Golf with a Shotgun

Clarke Bailey, big-time management-buy-out specialist, takes a stance like a cop yelling "freeze!" at a dangerous perp. But in place of a police-issued .45, Bailey holds a Beretta Silver Pigeon 12-gauge shotgun.

Instead of "freeze," Bailey shouts "pull!" And rather than being confronted by a gun-wielding felon, Bailey is ambushed by two clay disks that scream over his head at what seems like orbital-escape velocity.

In one fluid movement, Bailey points his gun muzzle skyward, tracks the pair of clays, and pulls the trigger. One second, there are two discs hurtling across the horizon; the next second, there are none. Bailey has pulverized them with a single expert shot.

Welcome to the world of sporting clays. A pastime enjoyed by more than 3 million people each year, sporting clays combines the tweedy charm of a 19th-century British shooting party with the Neanderthal thrill of blasting something out of the sky. Plot out the sites of America's cigar-puffing hot spots, and you'll likely find nearby sporting-clays ranges frequented by newly affluent, hard-driving businesspeople on the rise. Things that go bang and big cigars: Freud would have noticed the correlation.

Invented in the late 1880s by the English gentry, a notoriously gun-happy lot, sporting clays is designed to give upland bird hunters and waterfowlers a chance to sharpen their shooting in a setting that duplicates field conditions.

A typical shoot is not unlike playing a round of golf with a shotgun: You walk a course that alternates between woods and open spaces, stopping to engage in bursts of swift, focused activity. But instead of 18 holes, you encounter anywhere from 8 to 15 "stations," where a trapper fires clays at you, over you, and away from you. After two hours, a typical length of time for an outing, you may well have attempted every shot known to bird hunters.

Unlike skeet- and trap-shooting, where you pretty much know the flight pattern of each and every clay, the flight of a sporting clay is far less predictable: You can never be quite sure how the damn thing will behave. A sporting clay, as it zips to the heavens, might simulate a pheasant that's just been flushed - or a grouse's maddeningly erratic flight. It's this element of surprise that puts the "sport" into sporting clays.

While modern sporting clays includes legions of avid hunters who kill live prey, the sport also claims a growing number of devotees who forgo the hunt, but who enjoy the pure art of making difficult shots: no blood, no feathers, no mess. You've heard of catch-and-release fishing; shooting clays is the closest we will likely come to catch-and-release hunting.

The Power of Pow!

Scientists tell us we like games because they teach us things that are useful in life. Sporting clays enables competitive people to test, in real-time, their ability to concentrate and to make instantaneous decisions - without putting their careers at stake.

"You'll never hit a clay that's moving at 90 mph if you can't tune out everything and really focus," says Bailey, cochairman of Hudson River Capital LLC, a private-equity firm. "Successful businesspeople are very good at focusing, and they usually succeed at sporting clays."

Holly Bannister, a sporting clays aficionada and an attending physician in the pediatric emergency room at New York's Bellevue Hospital Center, seconds Bailey's point, but from her unique perspective: "Shooting clays requires that you concentrate, but it's not stressful. Putting together a kid who's been hit by a truck - that requires a kind of concentration that creates stress. When you're out on a sporting-clays range, you're just going 'bang! bang!' and having fun."

"You mean 'pow! pow!'," counters Bailey. " 'Pow' is the feeling - you're powdering it!"

"That's right - and merely cracking the clay isn't good enough," agrees Bannister, with undoctorly aggression. "You have to blast it into dust!"

First React, Then Think

I spent a morning walking the Orvis Sandanona course in Millbrook, New York with Bailey and Bannister. We were also joined by Mel Orenstein, an entrepreneur who built up his family textile company, sold it, and then went into private investing.

Among the three, the hot shot was Bailey. A city boy who spent his childhood summers on a Montana farm hunting game, big and small, Bailey powdered clays from every direction. Though not in Bailey's league, the other shooters also made difficult shots at targets that mimicked rocketing pheasant, springing teal, flushing quail, high-flying doves, and scampering rabbits.

The trapper often let fly with two clays at once, simulating "true pairs": two birds that take flight simultaneously, a real-world hunting situation that has always flummoxed me. Bailey, Bannister, and Orenstein made shooting true pairs look easy. Let me try that again: When Bailey, Bannister, and Orenstein hit their pairs, they made it look easy. Anything done well looks easy.