The 2024 Paris Olympics concluded Sunday night, but for the athletes that participated in the games the memories will last a lifetime.
Ed Etzel was a West Virginia University rifle coach when he registered a near-perfect shooting score to win a gold medal at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. He recently spoke with reporter Chris Schulz about his experience and perspective 40 years on.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Schulz: Tell me a little bit about how you came to find yourself competing and shooting? I mean, did you grow up hunting? What was your path to competitive shooting?
Etzel: My dad hunted and fished and we lived in a, I wouldn’t say it was rural, but I grew up in North Haven, Connecticut, at least the first part of my life. And we had a lot of property and my dad would say, ‘Well, you guys,’ – my brother and I – ‘need to learn how to shoot.’ So we had a little tiny .22 rifle and shot cans into a big old tree in the backyard, which is pretty big.
We joined a club in New Haven, Connecticut at the old Winchester Arms Factory. It’s been there since the 20s, and it was a club called the Jack Lacey Jr. Rifle club. I started to learn to shoot and I made friends and had two really great coaches. One was a colonel who was even in the cavalry of the army, if you can imagine that. And he and his son were my coaches, and I just got better and better and better at it. I found it challenging, you know it doesn’t look like much. Some people say ‘Well, we’re gonna watch you shoot. It’s sort of like watching paint dry.’ But if you’re actually doing it, it’s much more complicated and requires a good bit of hand eye coordination and balance and emotional control and focus or concentration. That was just a Friday night thing, you get a little box of ammunition that you’d fire the shots at these paper targets and mom and dad would take us to McDonald’s. And when I was 12, I won the state championship. I didn’t even know that I had won the state championship. I shot this match on some evening or afternoon in New Haven, and I got a call, ‘Hey, you’re the state champion.’ Oh, okay. I mean, that’s fine. I didn’t really quite know what that meant. But it was a nice thing. And I thought, ‘Well, you know, maybe I’m pretty good at this.’
And so I continued to do that, and competed and shot and stuff throughout the years, through high school, and I went on a scholarship to St. John’s University in New York City when I was 17 years old barely, turned 18 when I was there. And I only lasted a semester, as many of us do, we kind of bump and run in life. And it was just overwhelming for me. I wasn’t particularly mature, grown up, in New York City in 1970, which is a long, long time ago, was just a little too much for me. It was the height of the Vietnam War. I didn’t have any idea about life. I was even in ROTC and they burned our building down. And I thought, you know, this is, I don’t quite understand this. So, I went home and stayed there for one semester. And I got a letter out of the blue, from Tennessee Tech University in Cookeville, Tennessee, which is an engineering school of about 8,000 or 9,000, still, and they said, ‘We’d like you to come down and be on our rifle team.’ And I knew they existed, they were good. So I went there sight unseen and that’s where I finished my education.
Then I went on to somewhat of a hiatus. I went on active duty during the Vietnam War at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, and Fort Benning, Georgia. And eventually went to the Army marksmanship unit for nine months and competed as my first international sort of experience.
During that time, I was a world champion for the first time in a different event than what we have in the Olympics now, it was a 300 meters centerfire international match. And I did that in Finland in 1975 I believe. That was my first big competition, I think and, and fortunately, I was successful and learned a lot from people quickly in the military. And after that, I came (to WVU) and I continued to shoot with the US Army Reserves. They had a team, they still do. And I did that and into the Olympics in 1984, and I retired. I retired from shooting the day after the Olympics,
Schulz: Tell me a little bit about your time at WVU. I mean, was it similar to Tennessee? Did they recruit you or did you apply?
Etzel: I found out that they were looking for a coach here. The coaching ranks back then were particularly populated by Army ROTC noncommissioned officers, and they came and went, you know, they’re on a campus for a year or two, and they’re gone. So I heard that that was the case, and I was interested in a graduate program here in sports psychology. And so I applied and I was accepted. And I came here to coach and I was paid nothing. Actually, I was paid $250 as a graduate assistant through the School of Physical Education, which has another name now. And I lived off that and the GI Bill I got paid for eggs and a little bit of rent and electricity. And eventually, athletics decided to pay me something and I coached here for 12 years from ‘76.
I was involved in a doctoral program in counseling psychology, which is an American Psychological Association approved program, and I was the first graduate of that, and left and got my license and moved on from shooting. It was rather sad, actually, I didn’t want to leave the really good bunch of people I had recruited there. They’re good young people and good students and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, at that time, I was making the grand sum of $16,000 from athletics and the GI Bill had run out and I needed to move on and grow up on some level and get a real job. I left rifle after that. I actually continued to be the secretary of the rules committee for NCAA rifle for a long time. I did that for close to 30 years. But that sort of wore out. There are other people that knew more than I did. And so I made a gracious exit.
So yeah, that’s kind of the shooting side of things. I don’t really have any involvement in WVU rifle. I had a little bit over time, with USA shooting and their Olympic team, their national team, as a consultant, but mostly as a psychologist, but I don’t do that anymore. That’s actually one of my previous students does that.
Schulz: Were you seeking out an Olympic berth? Or was it you know, similar to your first state title, it just kind of happened?
Etzel: Well, yes. And no, I think every year we had a national championship and I had participated in that. Which historically, was in Phoenix, Arizona in the summer, which is kind of rugged. And I had tried out for various teams. I was a member of the World Championship gold medal team in 1978 in rifle shooting in one of the events, the three position men’s smallbore rifle event. And the same happened the next year in the Pan American Games, we were gold medalists there. And so every year you try out for a team like that and I had made those teams, I did not make the ‘80 team, which probably wouldn’t have made any difference anyway, because the United States boycotted that which was pretty sad for a lot of people who made that. It’s, you know, go figure, there is a good bit of politics in the Olympics, as well as commercialism.
I continued to do that every year, and I kind of got better and better and better. ‘83, I was very close to making the Pan American team and I didn’t. I really, I guess, dedicated myself to really doing as best I could. All that time I was involved with physical activity, was involved in psychological training, I’d done hypnotic work with the clinician for focus and emotional control. All of those things were part and parcel of my graduate program that was involved in at least my master’s program. So I knew a good bit about that. And that’s always been an anchor for me, to be emotionally intelligent and reasonably under control, if you will, because, you know, you can really lose it. You can get pretty nervous, just like anyone who gets on stage or has to do a speech or you know, whatever. So that was part and parcel of my work. And it was part of my graduate experience as well.
In 1984, I was fortunate enough to make the team in actually two events. I almost made it in three, but my back gave out, just a long time of trying out. I made the team and they only pick two people for each event, at least back then. So I was fortunate enough to make that team and compete in two events. The first one, I won a gold medal, the second one, I did not do that well, I finished 15th. And part of that was, I think, related to there’s a lot of media hype, and sort of a lot of interviews. And I remember going to do Good Morning America at midnight in Hollywood with David Hartman. But that kind of threw me off. If you want to spin off on a little bit of mental things, factors and recovery, that really kind of threw me off. I really wasn’t as prepared as I was for the first event. The conditions were pretty difficult, the mental aspect of all of that has been important to me, and I don’t practice anymore although I’m still a psychologist, a licensed psychologist in this state. I suppose I could, but I garden and play guitar and do radio on the University station, and paint and things like that. So that’s sort of the path.
I retired, again, right after the Olympics. Actually, I did shoot one match. That was rather painful. In 1988, I was doing my internship at Duke University Counseling Service, and somebody talked me into shooting the NC State game, so I had to figure out where my equipment was, and almost killed me. I was out of shape, not physically, but shooting shape just there’s something to that. So that’s the last time I actually shot. I did quit officially from competition, but somebody twisted my arm. And I did that in Raleigh, one sweaty afternoon.
Schulz: What was it like for you to win gold?
Etzel: Well, somebody else asked me this not too long ago. You know, you go with what got you there. And that’s what I did. I didn’t really change anything. It was a little nerve wracking. My first shot was nerve racking, but it was right in the middle. And I just shot very fast, which is a stylistic thing that lots of other folks were not doing. And I finished the whole thing, 60 shots in 25 minutes. So I was moving on. And that was a strategy.
I had done well in the past, the tryouts were similar. Actually, I think our tryouts were in the same place. So I had some sort of state dependent learning, we’d say in the business of, you kind of know what you’re getting into now. The Olympics were a little different. We had several thousand people watching us. Usually you have those people who work there, and folks who accidentally drift by, so that was a little different. Plus, I had three or four ABC TV cameras on me the whole time, so that was a little different. But I felt confident, and my goal was really not to go there to win an Olympic gold medal, but to do what I could do, and be in the moment. We’re taught as babies, you know, take a shot at a time. It’s one shot, one life, maybe that’s zen archery, I don’t know. But I did read that book. And that’s what I did. And I was fortunate enough to do that. I even did that in the matches I didn’t do so well. But it just didn’t turn out the same way.
So after that, there was a lot of attention. The ABC TVs, all the interviews and that kind of thing. We had no press person. We had a coach in really name only quite frankly. I was kind of left on my own. Someone would say ‘Okay, the New York Times wants to interview you.’ And then just a series of stuff. And ‘Oh, by the way, you’re going to be on TV tomorrow at midnight, or we’re going to get in the limo at that time.’ It was exhausting after that. I had some appreciation of what it might be to be a professional athletes, which I really wasn’t, but that’s part of it. I mean, I didn’t jump up and down and go ‘Yoo hoo!’ or anything like that. But I do remember Tony Caridi in town – who’s the voice of the Mountaineers, at least football and basketball – he interviewed me back then. And he said, ‘Well, what was that like for you?’ Same question you’ve asked me. I said, ‘Well, Tony, it made my afternoon.’ He thought that was hilarious. So even though there wasn’t some big hoopla or anything like that, subsequent to that I was busy doing other stuff, interviews and things of that nature and trying to rest up for the other thing, which didn’t really turn out.
Schulz: Can you tell me a little bit about how psychology plays into it? Because I think, as you alluded to before, shooting is a discipline that I think maybe gets overlooked a little bit.
Etzel: It’s you against yourself and the environment. It’s similar to archery, very similar. I played a lot of golf, obsessively, for several years. There’s some similarities there, although the variables are different. To name a few. Bowling is another good example of a closed sport, as we would say in the world of sport science, where the environment doesn’t change that much. So yes, it is something that can be characterized in that way. I would call it an orphaned sport to most people, even though it exists, it’s sort of pushed aside. Go to a rifle match here. If there are 100 people that show up the entire day or weekend, I’d be shocked. There’s no admission.
(Psychology) is always important in every sport, the faces and challenges are somewhat different. If you’re running a marathon, you’re going to deal with pain and exertion. You might deal with some pain, your arm going numb, in shooting, but you’re not going to be super exerted. The environment stays basically the same, although when you’re outdoors, the wind has a lot of effect on things. The Olympic Committee has a staff of people, an army of consultants who are associated with various teams. I’d done work with USA biathlon in the past, one of the coldest experiences of my life. But most interesting. So it does vary across the board, but there’s always a mental component to performance and peak performance.
Musicians are a good example of that, go interview Mountain Stage’s Kathy Mattea, or Larry Groce, and they’ll tell you they got nervous on stage or they forgot what they were doing or distracted and those sort of things. It’s true for all of these sorts of things. That’s a big part of that, it just manifests itself differently in different sports. And then there are individual differences. There are people who were generally unfazed according to their personality makeup. They don’t seem to be fazed. I know a few people that just never really seem to be fazed. ‘Well, that was a bad shot. And I’ll get after that one,’ They’re very stable people. And then we have people who were quite flighty and scattered and things like that, or who deal with adversity in different ways. So it’s a big component. That’s why there is mental training across sports that WVU has. One of my dear previous students is a sports psychologist, Sofía España Pérez. She is doing that work with WVU Athletics now, across all the different teams, not to just include shooting, but football and basketball, and whatever one thinks of all of those things.
So, yeah, I think it’s a very important component. And it seems to me that the better you get, you’re probably better at controlling your emotions, staying focused, dealing with adversity and recovery than you are in the beginning or at some other time in your career. But it can also be very challenging. I mean, all I have to do is miss one free throw shot and the NBA Finals and you’re a loser and social media is ready to crucify you.
Schulz: I want to give you one last opportunity, if there’s anything else that I haven’t given you a chance to discuss with me or something that you’d like to highlight that we’ve already touched upon.
Etzel: Well, I would say one thing, it’s certainly a great honor to represent your country. Whether you finish at the top or at the bottom, to be a participant and to represent your country is a great honor. And it was a great honor for me to do that. And also to represent the people of West Virginia.
And I’ll go sideways, I only did one endorsement. And that was for CB&T Bank in Morgantown, took black and white photos, and traveled around the region. And I’ve met people and shook hands, and everybody got to wear the gold medal, or touch it. And so it’s rusty. So there’s a metaphor for that: all things must pass, as George Harrison said, long time ago in an album.
But it’s nice to share all of those things with other people because, you know, we’ll laugh or be forgotten with the rest to be quite frank. It’s something that you value that has to do with representing other people and doing good for other people. It should not be about you. Unfortunately, a lot of folks are about ‘me’. And so I think, looking at that big picture of how it’s a privilege to represent your country and this state, met tons of people.
And found out how much actually the metal was worth. I brought it to my jeweler, John Kuehn of Morgantown, and I said, ‘Hey, this thing is rusting because it would tell me how much it’s worth.’ And he said, ‘Mind if I scratch it?’ I said, ‘I don’t care. It’s rusty.’ He said, ‘Well, you know, they sprayed it with gold. And it’s worth about 30 bucks, but it’s probably worth a lot more than that to you.’ And I think that’s a really interesting metaphor for the whole thing, you know? It’s just, it’s not made of gold, that won’t last forever. But it’s something you need to know: it’s about you, but it’s also about the people who got you there, and your coaches and other things like representing your country. It’s a much bigger picture than what we see on TV and all that type of thing. So that would be something that might be interesting for listeners, there are many other tales to be told, but it’s not part of the timeframe here.
