INTERVIEW WITH WARREN POTTER
A New Zealnder import to the United States, Warren Potter started shooting in New Zealand as a junior, where he still holds the Junior Sport and Air Pistol records. He won the Free Pistol event at the 1997 Oceania Championships, as well as two Volvo Air Pistol Opens.
You grew up originally in New Zealand?
Yes, I was born in Whangarei, right up near the northern tip of New Zealand. It’s a harbor town not far from the Bay of Islands where Zane Gray was a regular big game fisherman.
How did you get started shooting?
I started shooting when I was 11 years old. The whole family decided that they wanted to go and shoot.
What was the impetus for this decision?
We didn’t want to sit home watching television to have our minds turn to mush. Every Tuesday night we’d go down town to Jim White’s Electronics and convert his workshop into a five position range. The Whangarei Pistol Club started about six months before we rolled up and we’d get about thirty or forty shooters every Tuesday night shooting. Air pistols in New Zealand aren’t registered.
What kind of pistols were you shooting at the time? Feinwerkbau 65s?
Oh no. Nothing that good. Crosman Mark 1, the CO2 pistol that takes a powerlet. When we got a little more sophisticated I used a Gecado. After two or three years we bought two FWBs for the family, that’s myself, my brother and my parents, so we shared them.
At what point did you start getting serious about it?
I didn’t get serious probably until I was seventeen. There were so few shooters in New Zealand, I was already twice National Junior Champion at that stage, but when I was seventeen I decided to buy my own guns and start training properly.
What happened from there?
I bought my Toz 35, which I still own to this day (I’ll probably die with it). I bought a standard gun, a Walther GSP, which lasted me until I moved to Australia three years later. I was still using a FWB 65 at that stage for air pistol. We resisted the CO2 invasion for some years. In fact, even when I moved to Australia I was using my mother’s 65 and used to shoot really good scores with it, occasionally beating some of Queensland’s top shooters with their flash (Aussie for newfangled) Feinwerkbau Model 2s.
How old were you when you moved to Australia and what was the background to that move?
I was twenty when I moved to Australia. My parents had moved to Australia three years prior and my brother decided to get married, and I thought that was a good time to move out.
So you moved in with your parents?
For a while. Served them right for abandoning their kids. Eighteen months later I moved out to Gympie, where I lived for the next nine years.
Why did your parents move from NZ to Australia, just for US readers, tell us a little about the relationship between the two countries.
We’re somewhat interchangeable. We have rights to live in each other’s country without any visas. We do need a passport these days. My parents decided that they wanted a change and they figured what better way than to shift countries and move about and see some of the world. They had a mixture of jobs including bean picking and road construction. Then they landed a job running the Brisbane Gun Club – shotguns, which was just as I moved over, so I helped them a little there. But I haven’t worked with them until a few years ago when I moved back to Brisbane. New Zealand is only a little country, we have 3 million as opposed to 18 million in Oz (Australia). There’s this great rivalry between the two countries. We both think that we are exceptionally good at sporting endeavors for the sizes of our countries. If NZ ever beats Australia in anything there’s dancing in the streets. Of course when we lose they’re all wearing black armbands.
Seriously?
Just about.
So you were serious when you moved but then your shooting got sidestepped because of job interests?
I went through the classic junior coming into senior phase, where it used to be easy to win matches as a junior, and now it became much harder as a senior. For a few years I took things fairly easily. I’d go to Nationals, a few State Championships, but I wasn’t training. It was pretty laid back in those days.
At what time did you start to get serious again? And what was the reasoning behind that?
I moved to Gympie in 1986 for nine years and I had a great time up there (about two hours north of Brisbane, State Capital of Queensland). I was working for a gun wholesaler and we were very politically active. I didn’t have much time for shooting in those days. When I moved back to Brisbane in 1995 I could see the writing on the wall in Australia for shooting. I could see it would not be very long before it was gone. So I figured it would be the right time to work hard at it. If I was ever going to do any good at shooting, that would be the time, since I could see that within ten years the whole thing would be closed down. Plus I had moved from Gympie anyway and I had more time for it.
When did your parents get their gun shop and how did you start to work for them?
My parents started running the gun shop before I left for Gympie, around 1985. They started the shop for the guy I ended up working for in Gympie. We were like a chain of stores. A year before I moved back to Brisbane my father bought the shop outright, so at that stage it was Potter Firearms. I worked with him from there to build it up.
Had your brother moved over at that stage?
No, he moved over just two years ago.
Was this shop always focused on UIT guns?
No, it was always a general gun shop until my dad took over and he leaned more towards pistol. When I moved down it went even more so that way, because that really is our main interest. Because we could give specialist advice we became known pretty quickly for that.
How many gun shops are there in Australia that focus on the UIT disciplines?
Probably only five or six who fully focus on it.
Your successful target shooting was around then?
To put it in chronological order, I started training seriously in 1995, I met Vladimir in 1996.
Who was he?
He was the ex-Belarus coach. He moved from near the city of Minsk, which was downwind from the Chernobyl accident, and he has two young daughters. One of these was very ill and was told she had to move away from that area to a more friendly climate in order to have a better life, so they moved to Australia. For the first 18 months he was there he was working as a laborer in a factory. He had told a shooting official when he arrived what his credentials were. Nobody took him on. It was only when he wrote to the NZ Association that the Australians took any notice and found a job opening for him. He used to coach the Belarus national team, and he was in his day a master grade shooter.
So you were working with him and as a result went up to the next level?
I met him in 1996. He came and stayed with us for a week and I would say as a direct result from that I learned how to shoot properly. Within a few months I broke Master Grade in Air Pistol, won the Volvo Open and became I guess capable of being competitive internationally.
How did your store get involved in the internet? 
Has it always been an interest of yours?
No, I have a hatred of computers, and always have. My friend Bruce Favell talked me into putting a website on simply because he was starting at the same time (he runs auspistol.com.au). He is a computer programmer, he taught me the basics and how to get started. I learned the rest of it the hard way, I made lots of mistakes. It’s snowballed from there, it just got bigger and bigger.
When did you first start potfire.com.au?
It went up in late 1997.
Roughly the same time as pilkguns.com went up.
We took months to get picked up by any of the search engines and I guess 12 months to get any sort of following at all, but these days it’s a pretty good site.
During this time you were living in Australia and shooting for the NZ Team? I know we met at the World Championships in Barcelona in 1998.
I made the NZ Team at the Oceania Championships in 1997. That’s where I won the Free Pistol.
Did you win a quota slot for the Olympics? I made an MQS for the Olympics but that year they didn’t have the quota slot up for grabs as it was three years before Sydney. It was the next Oceania held in 1999 when the quota slots were available. I’d shot for NZ as a junior and I arranged to be part of their squad while I lived in Australia. It never really worked because they never seemed to want to communicate and I was always finding things out third hand. The trip to the World Champs was a bit of a surprise because it came out of the blue. I went to Barcelona with only four weeks’ preparation. I had missed making the Commonwealth Games Team so it was my assumption I wasn’t eligible to go. But they did later on offer me the trip. They subsidized it a little but I had to pay mostly my own way.
Did you ever imagine when we met at the Walther tent in commercial row in Barcelona that you’d ever be here working for me?
No. Because at that stage I thought American were all nutcases.
Seriously?
Yes. The media have convinced the population in Australia and NZ that America is an unsafe place to live. There are gun battles in the streets every day, innocent people getting shot. The crime rate and the gun violence are so bad that it’s a terrible place and should be avoided at all cost. It’s surprising there are so many people who come over here to go to Disneyland, because of the general attitude of our people towards America.
Their perception is that everybody over here is shooting at each other?
Sure.
So you decided to come over here against all the propaganda and shoot at Perry? How did that come about?
I’d got the travel bug. I’d been to Europe twice in the past twelve months and I’d sold a heap of stuff to Bullseye shooters in the States. Perry was the one place where they all go, and I thought it would be a great place to go and meet these people and to see America for myself. But I never expected to end up wanting to live here. It was a shock when I arrived to find that people were so open and friendly and had such a positive outlook on life compared with what I’m used to.
So you shot Perry, had a good time, went back home and decided you wanted to emigrate?
Yes.
And the next thing I knew I had this email show up in my Inbox looking for a job.
I figured I could apply for political asylum from a socialist regime but I’d have to wait until the current crowd got thrown out of the White House before they’d listen with any sympathy.
Several months later, courtesy of US Immigration Services, we got you here.
It’s been great.
What’s your favorite practice drill?
Dry fire.
What do you get out of dry fire?
It’s my favorite because it’s so easy to set up. Shooting glasses, gun and a dot on the wall. I find it relaxing. When you do it right it’s very satisfying. You’ve got to be very critical about what you’re doing. The secret to it is I never stick to it for more than fifteen minutes at a time, otherwise it can become boring. It becomes no fun, a chore. For ten to fifteen minutes at a time, if you do it right, you come away with a feeling that you’ve achieved something. I’d do it often, maybe two or three times a day.
That’s good advice, to keep it enjoyable.
Attitude problems start to appear if you’re doing it for any reason but enjoyment.
How do you set your sights in relation to the bull?
I shoot around the five ring, just a little below the black. So I guess it’s about the same light gap as either side of the front sight.
Do you do the same for Free and Air?
The same for everything. I even area aim for Rapid Fire phase of Center Fire. I come just into the black and let it go.
How do you play the mental game?
Badly.
That’s a common answer. Do you want to tell us the “real secrets”?
The one time I did it right the team coach cornered me in the hotel elevator the night before the shoot. He badgered me for an answer as to what I was going to do on the line the next day. At that stage I’d had a couple of beers and I told him in no uncertain terms what I was going to do the next day. I was going to be positive on the trigger and attack the trigger and get through the shot quickly or cancel. Luckily enough I talked myself into it. I went into the Final with a four point lead and managed to hold on to the end. (1997 Oceania Free Pistol)
How do you feel about shooting glasses?
I’m blind as a bat so I always need some form of corrective lens. I used to use an iris stopped right down, which kept everything in focus, the target and the sights. At the time it was really great for calling the shot while your attention was focused on the sights, but it was all too easy to look through the sights at the target. As the years have gone by I’ve gradually opened the iris up more and more until I now have a healthy fuzz of a black and clear sights. I use Varga shooting glasses with an iris, but the iris is more there to keep my head in the same position for each shot.
What’s your funniest shooting experience?
I was at a NZ Nationals many years ago and I happened to be shooting Free Pistol next to Rex Hamilton, the current national champion. I was a sixteen year old junior. On the fifth target I cross fired and put a five on this guy’s card. It was an accident. But as we had a 50 cent bet on the five match aggregate (he was giving me something like 150 points head start) I couldn’t convince him I hadn’t done it on purpose. He gave me hell over that for the next four years. But my mother paid him back for his doubt. We were playing pool, she was taking a shot, he was standing too close behind her when she took a big backswing with the cue and caught him right where it hurts. She didn’t even know, and couldn’t understand why Rex was groveling on the ground and the rest of us were collapsing in laughter.
What advice would you give to a junior starting out?
Listen to everything that anyone tells you. Believe less than half of it, but at least consider all of it. Everybody has good intentions in what they tell you, but what will work for one person won’t necessarily work for another. So don’t take everything that one person says as gospel.
What’s your favorite American beer and where should people send contributions to the Warren Potter beer fund?
Sam Adams is pretty good. They don’t have to send contributions, just send a slab. (When we get him taught proper American English he will call this a case.)
What’s your impression of shooting in the US?
The big difference between the countries is in cost to the competitor. For the same price for one event at your nationals I could shoot more than five events at Pistol Australia nationals. Also the time makes it difficult for a lot of people. This year with shooting the Olympic events a shooter would have to have taken a week to a week and a half off work simply to go to the nationals to shoot two or three events.
What’s your perspective on electronic trainers? I know you’ve used them a lot in the past.
They’re a great diagnostic tool. They’re not the type of thing that you’d shoot on every day, but they’re fantastic for discovering exactly what aspects of your shooting need work. And then of course you’d go away, work on that, come back in one or two weeks to shoot it again and see it if it had helped. I used a SCATT three years ago for six months solid and it helped me a lot. The RIKA I’ve had a lot of experience with over the past two months and it has the same benefits. If anything it’s more fun to work with because it’s so much faster to set up.
Where do you think the shooting sports should go from here?
Australian shooting has been decimated in the last five years by politics. What hasn’t been recorded out here recently is importers in Australia now may import pistols and rifles but the government will seize them until a buyer is found for each gun, and they will only release it to that buyer after he has jumped through the hoops and has his paperwork. Dealers can not stock new guns. As you can see, the government simply wants to stamp out the sport. For that not to happen in this country in the next twenty years, what we have to do is show the general public that this is a legitimate sport. We need shooters to go out and get non-shooting friends and take them to the range, so they understand what we do. We need more and more junior programs going because these kids in a few years will be voting. The more people out there who understand the shooting sports, the more people who are going to see what the media are saying and simply say, “What a load of garbage.” It’s all very well for the likes of the NRA to recruit more shooters to join, but for long term survival we need more shooters and more people who understand us. If every shooter out there would make it their job to, once every twelve months or once every six months, take a non-shooting friend to the range so that they understand our point of view. By doing that, a lot of them will get hooked on it as it’s a fantastic sport. Quite often these people who are first intimidated by guns end up shooting competition.
For the record, just how tall are you?
6’4″.
Are all New Zealanders that tall?
You should meet my BIG brother.
One Potter in the States is enough thank you.