Woodsball Legend: Randy Wood
by Wayne Montle on Jan 22, 2009
The following is a transcript of an interview that was originally released by Blast Radius Woodsball Podcast. Check out this interview and more shows at http://blastradiuswoodsballpodcast.com
Wayne: I want to hear more about how the Forest Demons came to the level of success that you’ve achieved and the history of the team. How far back do you guys go, Randy?
The team itself is actually relatively new. It was put together with some speedball, NPPL-type players, some young kids, and was really headed up by Dan Bonebrake. He’s the one that got the ball rolling after having been out of paintball for a little bit. He was coerced by his brother-in-law, a former player himself, into trying out the SPPL format. He went out, had a blast, called me up and said, “Randy, you’ve got to come out… This is the most fun I’ve had in years.”
He set up a team practice and had guys come and try out. There were some scenario-type guys and some more hardcore guys. I started playing in ‘84. Coming from the woodsball era, I knew there was a difference between true scenario players and this kind of tournament paintball that we play in the SPPL. I just kept pushing him off; I wasn’t motivated.
Why not?
I’m older than Dan by ten years; I’m 48 and he’s 38. That had a little bit to do with it. I wasn’t physically fit. I hung up my cleats ten years ago. I quit. I stopped. I couldn’t do it.
But he kept on saying, “You gotta try it, you gotta come out.” I actually didn’t play in the Oregon [2007] event, which was our Qualifier. I needed to make two practices and I couldn’t make those practices. I may have actually intentionally missed those practices because I just didn’t think I could do it.
But I did show up for the [Oregon] tournament to help on the sidelines, looking at other teams play, helping coach. Dan asked me to coach. We’ve been coaching, playing together and co-captaining teams since 1991. A few of the sidelines were a little brushy, and back in my day I was a crawler so I understood how to play that. A lot of our kids were young and more speedball-oriented and liked to play the open.
The first game that I watched I saw a guy make a move that I would have made, which was crawl up a sideline, wait in the bushes until the respawn whistle blew. The team came and ran right by this guy [and] the guy very quietly took six guys out right in front of me on the tapeline. I’m watching it and all of a sudden the bug bit me again. I realized I’m not too old to crawl.
If all I have to do is crawl then I could potentially play.
How did that first event go for the Forest Demons?
They won the event, which was amazing. And these kids had more fun than they ever thought possible in the woods. Most of them usually get in the woods and start getting shot at and just hunker down. They don’t know what to do. Through some coaching suggestions we were able to show them what to do. They began to bond and to trust us.
As an old school player, what do you think of the SPPL game format?
Watching a one hour game at first I thought, “That’s a lot of game.” But with the reincarnation every ten minutes and the different objectives, I realized very quickly that this was something that should have come around back in 1984 or 1985—that would have been amazing and awesome if it had been available to us back then.
We’ve heard from Bob Long that he loves the format. We talked to the Gardner brothers who run Smart Parts and they are in love with the format and the whole concept. The sport today, with the NPPL and the fast pace and the blow-up bunkers where you can see everything from start to finish, lends itself to the young kids that grew up in the video game age.
When we played in the woods, there was always an unfair side, always one side that played better than the other. There wasn’t an equalizer in the format because it was straight capture-the- flag. If you didn’t get the good side of the field on the coin flip or you didn’t have a really successful plan and a strategist on your team, it was really difficult to win on just manpower or firepower.
This new format allows for a lot of flexibility and a huge amount of strategy. Because you reincarnate, there really isn’t a dividing line. Because that third swing base is equal to both sides, if you can leave a guy behind and he can just lay down in the bushes the other team has no way of knowing where that person is. Strategy plays into how you’re going to position guys, how you’re going to drop players off, how you’re going to be able to fake a move with five guys and retreat when the other team is not going to be prepared for it. And then knowing that in six, seven or eight minutes a whole group of guys are going to come out on top of you; the number of variables that it adds to the game instantly is just amazing and very exhilarating.
I can’t speak highly enough of the SPPL format because I really think that all future woodsball-type tournaments are going to have to play a similar type of format. It’s just not possible in the old-school format of just straight capture-the-flag to give as many variables that would be attractive to the recreational paintball player. Most of those guys are playing out in the woods anyway. The largest number of players we have in the sport at this time are playing out in the woods. Giving them a competitive, tournament-level format that allows them to utilize the woods with a higher level of strategy is just fantastic. I just can’t say enough about it.
Talk to us about some of the backstory you and Dan Bonebrake share and how you came to play on the same field.
Southern California was the epicenter of the real explosion of paintball back in ‘84 to ‘86. At the end of ‘84 I played my first walk-on game. I had the most amazing time of my life. There I was, at 24 years old as a father of two, and I felt like I had landed in heaven. Part of my background had been growing up in Brazil where my parents were missionaries. I spent a lot of time as a small boy running around in the jungles of Brazil playing cowboys and Indians, but you never had a way of making sure you “got” somebody. So when I went out and played that day and saw that when the paintball marked you, you definitely knew it. There was no question. I thought it was great.
We played almost every weekend. So then I started going to this field in southern California called Tactics. The guy that ran Tactics got permission to play paintball on Bob Hope’s ranch. That ranch happened to be the place where they filmed a lot of the old time westerns, the very early Tarzan movies and the Lone Ranger. I played paintball in Tonto’s cave. It was a lot of fun, really a blast.
Another interesting note is that a 15-year-old kid was on one of the early teams. That kid’s name was Dave DeHaan. He went on to later be known as Dave Youngblood of DYE fame. Dave Youngblood was playing on my team right in the beginning, but this was before he put the suit on. Back then he wore a headband with the Japanese rising sun symbol because he wanted to be different. We used to rib him, but he was really good. As a 15- and 16-year-old kid Dave Youngblood was a phenomenal player. I don’t think most people really realize how good he really was back in those days. He was known at that time as the fastest gun in the west. Back in those days everything was pump action, and Dave’s ability to shoot rapid fire with that marker was unmatched by anybody. There was no one that could shoot as fast as this kid. He could run fast, he was intelligent, and very cocky. He was really enjoying the fact that he had found this sport.
We had a team called Havoc, and our nemesis was a team called Sudden Death run by Dave Aspen. Eric Fields was on that team, Russ Maynard who was the first editor of APG was on that team, Jessica Sparks, who is now the editor of APG, was playing back then. Sudden Death ended up enticing Dave Youngblood away from Havoc to play on their team. And the long and short of it is that eventually I ended up joining Sudden Death. In 1989 we went to play in the Lioness Eye Masters. We came in second. The winners were the Lords of Discipline and we came in about two or three points behind them.
I had tasted victory, but I had to think of my family. We had three small boys and I wanted them to grow up in a different environment than southern California. So I moved up to Portland, Oregon. When I got here, I started looking around for paintball. I ended up going out to a field called Hit and Run.
After I played there a few times I was looking for a team. I ran into Dan Bonebrake’s team, Phantom Force. At 21 years old, Dan ran his team really well. There was a small tournament with about five teams and Dan was a great leader. I knew that theirs was the team I needed to join. I worked my way in to getting an invitation to practice with them, and later they asked me to come on board.
We committed ourselves to building paintball in the Northwest. We knew that as a team we needed to put on tournaments and ref them. We figured that would be a good way to build paintball in the region and also raise money for the team so we could travel and play in more events. So that’s what we did. Dan and I began to spearhead that as a team. But it got to the point where Dan was putting on so many events that it was more like a kind of income for him. He began to look at it as a way to a business and as a way to make a living. I told Dan that he needed to move on and take it to the next level.
At that time, Russ Maynard had a series on the West Coast called the Great Western. He was going to get a tournament started in Seattle, but since he was a good friend of mine I asked him to do it in Portland instead. I told him about my team and how they were a good group of guys that would ref their butts off, which would make it all a little bit easier. He agreed and brought the show up to Oregon and all the teams came up. The industry was in a state of flux at that time with the NPPL just starting up, and we weren’t sure what was happening with the Masters. There wasn’t a dominant format at that point. Everybody tried to play everything but we weren’t really well-organized as an industry on the whole.
We reffed the Northwest event for Russ and then we went down to southern California and played in the event and came in dead last. All my friends were laughing at me. They were all in the tournament and gave me a real hard time. It really pissed me off because I was expecting to have at least a respectable showing. But it fired us up.
In 1994 we won the Great Western Series, both 5-man and 10-man, as Phantom Force. Then later that same year we went to the Masters tournament and did something that no one else had done at that point: we won first and second in the 5-man and 10-man in the Masters. That event turned out to be the last Masters that was held. The following year, 1995, the NPPL was formed. We played as a 5-man team and took the National Championship. So my history with Dan Bonebrake goes back to those days where we built Phantom Force and then him continuing on and building the circuit.
How did tournament history evolve after that?
Russ and Dan merged their circuits into what became the Pan-Am circuit. They had a few slow years, then things began to pick up. In 1996, I basically retired. Dan went on to play with Avalanche. After they won the NPPL he called me up from Florida to say they had won it, and that he had retired. Dan had achieved his goal of being the best.
But that wasn’t the end of Dan and paintball, at all...
No. After he retired, he went in on the business angle of tournaments. In 2000, Dan asked me to come on board and be the ultimate ref for the Pan-Am circuit. That continued until about 2004. That brings us all the way back up to hearing about the SPPL format and really getting back into it. I’m a grandfather now, but the SPPL made me feel like a kid again. It was the most amazing thing. I’m having a blast, and I’m going to try to do it one more year. We’re going to try to go next year and see if we can’t win the Nationals. We came a whisker away.
Many people who are playing today don’t really have the perspective on how the NPPL began. Can you describe for us how those early fields were laid out and how the tournaments were structured?
The games were held on four or five fields at one location. They were all different. Some fields were straight up and down with ravines, some were really bushy while others were super open. You might have some woods with stick bunkers or anything. You would really have to show up early and put in an entire day walking both sides of all the fields. The field you played on was decided on a coin toss. You would have to have a lot of information in your head about both sides. Then in the finals the team captains decided what fields would be played.
It was very difficult to referee mostly because of how the action was so spread out. Reffing was done by teams. If you reffed an event your team would get 50 points in the series. That made reffing a highly sought after part of the game. At the same time there were teams reffing games with players that had an axe to grind, or the opposite problem with “buddy teams.” Very political is one way to say it. There wasn’t an independent body to govern it. Jim Lively was calling all the shots in his series and teams wanted a little bit more control. That is really where the NPPL came from is the need for a separate group of people that weren’t team captains. So teams came together in ‘95 and ‘96 to put the NPPL together. Then later, that central core of NPPL teams and businesses were not providing the best product for the players that were out there. This is how the PSP then split off from the NPPL.
What do you see as the future for the SPPL? Given what you’ve seen in paintball to this point what does your crystal ball look like?
The first thing I’m going to say is that the SPPL has a very good product right now. The one drawback is the hour-long game, but it’s a very integral part of the strategy and the fun. But logistically trying to have 200 teams show up for a weekend and playing an hour each is just not feasible. So they’re going to have to have a structured national grass roots outreach. There will need to be local fields that are committed to this and run the format. Those will be the base of the pyramid that teams qualify and earn their way up to the nationals. They essentially have that kind of platform, but the one place the SPPL may be vulnerable is if an entity with a bunch of money comes in. If someone recognizes the untapped player out there, the rec-ball player, they’ll see that this is the lifeblood of the sport. The market is taking a big hit. The money is in the woodsball players. If the SPPL is not able to get the grassroots spread a little deeper in the next two years they’re going to be vulnerable to someone coming in with bigger money and a similar format just making a few changes here or there.
But I think Jayson [Nielson] is doing a fantastic job. He is working on it. He has been picking the brain of Dan Bonebrake and others. Dan and I are completely on board with anything we can do to help the sport grow. If the changes, the tweaks, and the adjustments all keep happening then we’ll have a tremendous opportunity. The next four or five years will see competition paintball combined with the enjoyment of the woodsball experience be brought to more people. That in turn will help everybody in the sport across the board: businesses, field owners, paint manufacturers, you name it. Everybody will see a resurgence that has been lacking in the last couple of years. I really see the SPPL as something that can lead the way in this regard.
If it can get old guys like me out of retirement and back on the field that’s no small feat. We’ve found a new lease on life. It’s just been so much fun. It’s a lot friendlier, and it’s a really sportsmanship and fair-minded kind of an organization. Just the friendliest bunch of paintball players, people that love the sport and are interested in giving it a good name. That’s what we see in the format.
What advice do you have, Randy, for those players that have considered getting a team entered in the SPPL?
You have to have a love and a passion for it. There’s no big money in it at this time. You have to get out there. You really have to play the format to understand it. Practice a one-hour game. Find a field owner that is committed to helping you achieve that level of game. Get your field owners in contact with the SPPL. It’s going to be a joint effort. Once that begins to happen where smaller regional events can earn the field owners a couple of bucks and the players fall in love with the game then we’ll see great things happen. Once hot spots start to spring up you can get the SPPL to come to your area. Another way to get involved is on the internet where you can get in touch with other teams and players that are interested in the same kind of thing.
The SPPL is poised to take advantage of the market forces coming together. Of course with success there will be copycats, but if there is value in it and it’s a smooth clean operation the players will keep coming back. That will be the growth in the circuit.
Randy thank you so much for sharing your perspective with our audience and please consider coming back as a guest again in the future.
Thank you, Wayne, I appreciate it.
Wayne Montle began playing paintball in 1990 and is the producer of Blast Radius Woodsball Podcast. The online radio show began in July 2006 and reaches a global audience.