guys turning up in their teddy-bear onesies threatening to beat him up because of something written in their mag.
For normal Joes, paintball was like a mine-field, people seemed so sensitive to what or wasn’t in print .. it was this hypersensitivity that became the genesis of what I’ve been talking about concerning something I did that wasn’t particularly … er ….. ‘civilised’ is the best word I suppose.
Back to the magazine, Matt, believed quite rightly, this wasn’t such a good situation for anyone publishing a paintball magazine .. the last thing you need is a bunch of idiots coming into the office demanding whatever …
And so in true Machiavellian style, Matt made his move to shore up a defence perimeter around the magazine.
He looked around at what was happening and decided, rightly or wrongly he would ask me to write for the magazine ….
He had no idea if I could put a sentence together and write an article and so at least we both had that in common.
I wrote my first article and I suppose I must have been able to do something right because I ended up writing over 300 articles for the magazine in the following years.
Matt and myself became a partnership that went on for well over 15 years, our friendship still endures.
Matt went onto become one of my closest of friends and has always been 100% loyal to me even when people were screaming for my head because of something I had allegedly got involved in but he always stayed loyal . .no matter what - you really can't buy stuff like that and I recognised it for what it was.
Matt’s move to gain some form of security blanket was a double-edged sword because Trouble [with a capital 'T' followed me around] - as I told you in a previous chapter, I was misunderstood and wasn’t given sufficient number of toys to play with when young, either that or I was out and out barmy though I would resist that description on the basis of …… of …… er … I’ll have to get back to you on that one.
My position on the magazine got compromised many times by my actions .. it was a fine line for Matt but he was eventually proved right thankfully, though I’m damned sure there were times Matt might have regretted his decision to get me on board the mag .. our burgeoning friendship became an insulator for most of those type problems [not all] leaving me forever grateful to him. I was proud to be his best man when he got married and I’ve always tried to keep up my end of our friendship.
I owe him big-time .... and still do ....
Matt once told me that he dreaded going into work on a Monday morning in fear of hearing about some incident or other that I’d got involved in ..when I look back, I genuinely feel embarrassment now but I was someone different back then and so I just have to accept it all.
Matt’s commitment to the magazine was now destined to shape UK paintball.…
After a few years passed, Matt employed a guy called Steve Duffy as some of you guys may remember – Steve was a philosophy graduate who took over the job of the editor of PGi and for a good few years, Steve’s stewardship under Matt's beady eye began to fine-tune the magazine for the paintball market.
I liked Steve, he was smart, politically astute and possessed a good degree of common-sense, sometimes being smart and having common-sense are mutually exclusive with some people but not Steve.
He did an outstanding job as editor and I was gutted when he finally left – I felt the magazine lost something when Steve departed.
PGi would go onto become one of the best-selling magazines in the world but more importantly, the most respected.
I’m not suggesting that my articles were instrumental in gaining that respect but I hope some people would have realised I knew what I was talking about.
And so, I started to write articles for PGi in 1990 and it wasn’t long before I was in trouble.
After one particular semi-final game, we were all standing around along with the team we had just tied with - we had expected to win the game easily but it was one of those days when sh!t just happens – the fact we tied meant we didn’t go through to the finals.
I was a tad disappointed ..
I just couldn’t work out how this team managed to stop us winning – I was not a good loser by any means and then fate played its hand – one guy from the other team decided he would try to put us [NWC] in our place.
He was supposed to be some marine or something and shouted out to us something akin to, ‘we just fuhk’d you up for the finals’ [not verbatim] well, this was I suppose quite true but I thought he didn’t really have to articulate it in the way he did - his team-mates looked nervously toward him and so I kinda guessed this guy was a tournament newbie and didn't know the score. And so I walked over and just prodded him in the chest [not hard] with a paintball pod and told him to ‘shut the fuhk up’ or words to that effect.
He immediately launched himself at me at which point I had no alternative but to defend myself.
He didn’t fare too well in the ensuing fist debate and so he went off licking his wounds ..the next thing I know, I’m sitting with my brother having a cuppa between games and someone comes up and tells me the police are on their way.
Fuhkkk, I thought that’s pretty fuhking rich, corporal crap-face launches an attack on me and when things didn’t go the way he planned, he calls the police to get me nicked. I really wasn’t amused and so I went looking for him.
Surprise, surprise, he'd gone on the missing list but the police still had to be dealt with.
I worked out very quickly what I had to do and so I came up with a super-duper complex plan of action, I fuhked off into the woods and hid ..... along with my brother.
Eventually someone came and told us the police had arrived and were looking for me and they weren’t going until they had seen me … obviously, my skill at hiding myself was not yet fully honed since the guy who gave me the message came straight to us.
Sh!te, I had to go back and face the music all because of Captain ‘Fuhkin’ Pugwash was pis$ed off at losing a fight he had started.
Woo Hoo !!!!!
By the time I handed myself in, the police had done a bit of astute interviewing of ‘witnesses’ and the police had quite fairly decided there was no case to answer and they put it down to a testosterone-tussle with no action needed …
I did wonder afterwards who they had interviewed …… but then I realised it must have been some of my team-mates who had gone up to them and offered their unbiased testimony and the police just didn't realise... the dice had rolled my way .. for once.
But I wasn’t out of trouble just yet …. another connected problem was to rear its head a few weeks later, the UK had just formed a paintball committee type thing whereby they imposed their remit [and codes of behaviour] onto the tourney circuit making us [the players] answerable to them in terms of adjudicating ‘incidents’.
Oh fuhk, that's all I needed, another self-appointed bunch of pot-fillers stamping their authority all over my ass - Mind you, I can't really criticise them too much cos a few of them are friends of mine now .. they weren't back then I hasten to add.
I got plopped right into their laps to be their very first case they were to sit in judgement on, I felt somewhat honoured of course though I don’t think they shared my emotion.
The thing was, nobody had asked these people to police our sport, they did it off their own backs but a lot of players around that time were rightfully concerned at the way things were going.
Matt Tudor, the guy who owned the magazine PGi, advised me to take whatever decision they came to on the chin because it would look good that someone was able to rein me in .. I wasn’t so sure, I hated the idea but went along with it anyways.
I realised I shouldn’t have prodded the pod in that player’s chest but my rebuttal would be, he shouldn’t have said what he did at such a sensitive time.
That was my rationale anyway … not a justification I know but in my head, it added up to the same thing.
Bottom line, I was summarily banned from every paintball tournament in the UK for 3 months, even though legally, they weren’t entitled to ban anyone but I took it anyway .. through gritted teeth.
They apparently didn’t accept my pleas of ‘being misunderstood’ and maybe they did do the right thing, maybe !!.
I was now a marked man, not by someone's paintball but by our sport’s disciplinary committee.
But, did I learn anything from that experience?
Did I fuhk …
A Game Changer ….
When I took NWC to Nashville in 1990, a guy called Tom Kaye was there with his new semi-automatic marker, the Automag. We were all still using pump action guns back then and so this was something new, and to make matters even more poignant, an American team called Swarm were kitted out with this new marker at that event and they went on to win.
The ‘semi-automatic’ writing was on the wall amid cries and protestations of, ‘this will take the skill out of playing paintball’ etc …
The critics were right … to some extent, it did.
We may have abandoned some shooting skills but we also had to learn new others.
The game of paintball itself struck the balance between old and new skills.
Slowly but surely, the semi-automatic revolution stamped its inevitability onto the game - there were some die-hards who continued to use their pumps but you could always recognise these guys because they were invariably walking off the field covered in paint ..
Any Luddite thinking was pointless, semis were gonna take over, and that was that, so get used to it.
Two American companies became legendary around this time because they came out with their respective markers – the Automag as just mentioned and the Autococker.
A genial guy called Budd Orr was the man behind the Autococker – these two markers completely dominated the gun market, you were one or the other, there were no in-betweens.
The Automag was loved because it had hardly any moving parts, it was a pneumatic work of pure genius that Tom was never able to replicate in future markers. I once told him, he created a monster with his Automag because he had set too high a benchmark with the Automag, and as the electro-pneumatic guns started to trickle in many years later, Tom was unable to keep technical pace with the new electronic markers that were coming on line.
I really like Tom and Budd, both stand-up guys … respect to them both!!!
Back to the UK …
There was a geographical anomaly in the early 90s in the UK that had the southern half of the UK [teams from around London] completely dominating the UK paintball scene, as to why?
Er …, dunno really, the Manchester Lions were there at the first Survival event but they never really got anywhere – us mob down south always thought the northern part of the UK is much like the redneck areas of the US where they go to family reunions to target potential partners hence the piano keyboard teeth’.
The first team to show any sort of real northern promise were the Banzai Bandits, also from Manchester way.
Their charismatic captain, Ledzy, went onto become one of the UK’s most successful paintball business owners with Planet who make the Ego and a lot more besides.
He also was one of the best players in the UK and was one of my first picks when I was asked to put together a Brit squad to go contest the inaugural international X-Ball event in Pittsburgh in 2002 - I wanted Ledzy as the team’s captain and this team went on to become Nexus, we shall come to Nexus later.
Ledzy’s partner at Planet, is Julian Carr [also a former player with the Banzai Bandits] .. to describe Julian as understated is an understatement; a Buddhist monk seems like an epileptic compared to Julian.
I’m pretty sure if a nuclear bomb went off outside of Manchester, he’d look out of his office window at Planet and mumble to himself, ‘hmmmnn, looks like I might get home late tonight’.
Roundabout 1990, there was only one magazine that I remember, it was Action Pursuit Games from the US, they were like gold-dust over here because we got to hear of the top American sides, teams like the ominous sounding, Lords of Discipline, Navarone and Wild Geese … we could only imagine how good those guys were when compared to us little ole Brits feeding off the breadcrumbs at the bottom of the pile … we didn’t have to wait long before they came looking for Brit-blood from across the Atlantic .. more of that later … but let’s say, it used to get kinda heated ….
As to just how serious things got in Paintball?
The following account is the one I hinted at earlier in being outrageous and incredulous ..
For the record, this was not between any of the teams and did NOT involve me in any way … sorta …. but a certain individual back in the early nineties was causing serious ‘problems’ [not me] within the industry.
People don’t much like being threatened especially when it’s from the mouth of a raving psychopath which this guy most certainly was [not the guy in NWC I mentioned earlier I hasten to add].
His name was Keith Idema, also known as Jack or John ...
This particular guy was …erm ….kinda malicious with his threats such that anyone who had a disagreement with him was eligible for ‘treatment’ … and not just threatened with a beating, it was a lot more serious than that - in fact you can’t get more serious than this type of threat.
He was a self-proclaimed special forces guy who went on to fight in Afghanistan as a freelance mercenary but he claimed he was there at the behest of the US defence department.
Generally speaking, guys who mouth off with threats of this kind can’t hold their hands up to save their life but this particular guy had history … and that history was bad-ass.
Now before I go any further, this account isn’t bullsh!t though I’m pretty damned sure, people will find it hard to believe, even incredulous but I know it all happened and there are people still involved in this industry in the UK who I’ve already mentioned in these articles who could still verify what happened back then.
It is the nature of the average Joe, not to handle threats of violence too well; people generally ain’t like that, people prefer to steer well clear of violence and all its trappings… but when threats to one’s life are issued, as most definitely happened with this guy, there was an eventual and inevitable response.
And it was an Anglo - American response which seemed to make it all the more serious at the time.
I knew of the meeting at the time but I wasn't privy to what was said then .. I found out when one of the meeting's attendees told me a long time afterwards.
A group of industry individuals met up with a view to solving the common problem they had all encountered.
During that meeting, the subject of a rather dramatic and somewhat ‘final resolution’ was discussed but luckily, they chose not to venture down that path, and in the end, it was the right decision to make even though some of those guys were scared sh!tless, and understandably so … the up-shot was, nothing happened with regard to those threats but to be fair, there was no way those concerned businessmen could have known it would come to nothing.
The conversation skirted around this suggested resolution but it didn’t gain sufficient traction within that group of guys to facilitate someone being hired.
I think someone just threw the suggestion into the middle just to gauge a response, whether it would have been acted upon should the consensus of individuals had agreed, I don’t think they would have gone through with it.
The more people you have who know about a proposed ‘defence’ plan of that nature, the more likely you will be in getting nicked by the police.
I suppose the fact that it was even mentioned gives you an idea of just how serious this situation had spiralled downward.
As I said earlier, paintball attracted some dysfunctional people that’s for sure though this was probably the most serious of all the things that went on during the naughty nineties.
Nobody should worry any more about Idema unless he starts issuing threats through a medium .. in which case, I’m on sick-leave until further notice coz I don’t like ghosts …. you can’t just bash them up like you can with the living.
To give you a taste of what he was like .. when my team went to the Nashville event in 90, Keith was our major sponsor.
He said he liked the 'look' of our team and that's why he elected to sponsor us, truth was, his sponsorship gesture was more of a acknowledgement that he thought we were trouble and he liked that for some reason.
While we were in Nashville, we were going out bar-hopping with Keith and his friends drinking .. so far so good.
All his mates were Special Forces guys from Fort Bragg which I suppose is the equivalent of our special services barracks.
One of Idema’s friends was called Jim – we all liked Jim, he seemed personable and extremely social.
When we got back home to the UK, we weren’t home that many months when we heard that Jim had died through drinking anti-freeze … the verdict was suicide I think.
We were sent faxes of the newspaper that carried the story and so we knew he'd actually died in the way described but when you've been around Keith for a time, you knew there was more than meets the eye ..
Long story short – a few years later, I had a phone call to pick up Keith from Heathrow airport to take him to Olympia for a book convention or sales thingy I can’t remember too much.
Keith was co-author for a book called the ‘Hunt for Bin-laden’.
About 4 of us had gone to pick him up and after a while, we sat around a table drinking tea/coffee when one of my mates asked Keith what happened to Jim and was it true he’d drunk anti-freeze .. Keith wasn’t one for playing his cards close to his chest and he went on to explain, Jim had been part of a trio who had not only set up business in direct competition with Keith but they had also kidnapped Keith’s dog and had shot the poor mutt in its ass and sent it back to Keith yapping its head off.
Keith was pathologically obsessed with his dog called ‘Sarge’ and so such an affront wasn't gonna be ignored.
Inevitably one of us asked, ‘Keith, why the fuhk did he drink anti-freeze’?
Keith answered in true psychopathic style by stating, ‘Well, what would you do if someone was pointing a 45 at your head’ ….
All of us Except Keith, were looking at each other all wondering the same thing, was he was telling the truth?
Now, it could have been BS, a large dollop of it but the problem was, Jim had died of drinking anti-freeze and so I suppose one has to concede that it’s at least possible Keith had him topped especially when you factor in a psychopathic nut-job has just put his hands up to it.
I looked at Keith in a different way after that but he was to come back into my life much later when he called me from his prison cell in Afghanistan.
It was one of those times when you think, 'why the fuhk did I just pick that phone up' .. I had made the mistake and therefore had to listen to whatever mad-cap escapade he wanted me to get involved in.
I’ll deal with that one later if I remember.
Opus 4 is coming soon ...
In the year of 1990, there entered a man who was / is an unsung hero for British paintball.
As some of you guys would know, there wasn’t a domestic paintball publication at that time but a sharp-eyed individual recognised the beginnings of a trend … the paintball trend.
He decided he was going to start publishing a paintball magazine – his name is Matthew Tudor who went on to become a profound guiding light for me over the years and one of the few very guys I would actually listen to.
I might not have followed all his advice but the point was I suppose, I valued his counsel.
If I didn't follow Matt's advice, I generally got into trouble and so I came to trust his views more and more as the years went flying by at 300 fps.
His new-born publication was to be called ‘Paintball Games International’ …. little did he know, or indeed anyone else, for that matter just how successful it was going to be.
Matt is one bright guy [though he would invariably deny this in an act of uncharacteristic humility] he has an intuitive grasp of the publication business and so his expertise was brought to bear on publishing a magazine but there was a problem … after the magazine started publication, it was obvious, this sport of ours was unlike many others.
Paintball in those days was vastly different than it is now in terms of player demographic.
Reports of fighting and intimidation were rife such that if PGi covered an event and players/teams weren’t mentioned or reported on .. people got pi$$ed off.
Accusations of favouritism and impartiality would fly around our sport with all manners of threats and silly stuff erupting.
An example of this insane behaviour came from one gun manufacturer who called Matt up one day, and he had counted the number of pics of his company's guns there were in this particular edition of PGi .. I can't remember the exact numbers quoted but it was along the lines of, the guy who called had about 17 pics of his marker in the edition and his competition had 19 .. that's how crazy it got back then, paranoia ruled the roost and hardly anyone acted rationally, except me of course, I was a shining example of controlled behaviour ..
Matt was in charge of about 15 other magazines at the time but it was the paintball magazine that would prove to be the biggest pain in his ass.
I’m not really surprised when one of his other magazines was called Teddy Bear International – I can hardly imagine 3 guys turning up in their teddy-bear onesies threatening to beat him up because of something written in their mag.
For normal Joes, paintball was like a mine-field, people seemed so sensitive to what or wasn’t in print .. it was this hypersensitivity that became the genesis of what I’ve been talking about concerning something I did that wasn’t particularly … er ….. ‘civilised’ is the best word I suppose.
Back to the magazine, Matt, believed quite rightly, this wasn’t such a good situation for anyone publishing a paintball magazine .. the last thing you need is a bunch of idiots coming into the office demanding whatever …
And so in true Machiavellian style, Matt made his move to shore up a defence perimeter around the magazine.
He looked around at what was happening and decided, rightly or wrongly he would ask me to write for the magazine ….
He had no idea if I could put a sentence together and write an article and so at least we both had that in common.
I wrote my first article and I suppose I must have been able to do something right because I ended up writing over 300 articles for the magazine in the following years.
Matt and myself became a partnership that went on for well over 15 years, our friendship still endures.
Matt went onto become one of my closest of friends and has always been 100% loyal to me even when people were screaming for my head because of something I had allegedly got involved in but he always stayed loyal . .no matter what - you really can't buy stuff like that and I recognised it for what it was.
Matt’s move to gain some form of security blanket was a double-edged sword because Trouble [with a capital 'T' followed me around] - as I told you in a previous chapter, I was misunderstood and wasn’t given sufficient number of toys to play with when young, either that or I was out and out barmy though I would resist that description on the basis of …… of …… er … I’ll have to get back to you on that one.
My position on the magazine got compromised many times by my actions .. it was a fine line for Matt but he was eventually proved right thankfully, though I’m damned sure there were times Matt might have regretted his decision to get me on board the mag .. our burgeoning friendship became an insulator for most of those type problems [not all] leaving me forever grateful to him. I was proud to be his best man when he got married and I’ve always tried to keep up my end of our friendship.
I owe him big-time .... and still do ....
Matt once told me that he dreaded going into work on a Monday morning in fear of hearing about some incident or other that I’d got involved in ..when I look back, I genuinely feel embarrassment now but I was someone different back then and so I just have to accept it all.
Matt’s commitment to the magazine was now destined to shape UK paintball.…
After a few years passed, Matt employed a guy called Steve Duffy as some of you guys may remember – Steve was a philosophy graduate who took over the job of the editor of PGi and for a good few years, Steve’s stewardship under Matt's beady eye began to fine-tune the magazine for the paintball market.
I liked Steve, he was smart, politically astute and possessed a good degree of common-sense, sometimes being smart and having common-sense are mutually exclusive with some people but not Steve.
He did an outstanding job as editor and I was gutted when he finally left – I felt the magazine lost something when Steve departed.
PGi would go onto become one of the best-selling magazines in the world but more importantly, the most respected.
I’m not suggesting that my articles were instrumental in gaining that respect but I hope some people would have realised I knew what I was talking about.
And so, I started to write articles for PGi in 1990 and it wasn’t long before I was in trouble.
After one particular semi-final game, we were all standing around along with the team we had just tied with - we had expected to win the game easily but it was one of those days when sh!t just happens – the fact we tied meant we didn’t go through to the finals.
I was a tad disappointed ..
I just couldn’t work out how this team managed to stop us winning – I was not a good loser by any means and then fate played its hand – one guy from the other team decided he would try to put us [NWC] in our place.
He was supposed to be some marine or something and shouted out to us something akin to, ‘we just fuhk’d you up for the finals’ [not verbatim] well, this was I suppose quite true but I thought he didn’t really have to articulate it in the way he did - his team-mates looked nervously toward him and so I kinda guessed this guy was a tournament newbie and didn't know the score. And so I walked over and just prodded him in the chest [not hard] with a paintball pod and told him to ‘shut the fuhk up’ or words to that effect.
He immediately launched himself at me at which point I had no alternative but to defend myself.
He didn’t fare too well in the ensuing fist debate and so he went off licking his wounds ..the next thing I know, I’m sitting with my brother having a cuppa between games and someone comes up and tells me the police are on their way.
Fuhkkk, I thought that’s pretty fuhking rich, corporal crap-face launches an attack on me and when things didn’t go the way he planned, he calls the police to get me nicked. I really wasn’t amused and so I went looking for him.
Surprise, surprise, he'd gone on the missing list but the police still had to be dealt with.
I worked out very quickly what I had to do and so I came up with a super-duper complex plan of action, I fuhked off into the woods and hid ..... along with my brother.
Eventually someone came and told us the police had arrived and were looking for me and they weren’t going until they had seen me … obviously, my skill at hiding myself was not yet fully honed since the guy who gave me the message came straight to us.
Sh!te, I had to go back and face the music all because of Captain ‘Fuhkin’ Pugwash was pis$ed off at losing a fight he had started.
Woo Hoo !!!!!
By the time I handed myself in, the police had done a bit of astute interviewing of ‘witnesses’ and the police had quite fairly decided there was no case to answer and they put it down to a testosterone-tussle with no action needed …
I did wonder afterwards who they had interviewed …… but then I realised it must have been some of my team-mates who had gone up to them and offered their unbiased testimony and the police just didn't realise... the dice had rolled my way .. for once.
But I wasn’t out of trouble just yet …. another connected problem was to rear its head a few weeks later, the UK had just formed a paintball committee type thing whereby they imposed their remit [and codes of behaviour] onto the tourney circuit making us [the players] answerable to them in terms of adjudicating ‘incidents’.
Oh fuhk, that's all I needed, another self-appointed bunch of pot-fillers stamping their authority all over my ass - Mind you, I can't really criticise them too much cos a few of them are friends of mine now .. they weren't back then I hasten to add.
I got plopped right into their laps to be their very first case they were to sit in judgement on, I felt somewhat honoured of course though I don’t think they shared my emotion.
The thing was, nobody had asked these people to police our sport, they did it off their own backs but a lot of players around that time were rightfully concerned at the way things were going.
Matt Tudor, the guy who owned the magazine PGi, advised me to take whatever decision they came to on the chin because it would look good that someone was able to rein me in .. I wasn’t so sure, I hated the idea but went along with it anyways.
I realised I shouldn’t have prodded the pod in that player’s chest but my rebuttal would be, he shouldn’t have said what he did at such a sensitive time.
That was my rationale anyway … not a justification I know but in my head, it added up to the same thing.
Bottom line, I was summarily banned from every paintball tournament in the UK for 3 months, even though legally, they weren’t entitled to ban anyone but I took it anyway .. through gritted teeth.
They apparently didn’t accept my pleas of ‘being misunderstood’ and maybe they did do the right thing, maybe !!.
I was now a marked man, not by someone's paintball but by our sport’s disciplinary committee.
But, did I learn anything from that experience?
Did I fuhk …
A Game Changer ….
When I took NWC to Nashville in 1990, a guy called Tom Kaye was there with his new semi-automatic marker, the Automag. We were all still using pump action guns back then and so this was something new, and to make matters even more poignant, an American team called Swarm were kitted out with this new marker at that event and they went on to win.
The ‘semi-automatic’ writing was on the wall amid cries and protestations of, ‘this will take the skill out of playing paintball’ etc …
The critics were right … to some extent, it did.
We may have abandoned some shooting skills but we also had to learn new others.
The game of paintball itself struck the balance between old and new skills.
Slowly but surely, the semi-automatic revolution stamped its inevitability onto the game - there were some die-hards who continued to use their pumps but you could always recognise these guys because they were invariably walking off the field covered in paint ..
Any Luddite thinking was pointless, semis were gonna take over, and that was that, so get used to it.
Two American companies became legendary around this time because they came out with their respective markers – the Automag as just mentioned and the Autococker.
A genial guy called Budd Orr was the man behind the Autococker – these two markers completely dominated the gun market, you were one or the other, there were no in-betweens.
The Automag was loved because it had hardly any moving parts, it was a pneumatic work of pure genius that Tom was never able to replicate in future markers. I once told him, he created a monster with his Automag because he had set too high a benchmark with the Automag, and as the electro-pneumatic guns started to trickle in many years later, Tom was unable to keep technical pace with the new electronic markers that were coming on line.
I really like Tom and Budd, both stand-up guys … respect to them both!!!
Back to the UK …
There was a geographical anomaly in the early 90s in the UK that had the southern half of the UK [teams from around London] completely dominating the UK paintball scene, as to why?
Er …, dunno really, the Manchester Lions were there at the first Survival event but they never really got anywhere – us mob down south always thought the northern part of the UK is much like the redneck areas of the US where they go to family reunions to target potential partners hence the piano keyboard teeth’.
The first team to show any sort of real northern promise were the Banzai Bandits, also from Manchester way.
Their charismatic captain, Ledzy, went onto become one of the UK’s most successful paintball business owners with Planet who make the Ego and a lot more besides.
He also was one of the best players in the UK and was one of my first picks when I was asked to put together a Brit squad to go contest the inaugural international X-Ball event in Pittsburgh in 2002 - I wanted Ledzy as the team’s captain and this team went on to become Nexus, we shall come to Nexus later.
Ledzy’s partner at Planet, is Julian Carr [also a former player with the Banzai Bandits] .. to describe Julian as understated is an understatement; a Buddhist monk seems like an epileptic compared to Julian.
I’m pretty sure if a nuclear bomb went off outside of Manchester, he’d look out of his office window at Planet and mumble to himself, ‘hmmmnn, looks like I might get home late tonight’.
Roundabout 1990, there was only one magazine that I remember, it was Action Pursuit Games from the US, they were like gold-dust over here because we got to hear of the top American sides, teams like the ominous sounding, Lords of Discipline, Navarone and Wild Geese … we could only imagine how good those guys were when compared to us little ole Brits feeding off the breadcrumbs at the bottom of the pile … we didn’t have to wait long before they came looking for Brit-blood from across the Atlantic .. more of that later … but let’s say, it used to get kinda heated ….
As to just how serious things got in Paintball?
The following account is the one I hinted at earlier in being outrageous and incredulous ..
For the record, this was not between any of the teams and did NOT involve me in any way … sorta …. but a certain individual back in the early nineties was causing serious ‘problems’ [not me] within the industry.
People don’t much like being threatened especially when it’s from the mouth of a raving psychopath which this guy most certainly was [not the guy in NWC I mentioned earlier I hasten to add].
His name was Keith Idema, also known as Jack or John ...
This particular guy was …erm ….kinda malicious with his threats such that anyone who had a disagreement with him was eligible for ‘treatment’ … and not just threatened with a beating, it was a lot more serious than that - in fact you can’t get more serious than this type of threat.
He was a self-proclaimed special forces guy who went on to fight in Afghanistan as a freelance mercenary but he claimed he was there at the behest of the US defence department.
Generally speaking, guys who mouth off with threats of this kind can’t hold their hands up to save their life but this particular guy had history … and that history was bad-ass.
Now before I go any further, this account isn’t bullsh!t though I’m pretty damned sure, people will find it hard to believe, even incredulous but I know it all happened and there are people still involved in this industry in the UK who I’ve already mentioned in these articles who could still verify what happened back then.
It is the nature of the average Joe, not to handle threats of violence too well; people generally ain’t like that, people prefer to steer well clear of violence and all its trappings… but when threats to one’s life are issued, as most definitely happened with this guy, there was an eventual and inevitable response.
And it was an Anglo - American response which seemed to make it all the more serious at the time.
I knew of the meeting at the time but I wasn't privy to what was said then .. I found out when one of the meeting's attendees told me a long time afterwards.
A group of industry individuals met up with a view to solving the common problem they had all encountered.
During that meeting, the subject of a rather dramatic and somewhat ‘final resolution’ was discussed but luckily, they chose not to venture down that path, and in the end, it was the right decision to make even though some of those guys were scared sh!tless, and understandably so … the up-shot was, nothing happened with regard to those threats but to be fair, there was no way those concerned businessmen could have known it would come to nothing.
The conversation skirted around this suggested resolution but it didn’t gain sufficient traction within that group of guys to facilitate someone being hired.
I think someone just threw the suggestion into the middle just to gauge a response, whether it would have been acted upon should the consensus of individuals had agreed, I don’t think they would have gone through with it.
The more people you have who know about a proposed ‘defence’ plan of that nature, the more likely you will be in getting nicked by the police.
I suppose the fact that it was even mentioned gives you an idea of just how serious this situation had spiralled downward.
As I said earlier, paintball attracted some dysfunctional people that’s for sure though this was probably the most serious of all the things that went on during the naughty nineties.
Nobody should worry any more about Idema unless he starts issuing threats through a medium .. in which case, I’m on sick-leave until further notice coz I don’t like ghosts …. you can’t just bash them up like you can with the living.
To give you a taste of what he was like .. when my team went to the Nashville event in 90, Keith was our major sponsor.
He said he liked the 'look' of our team and that's why he elected to sponsor us, truth was, his sponsorship gesture was more of a acknowledgement that he thought we were trouble and he liked that for some reason.
While we were in Nashville, we were going out bar-hopping with Keith and his friends drinking .. so far so good.
All his mates were Special Forces guys from Fort Bragg which I suppose is the equivalent of our special services barracks.
One of Idema’s friends was called Jim – we all liked Jim, he seemed personable and extremely social.
When we got back home to the UK, we weren’t home that many months when we heard that Jim had died through drinking anti-freeze … the verdict was suicide I think.
We were sent faxes of the newspaper that carried the story and so we knew he'd actually died in the way described but when you've been around Keith for a time, you knew there was more than meets the eye ..
Long story short – a few years later, I had a phone call to pick up Keith from Heathrow airport to take him to Olympia for a book convention or sales thingy I can’t remember too much.
Keith was co-author for a book called the ‘Hunt for Bin-laden’.
About 4 of us had gone to pick him up and after a while, we sat around a table drinking tea/coffee when one of my mates asked Keith what happened to Jim and was it true he’d drunk anti-freeze .. Keith wasn’t one for playing his cards close to his chest and he went on to explain, Jim had been part of a trio who had not only set up business in direct competition with Keith but they had also kidnapped Keith’s dog and had shot the poor mutt in its ass and sent it back to Keith yapping its head off.
Keith was pathologically obsessed with his dog called ‘Sarge’ and so such an affront wasn't gonna be ignored.
Inevitably one of us asked, ‘Keith, why the fuhk did he drink anti-freeze’?
Keith answered in true psychopathic style by stating, ‘Well, what would you do if someone was pointing a 45 at your head’ ….
All of us Except Keith, were looking at each other all wondering the same thing, was he was telling the truth?
Now, it could have been BS, a large dollop of it but the problem was, Jim had died of drinking anti-freeze and so I suppose one has to concede that it’s at least possible Keith had him topped especially when you factor in a psychopathic nut-job has just put his hands up to it.
I looked at Keith in a different way after that but he was to come back into my life much later when he called me from his prison cell in Afghanistan.
It was one of those times when you think, 'why the fuhk did I just pick that phone up' .. I had made the mistake and therefore had to listen to whatever mad-cap escapade he wanted me to get involved in.
I’ll deal with that one later if I remember.
Opus 4 is coming soon ...
