Give a small boy a stick to play with and before long he’ll turn it into a make-believe gun.
Give a grown man a gun that shoots paint so he can more efficiently mark trees for logging and before long he’ll turn it on his co-worker in play.
The first statement may be sexist and it might not even be true. The second statement is, by golly, how the sport of paintball got invented about years ago in Vermont. That is, it’s the story that grown man and paintball wizard/entrepreneur Forest Brown likes to tell.
Just what is paintball anyway?
For the uninitiated-and there are fewer every year, since approximately 800,000 Americans are reported to enjoy the sport every weekend-paintball is like the children’s game Capture the Flag, with players using guns that shoot, well, balls of paint. The paintballs are made of medical gelatin (the stuff that medicine capsules are made of) and contain fish oil and pigment, Brown said. The 20-plus paint colors wash off with water.
“The paintballs are non-toxic, non-caustic and are biodegradable. They are also edible,” Brown said, “if you can stand the taste, which is terrible.” They are shot from guns using carbon dioxide (CO2) or nitrogen as a propellant.
The paintball is projected at an average rate of 280 to 300 feet per second-more than 200 miles per hour. The impact feels like anything from a rubber band-snap to a pretty good whack, depending on whom you ask. Most players interviewed concede the impact leaves a fairly good-sized welt.
“You never even feel something like this until play is over,” Brown argues, exposing a major purple/blue/yellow bruise the size of a fist on his shoulder.
Brown, a Vietnam vet in his mid-40s, continued, “While you are out on the field, you can only concentrate on the game. It is stress-reducing since you don’t have time to think about your problems.”
Indeed, in the July 1994 edition of Action Pursuit Games magazine, paintballer Rob Kerr wrote of how playing the game after January’s southern California earthquake brought welcome stress relief. He called the game “a well-needed reality break after all the stress and work I have been through.”
Ask Brown, owner of three paintball supply stores and owner/operator of two paintball playing fields, to talk about this sport and be prepared to listen. To say this Joliet resident is a booster of the sport of paintball is to be guilty of severe understatement.
A recent rainy afternoon at his Joliet paintball supply store, Challenge Games, brought out the salesman in Brown. He began by describing the basics of the game.
Guns . . . paint . . . the out-of-doors . . . choosing up sides . . . neat paramilitary-looking outfits . . . hiding . . . seeking. It’s easy to see how the basic elements of paintball would be almost irresistible to the average American action sports enthusiast.
That’s what hooked Ken Cho five years ago when, he said, “I was dragged to my first game for a friend’s going-away party. I didn’t want to go. I’d heard about it, but I wasn’t interested.” Until the play began.
“It was the rush of adrenaline. The paint. The chance to get outdoors and get really dirty and have a great time,” the 23-year-old Villa Park resident said recently.
Although Cho didn’t get to play a second time until a year later, he was hooked. Now the Elmhurst College student plays “just about every weekend. I love it.” He plays on Brown’s paintball team, called Team Far Side.
For 24-year-old Joliet resident Adam Coker, it is the thrill of the hunt that’s appealing. “It’s good exercise and a chance to be outdoors. But the best part is that while you’re out there all stress goes away,” he said, echoing others’ observations, “because you haven’t got time to think of anything but the game.”
Coker said he plays paintball just about every weekend. “I own seven guns. I didn’t buy any of them new. I bought used ones and fixed them up,” he said. Both Coker and Cho acknowledge that the game, like many hobbies, can be expensive.
There are two types of guns, Brown explained, pump and semi-automatic, and they may be purchased or rented. Pump guns are recommended for novices to the sport since they shoot at a rate of only two balls per second for slower-paced play. A semi-automatic paintball gun shoots at a rate of four balls per second, he said, and is a favorite of experienced players.
A new gun can cost anywhere from $100 to $500, basic goggles with face mask $30, CO2 tank $40, paintball hopper $15 and paintballs, sold in quantities of 100 (Brown said most players get 200 for a game) cost anywhere from 4 to 8 cents each. Equipment is sold at specialty paintball stores, through mail order catalogs and a number of paintball publications, and at local sporting goods stores.
Between the guns, the ammunition, the fields, the clothing and gear, it’s easy to see how many aspects of paintball would be almost irresistible to the entrepreneur. At one of Brown’s parks, the casual player can expect to pay about $45 for a day’s fun, said Coker. That includes a $10 admission, gun and head gear rental, paintballs and either CO2 or nitrogen cartridges.
One of Brown’s partners, Chris Fell of Chicago, recalls his introduction to paintball.
In 1985 Fell, Brown and another partner, Butch Leeper of Joliet, all worked for a Chicago publishing house specializing in role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons. The trio went out to play paintball one Saturday afternoon, Fell said, and ended up deciding they could run their own field. That’s all it took.
“What we saw when we went out to this field near Aurora was a fabulous game that was being marketed really badly,” Brown recalled. The game suffered from a bad reputation, and most fields were poorly managed because the owners were sportsmen who gave free play away to friends, he said.
Between the three of them, the men figured they had enough marketing and business savvy to bring paintball out from under its rock of obscurity and into the bright light of respectability, Brown said. At first they leased the Aurora park, then bought it. Later they sold it and bought a site near Wilmington, which they named Challenge Park.
The corporation that runs Challenge Park and the stores is called The Adventure Game, based in Joliet. Brown oversees all activities, Leeper manages Challenge Park, and Fell manages the Challenge Games store in Northlake.
Brown noted that when paintball started on a national level in 1980, it was called the Survival Game. “It couldn’t have had a worse name. It quickly became associated with wackos, weirdos and survivalists-the types who hole up in the mountains and teach their young to hunt each other and eat leeches,” Brown said.
The game couldn’t have been further from that image, both Brown and Fell insist. Although at first people floundered for a suitable format for the paint-shooting pistol-play, Brown said the game soon became a variation on Capture the Flag.
A flag lies at either end of a field with trenches, trees, shrubs and other barriers between. Two teams of five players each work to capture the other team’s flag and return it to their side. Players are eliminated as they are “shot” and marked with a paint splat the size of a dime or larger. The team with either the opponent’s flag in custody or the most unmarked players after 20 minutes of play wins.
At his Challenge Park in Wilmington and the newly opened Challenge Park II (at Balmoral Race Track in Crete Township) there are strict rules, and safety is the first consideration, Brown said.
“People are ejected if they even lift their face mask away from their face,” he said. He means it.
According to Brown, there are only six companies that insure paintball fields. Rates are based on safety and on numbers of players. Since Challenge Park hosted more than 25,000 players in 1993, Brown said, “without one injury,” his top concern is continued safety.
Players are required to sign a waiver before they play. Minors must have parental consent. The first line on the waiver form states that a player can die while playing this sport. Brown laughs, “Anybody can die doing anything at any time. It’s more of an attention-getter, to remind people that any action sport’s safety rules are to be taken seriously.
“We’ve had players from 12 to 75 years old. We often have players who are handicapped, in a wheelchair, on crutches or hearing-impaired,” Brown said.
Brown claims Challenge Park, with its 14 playing fields on 100 acres, is the world’s largest in numbers of players. Jim Lively, a Nashville resident and producer of national paintball competition events, agrees it’s probably true, although he said that with more than 3,000 paintball fields worldwide, many others may be comparable.
Of Challenge Park’s 14 fields, three have special themes, according to Brown. One is completely cleaned of underbrush, leaving only big trees for cover. It is called Chaos. Another, called Wasteland, consists of trenches and burned-out cars. A third, The City, was constructed to look like a bombed-out city, with partially standing buildings on deserted streets. Challenge Park’s remaining fields are primarily wooded.
All games are refereed, and Brown and his partners employ 11 people full time and 25 to 35 people part time, at the stores and to monitor play.
Open games are available most anytime the park is open, which is weekends between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., “or dark,” whichever comes first, said Brown. Both parks will be open on Wednesdays from April 1 to Oct. 1, 1995. There is reserved and tournament play, but it does not preclude the casual player, he said.
Lively, co-owner of Lively Productions, produces five annual paintball international competitions. One, A Gathering of Nations International Masters’ Tournament, is just wrapping up in Nashville. Lively explained that during this event more than 1,500 individual players were to compete on teams from 14 nations for over $60,000 in prizes.
The Masters’ Tournament also was to host more than 45 manufacturers of paintball products and between 2,000 and 3,000 spectators over six days. Other annual tournaments are held on the West Coast, in the Midwest and overseas.
Tournament play is reserved for those paintballers who are the most diehard, Brown said. They have formed formal teams, often have equipment sponsors and play every weekend, year-round.
Most fields are open all year long, Brown said, and autumn is the busiest season. He added, however, that December through February were very busy last year.
In tournament play, there are two levels of contestants: professionals and amateurs. Professionals, Brown said, play for cash prizes. Amateurs play for trophies and equipment prizes. The difference between the two is not necessarily so much skill-level as it is love of the sport.
The bulk of Brown’s Challenge Park trade comprises those who come out once or twice a month. Neither amateur nor professional, they are what he calls casual players. They may or may not own their own gun, may or may not be a member of a team.
It is not necessary to have a team in order to show up at the field and play, Brown said. Like golf, many will arrive solo and join with other solos for team play. It doesn’t take long to make two teams this way. “When I get out there to open up in the morning there are usually 30 people waiting to play,” he said.
Many teams are formed from corporate groups, both upper and middle management, who start playing for the team-building effect of the sport, Brown said. At Challenge Park, as at others, teams may reserve a field for private play. Lively noted that many teams in international tournament competition are from corporations.
Don Snipes of Lisle is director of product development at Amoco Laser Co. in Naperville. “We have a group of about 40 who play paintball twice a year. It’s not a formalized thing. We just go to have fun,” he said. “But we noticed that, while there are a lot of good books on developing business strategy and consensus, paintball is the fun way to learn those things.”
Lively pointed out that 80 percent of paintball players are males between the ages of 16 and 25. “There are women who play; there are even all-women teams,” he said.
Brown noted that, in general, while women paintballers may not be as aggressive as men, they are less likely to surrender in the midst of a chaotic situation.
Brown added that his wife plays. “But the vast appeal of the sport is to men,” he said. Young men like Cho and Coker.
Naperville resident and direct mail salesman Pat Grady found the sport so appealing to young men that he regularly chaperones his church’s youth group trips to Challenge Park. “I got the idea from talking to Forest about the fact that our church’s youth groups are often looking for novel things to do,” Grady said.
It seemed like a wholesome sport to Grady-who has played and also enjoys the game-and the teens like it a lot, he said. Brown does not recommend paintball for children younger than 12, mainly because the impact of the paintballs may hurt their young bodies more. But he also feels it takes a certain level of maturity to understand the concept of the game.
Brown’s wife, Carol, said she enjoys seeing teenagers come out who are not particularly athletic. “Since you don’t have to be a jock to be good at paintball, these kids leave with a whole new image of themselves. Often it’s the computer nerds who become leaders in paintball,” she said.
To critics who insist the game is destructive, Fell said, “Come out and play the game. It’s easy to criticize something you’ve never even seen or experienced. I bet once people play paintball they’ll have a higher opinion of the game.”
