Jul. 3—James Hall says it’s true. Blame his mom.
She’s the reason he started shooting guns. Without her, none of this would have happened. The former Annistonian still remembers his virgin shot with an air rifle fired in Carrollton, Ga., when he was 13. Which means, in a not-so-roundabout way, Creaestia Hall’s former anti-gun stance is a catalyst for her son’s upcoming trip to the Tokyo Olympics as a member of the U.S. Olympic shooting team.
“Absolutely,” said Hall, acknowledging the humor behind his mother’s figurative culpability. “It’s all her fault.”
The significant headline is that Hall, 37, will soon become the first former Jacksonville State University athlete to compete in the Olympics as a member of Team USA. The United States has competed in every Olympics — except 1980 — since the modern games began in 1896, and Hall will be the first Gamecock to wear Team USA’s uniform. JSU’s only other Olympian, golfer Danny Willett, competed for Great Britain in the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro.
But the fascinating side tale is that the four Hall brothers — James, Jonathan, a 2012 Olympian, Joseph and Jacob — became accomplished competitive shooters in part because their mom, who homeschooled her sons, made a life-altering decision.
Instead of shielding her boys from firearms, she enrolled them in a hunter safety-education course. The familiar story is that Creaestia Hall hoped the class’s tedium would dissolve any interest her sons had in guns.
If so, the stance proved an utter failure.
“My mom, being an educator of four boys, she wanted us to learn shooting, and she really felt like maybe her anti-gun (stance) was ignorant,” Hall said, “and she really made us go through learning the proper handling and learning where to fire a firearm. It is kind of ironic that she has two Olympic athletes.”
Nine years ago in London, Jonathan shot for Team USA in the 10-meter air rifle competition. Joseph, another former Gamecock, served in the heralded U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit. Jacob, the youngest, competed in shooting events in the Junior Olympics and is a firearms instructor. The trend is unmistakable.
Another oddity: None of the brothers are hunters, Hall said, though he adds a few caveats: He owns a legal firearm, supports the Second Amendment and does not oppose hunting. He eats meat and believes the “conservation of our resources” is important.
“I just don’t have a desire to go sit in the woods and shoot an animal, especially when I can go to the grocery store or my local meat locker and buy it,” he said.
That helps explain why he calls himself a “professional paper puncher” — a highly skilled athlete who fires a .177-caliber pellet at 500 feet per second at a target 33 feet away. The goal is to hit a bullseye that, he says, is “a little smaller than a dime.”
Seemingly impossible, in other words.
Hall and his fellow shooters often laugh when they say their air pistols “kind of look like space guns” that use a cylinder of 3,000 pounds-per-square-inch compressed air to fire pellets. For laymen, Hall equates the firearms to expensive sports cars. “Everybody drives a car,” he said, “so my air pistol kind of looks like a Lamborghini of vehicles.”
At JSU, Hall was part of the Gamecocks’ remarkable domination of the Ohio Valley Conference championship, which they won six times in seven years between 2003 and 2009. In 2005, Hall and his JSU teammates fell one point shy of the national championship. (Who won? Army, of course.)
After graduation, Hall began working for the Civilian Marksmanship Program in Anniston and helped design its electronic target range, he said. Shooting became his athletic outlet and his profession. A switch from rifle to pistol shooting prior to the Olympic Trials expanded a window of opportunity in World Cup events and for making Team USA.
“I took what I learned training with rifle and carried those principles over to training with air pistol,” Hall said. In 2016, he finished third in the national competition; the top two moved on. “So, I had just gradually continued to progress and do better and better in the sport.”
Only the pandemic slowed that momentum. His first-place finish in the Championship of the Americas in Guadalajara, Mexico, in November 2018 secured a spot on Team USA’s 2020 Olympics squad. But the novel coronavirus circled the globe last spring, delaying the Tokyo Games and making JSU’s first U.S. Olympian wait another year for his opportunity. In Tokyo, Hall will shoot in two events: men’s 10-meter air pistol and 10-meter air pistol pairs, a competition akin to mixed doubles in tennis.
Hall, who lives with his wife and two children in Columbia, Mo., built an indoor electronic shooting range in his basement. During the day, his wife works and he’s a stay-at-home dad. At night, he trains in the basement for an Olympics appearance that’s as noteworthy for his alma mater as it is for him.
What’s weird, he says, is “it’s never really been a top-priority goal for me; instead, I think (it’s) the dedication to seeing what I can do to measure my own skills.”
Hall explains his sport as “competitive yoga with a firearm,” which may sound silly. “What I mean by that is everybody knows how to align a sight and squeeze a trigger and shoot a decent shot,” he said. “And there’s a lot of people who participate in yoga and say, ‘How do you feel after this session? Oh, I feel great, my mind is clear, I feel wonderful.'”
It’s the hyper-focus on a single shot, the chase of repetitive excellence, from Jacksonville to Tokyo.
“My thought process is I get to do this across the country and I get to measure how I am feeling and how my mind is clear and how competitive I am in my posture,” Hall said, “because there is a score value related at the end of my hour and 15 minutes of competition.”
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Phillip Tutor — ptutor@annistonstar.com — is a Star columnist. Follow him at Twitter.com/PTutor_Star.