If you’ve never trained with Super Dave, you are really missing out. Wish I could make it up to this one. I’ve been itching for another SDave fix for a while now.
For those of you who would like to get an idea of what Dave is like here is a link to some videos Matt Burkett did from Shot '08, one of them is an interview with Dave:
For those of you that have not experienced a Super Dave class you don’t know what you’re missing. I hope we can get him back to VA at some point. His classes are intense and you will definitely learn a lot.
“Lance, what the %&@ are you doing? Don’t %&@ing freelance on me dude.”
I still laugh out loud when I think about him calling you Lance the entire weekend! Even after Dave P corrected him. Damn that was some funny stuff.
Super Dave’s style is “different” but I was still thinking about the stuff I learned three weeks later. Most importantly I learned that I suck at no/low light shooting.
So, Dave’s space program story. I first heard this from a mutual friend (Ken Hackathorn) when Ken learned I was considering bringing Dave on as a member of the Beretta pistol team. I apologize in advance for the lack of details, it’s just been years since I heard the story.
Dave was in Group and deployed somewhere in Africa. His team had been tasked with a mission that involved getting panoramic photographs of certain parts of the local terrain.
While looking for an ideal vantage point, the team comes upon a village. The village elders come out to meet the team. The village, they say, has been there for countless generations … literally thousands of years. The team informs the village that the next morning, they’ll be traveling to this huge collection of rocks a few klicks away to do their photography from as high a vantage point as they can.
One of the elders is flabbergasted. No one, he tells them, has ever climbed the rocks. No one in those countless generations, thousands of years, has traveled to those rocks a few klicks away and climbed to the top. No one!
“And that,” says SuperDave, “is why you’ll never have a fucking space program.”