A late cowboy

This obituary was posted in teh Daily telegraph yesterday

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9773265/Bob-Munden.html

Bob Munden, who I had never heard of till now, impressed me because of his amazing skills and because as I recently wrote, my childhood was dominated by cowboys. However, what impressed me even more was the paragraph in the obituary below, which described how competetive he was, but competetive in a way which made him stick to what he was doing, and not give up. He would work and work and work at whatever it was until he excelled.

Gary Player once commented when someone described him as lucky “Yeah, I’m very lucky, and do you know, the more I practice, the luckier I get!”

Bob Munden, who has died aged 70, was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as “The Fastest Man with a Gun Who Ever Lived”.

One journalist reckoned that if Munden had been at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, on October 26 1881, the gunfight would have been over in 5 to 10 seconds. He could whip out his Colt .45 single action revolver (as used by John Wayne), shoot a target and replace the gun in his holster in .0175 seconds, and over his lifetime he won more than 3500 trophies, 800 championship titles and bagged 18 world records in speed-shooting.

Munden’s accuracy was deadly. He could burst two balloons six feet apart in what sounded like a single shot and split playing cards — edgeways. He might not have been quite as fast as the French cartoon character “Lucky Luke”, the cowboy who could “draw faster than his shadow”, but Munden’s audiences sometimes needed slow-motion action replay to convince them that what they had just seen was not a trick.

Robert Munden was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on February 8 1942, and grew up in the San Bernardino Mountains of California. His father was a disabled veteran of the Second World War. Though Bob was the “smallest kid around” he was always highly competitive, winning the South California marble championship. When told he was not tall enough to play basketball, he practised so hard that he played for his high school for all of the four years he was there.

Meanwhile, inspired by Hollywood films, he was honing his skills as a gunslinger. He began with cap guns, then his father traded a shotgun for a set of nickel-plated Ivor-Johnson .38 revolvers and by the time Bob was 11 he was winning fast-draw competitions. After leaving school Munden tried his hand at a variety of manual jobs, but none of them lasted and he decided to try and make a living from winning shooting competitions.

In 1963 he met his wife Becky, the women’s quick-draw champion, at a tournament in southern California. They married the following year and in 1969 they decided to become full-time professional shooters and fast-draw artists. Munden and his wife appeared numerous times on television, including the Paul Daniels Show in Britain, and became an authority on the use of firearms in the Old West, which was nothing like the Hollywood myth: “There weren’t any fast-draw artists in the Old West,” he said. “The guns weren’t designed for it, and the holsters were designed to keep the gun in place.” It was for this reason that he believed Wild Bill Hickok to have been the deadliest gunman of that time, as Hickok carried his two Remington revolvers in a red sash tied around his waist.

Bob Munden is survived by his wife and two daughters.

Bob Munden, born February 8 1942, died December 10 2012