Golf with a shotgun?

Hmm, to a duffer like me that sounds like an interesting variation.

However, “golf with a shotgun” is a common reference to a shotgun sport called “sporting clays.”

Just like golf, sporting clays courses are usually laid out in natural surroundings, making use of features such as woods and ponds to create a realistic setting for each type of shot as the shooter moves from station to station, typically 10, but as many as 15.

At each station, mechanical traps are used to throw clay disc-shaped targets in varying directions designed to simulate the flight path of different game species (teal, dove, quail, pheasant and even a bouncing rabbit).

The shooter’s challenge, then, is to knock a bobbing and weaving target out of the sky.

The golfer’s challenge seems much simpler: the target is stationary, a ball on a tee. Golf has its “game species,” too: a birdie, an eagle, a rare albatross. But the way I play, the flight of my ball slices or hooks or winds up in water or behind a tree or buried in a sand bunker.

Please excuse the circuitous route I’m taking to introduce you to Matt Grunzweig, a lanky 17-year-old senior at Catholic Central, who is such a dead-eye at Sporting Clays that Hillsdale College awarded him a scholarship to study business (his intended major) and join the college’s top-ranked shotgun clays team this fall.

“I chose Hillsdale because it’s one of the best around,” says Grunzweig, who has practiced with the team several times.

Six weeks ago, the college’s shotgun team outshot 33 other Division III schools to win the Association of College Unions International’s College Clay Targets Tournament in Texas for the third time in four years.

Matt says he’s been around guns “since I could hold one.” In turn, guns have been around the family going on four generations: his father, Kevin; his grandfather, John Dallas; and his great-grandfather, who was a board member of the famed Remington Arms Co. Matt’s brother, Ryan, a sophomore at CC, also is a shooter, “but he does it for fun. I’m serious about it.”

Catholic Central’s band was the attraction that drew Matt to the school, but that wore off when he joined the gun club, mentored by Mark Gagnon, a 30-year veteran of the faculty, the assistant JV basketball coach, science department chair and last year’s Catholic League Teacher of the Year.

The 30 or so members of the gun club meet weekly at the Island Lake Gun Club in nearby Brighton. “It’s a recreational thing for the kids,” Gagnon says, “something they’ll do their whole life.” (The only other Catholic League school I could verify that has a gun club is Orchard Lake St. Mary’s with 34 members.)

Most every weekend finds Matt honing his skills on his $12,000 Blaser F3 12-gauge shotgun practicing or participating in a tournament. He’s been in seven so far this year, winning two. He’s won dozens and dozens of trophies, and in tournaments that offer cash prizes, about $650.

He craves the intensity of the competition, proceeding through 14 stations with six or eight targets each. “The clays are coming at you from different angles, from right or left, from top or bottom, even behind you, from 10 to 80 yards away,” Matt says.

The perfect score is 100. His best is 97. “My average is 90.19. For perspective,” he adds, “pros average 95.”

“He has great hand-to-eye coordination and great technique,” Gagnon points out.

“I’m in my peak year. I’ve been staying pretty consistent,” Matt says, his eyes on the state sporting clays championship June 11 at Bald Mountain in Lake Orion, and on June 22, the U.S. Open clays championship at Hainesville, Ill.

You know, the more I think about my golf game, playing with a shotgun could be dangerous.

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Don Horkey may be reached at [email protected].