PDA

View Full Version : Great Article in the Chicago Tribune



Mighty Wingman
09-10-2004, 09:08 AM
I think this just about sums it up:

On a failed paintball mission with William Shatner

By Robert K. Elder
Tribune staff reporter
Published September 10, 2004

I'm hiding behind a tree with William Shatner when I get shot in the neck.

Seconds later, Shatner is hit in the shoulder, then in the hip.

"Medic!" he shouts into the forest, and a young man wearing a Red Cross armband appears. He records our names and then wipes away the white, milky paint.

The air is thick with the burnt almond smell of smoke grenades and the "pop-pop-pop" sound of C02 tanks firing thousands of orange and white paintballs.

It's only an hour into the game, and our team is getting trounced. We might as well be wearing bright orange vests that say "Shoot Here: We Eat Paint"!

At Celebrity Paintball's Mobster Mash last Sunday, more than 660 weekend warriors paid up to $100 to shoot at Shatner, Q101 host "Mancow" Muller, Fox News' retired Col. David Hunt and paintball guru Tom Kaye in Joliet's 150-acre Challenge Park Xtreme.

Kaye led the Red team, while Shatner, Muller and "The Colonel" (as the back of his pinstripe jersey reads) commanded Blue, my team.

Shatner -- riding high with a new TV series ("Boston Legal"), a new album (the tongue-in-cheek-titled "Has Been," with guest appearances by Ben Folds, Aimee Mann and Henry Rollins) and a successful Priceline.com ad campaign -- doesn't have to make himself a target, literal or otherwise. But he's doing it for charity. Ten dollars from each paid admission went to the Hundred Club, a non-profit supporting the families of fallen police officers, firefighters and paramedics.

Initially, advance registrations were 3-1 for Kaye's team, meaning more people signed up to shoot Shatner than defend him.

"I'm a little paranoid, to tell you the truth," he tells me before the game. He won the last two years, so he knows people are gunning for him.

In 2002, a bodyguard with a fiberglass riot shield followed Shatner around to protect him from what paintballers call "overshooting." Rules state that once a player surrenders or throws up his hands in acknowledgment of a hit, players must stop firing. Not everyone does.

This year, the 73-year-old actor doesn't have a bodyguard detail, only his grandson and his wife, Elizabeth.

He wears a pinstripe jersey, a chest pad, black pants and a spine-hugging holster that carries 1,500 paintball rounds. On the field, a mask obscures his face, so little differentiates him from his teammates besides the custom pinstriped jersey. Most everyone is in solid navy-blue, long-sleeve shirts.

But at 10 a.m., we're seeing mostly orange and white. Tree trunks and leaves drip with exploded paintballs.

Missing tanks

Tanks -- essentially tricked-out golf carts with high-powered paint guns and particleboard armor -- are shredding the ranks. Blue Team tanks are MIA (later, we find out they were taken out by a pair of Nerf rocket-propelled grenades); we're out-manned and out-gunned.

"We have to move everybody forward!" Shatner shouts. The next volley of shots pushes Shatner, his wife and a handful of us back into a ravine, then back to our base, named, of all things, Ft. Courage.

"The problem is, not everyone out there knows what the mission is," Elizabeth Shatner says, sitting inside the base.

This includes me.

"The problem is," Shatner says in exhaustion, "that no one knows where our tanks are. We haven't seen our tanks in an hour."

"Maybe we need a mind meld," offers Hunt, making one of the few "Star Trek" references of the day.

"What I really want to do," Shatner says, "is find someplace cool and take this stuff off."

It's 80 degrees, and Shatner is lugging around 20 pounds of gear. On the field, you're constantly in conflict with your "goggles," really a full face mask that makes you look and breathe like Darth Vader. Add humidity and your own breath, and the fog of war becomes a literal fog inside your mask, limiting visibility and cooking your brains.

By the time the lunch hour gun fires, Shatner is spread eagle on the grass, flat on his back in front of his trailer.

"We haven't really posted the score," Red Team leader Kaye tells me. "We're so far ahead that it'd be demoralizing to the other team."

Red Team shooter Mary Williams, 31, of La Porte, Ind., says she took a couple of shots at Shatner when he emerged from a tank during the second morning mission. He was shouting at his ranks.

Troops in disarray

"He was really yelling," she says. "He couldn't get his troops in line."

Shatner, too, recounts his frustration.

"They wouldn't move," he says. "I said, `OK, guys! Walk in front of us on our flanks, 20 on the right, 20 on the left!' They froze. We just got picked apart out there."

Just before lunch, Elizabeth Shatner caught a paintball under the mask, breaking the capillaries on the right side of her chin. It looks like a swollen hickey.

"I'm still looking for the guy that did it," Shatner says, teasing his wife.

Shatner himself has taken a half-dozen or so hits.

"I called `Medic!' a lot, got wiped a lot," he says. "It reminded me of my babyhood: call for help, get wiped, press on."

Bumps, bruises and welts are just part of the game, though. Shatner started playing paintball for charity three years ago.

"What's the allure?" he says. "The frenzy this morning, rallying the troops. It's the kick of trying to eliminate somebody. It really doesn't hurt that much.

"The sting of the paintball is part of the mystique of the ballgame. So, the kick of running and jumping, dodging the paintball . . . goes right back to your childhood. And then the competition of trying to make the points to win the overall thing is a rush."

In Mobster Mash, a loose scenario game about rival gangs vying for control of hooch distribution in the '20s, kills don't earn points. Missions do. Setting foot uninjured inside an enemy fort earns 25 points. Using your tanks to shoot the opposing team's base is another 25 points.

But deep into the second half, Shatner still hasn't completed a single mission, though Blue Team has gained ground. Shatner's current objective: to set foot inside Red Team's camp. Hunt even assigns him special bodyguards for the push.

But on the road between the Copacabana Club and the Four Deuces Cafe, an ambush stops Blue Team advancement cold.

Mission impossible

Elizabeth Shatner gets pinned down with me in the bush, and her husband's bodyguards have abandoned him or been picked off. I run out of CO {-2} and retreat with Hunt, and Shatner's mission to penetrate the Red Team camp disintegrates over three hours. Later, he briefs me on the last moments of the mission.

"Finally, I was able to turn one of their forces -- a Red Shirt," he says. "I was going to have him put a gun on my back, raise my hands and carry the bomb to blow up the command post. But I got so tired. My wife said, `It's not worth it.'"

The final tally: 693 for Red Team, 195 for Blue Team.

Back at the VIP trailer, Shatner plays the gracious loser.

"What we lacked was a disciplined force. Most of our guys were out there to enjoy themselves," he says. "If you want to win, you have to sort of get military about it. And Tom Kaye had a hard-core group of people. . . . We played well, but not well enough."

Shatner's left ear is caked in white paint. He's dripping with sweat, red-faced and dehydrated; his wife has an orange paint smear on the other side of her chin.

"I got hit in the nose; I got hit in my ear," Shatner says.

"It'd be easier to ask where we didn't get hit," Elizabeth says.

Shatner checks himself, pauses and declares, "I didn't get hit on my toes."

kevdupuis
09-10-2004, 09:22 AM
Nice artical. I hope there are more out that we can link to.

And Tom Kaye had a hard-core group of people. . . . We played well, but not well enough."
AO days are great training aids. ;)

Plus we had a few awsome scenario teams.

Weltman
09-10-2004, 10:42 AM
Yes, it was a well written article. Not in the traditional tired writing style. Dig!