Southpaw Skeeter

The sharp eyes of some of the best marksmen in the country watched hopefully for the least sign of score-spoiling tension. But Alabama's loose-jointed Miner Cliett a 14-year-old eighth grader, stepped to the mark in the Royal Palm Open Skeet Championship at West Palm

Beach last week as casually as any less gifted youngster getting ready to plink tin cans off a roadside fence. His gun swung on target with military precision; the clay birds came apart regularly like puffs of smoke. Miner shot 97 out of a possible 100 to become AA 12-gauge champion. With his 20-gauge gun he made a perfect score of 25 birds twice in a row. Overall, against senior shooters from ten states. Venezuela and Canada, the cool youngster scored 278, only three birds behind Champion Jack Gellatly of Palm Beach.

His unusual lefthanded shooting style has already earned Miner half a dozen cabinets full of trophies-more than the sleepy-eyed youngster has ever bothered to count. Last summer in Reno, shooting against state champions from all over the country, he became the first junior ever to be named U.S. Champion of Champions. A junior Ail-American three years running, he holds a long-run registered target score of 634 without a miss. Miner makes it all seem so easy that scornful hunters have been heard to sneer: "It's as mechanical as playing a jukebox for most of the skeet boys. Put 'em on duck and quail and they get lost fast."

Fair Game. Miner Cliett puts a neat hole into that argument. For him the best shooting has always been for the birds. He proved himself a hunter with his first air rifle when he was only five years old. Recalls his father, Henry Cliett, a well-to-do landowner in Childersburg. 30 miles southeast of Birmingham: "He was over at a neighbor's house one day, and to get rid of Miner she told him to go out in the backyard and kill her some chickens with the air rifle. I guess she didn't think he'd hit 'em. When she went out, he'd already killed three of them."

Miner has been hunting ever since, now owns "eight or ten" shotguns, several rifles and two bird dogs. He studies hard enough to get all As and Bs at the Childersburg school, and he plays the saxophone in the school band, but most of his time is spent out of doors, ranging the rolling, pine-lush hills. He makes his own bird calls, dresses himself in a war-surplus camouflage outfit ("The birds come right up to you") and goes after anything that is fair game. On vacation trips to Florida he straps on a pair of aluminum leggings against rattlers, wades into the swamps and goes right on hunting. Off season he keeps in practice by potting crows, estimates that he and a friend shot 1,000 of them last year.

Nothing to It. A hefty (5 ft. 9 in., 170 Ibs.), tireless youngster, Miner seldom fails to bag the legal limit. He has long been able to hold his own with the yarn spinners who hang out in his daddy's hardware store on Main Street, swapping stories of muskrats dropped without wasted shots, horned owls or quail or wild turkeys shot on the wing. He was just eleven when one of the local sharpshooters took him to a gun club and taught him that for a real hunter, clay saucers are a cinch.

So just for the heck of it, Southpaw Miner put in a little practice and became an expert. "There's nothing to it," he said last week. "Never shut one eye. Put your left foot forward, get your gun up and pull the trigger when you're on the bird." Frustrated adults who have never found skeet shooting quite that simple keep trying to talk Miner into giving them lessons. But most of the time the boy will not be bothered. Competition takes too much of his time already, and the shooting he prefers is strictly for the birds.

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