July 4th, 1977 was an histroic day in FAI Combat. Our first Team Trials was held in Saint Louis, hosted by Gary Frost.
The mood was more joyous than it became in future, more serious Team Trials. Most of us were just happy that our event had finally been accepted as a full-flegged Official World Championships event. We'd never had a TT before and people didn't expect perfection the time out of the gate.
As one sage philosopher wrote; "There's enough sport flyers, just in Texas, to easily beat everybody in Europe". So, based on the that, the TT was just a routine contest to win the honor of going over and picking up the trophy.
The original 21 flyers, together with their won-lost records were (and still are):
George Cleveland 8 4 Team
Howard Rush 7 2
Charles Rudner 7 2 Team
Gary Frost 5 1 Team
Paul Smith 5 3
Phil Cartier 4 2 Alternate
Phil Granderson 4 3
Mike Strieter 3 3
Bob Burch 3 3
Neal White 2 4
Dick Imhoff 2 3
Charlie Johnson 2 3
Max Mearns 2 3
Diane Mearns 2 3
Bill Harris 1 3
Wayne Roberts 1 3
Jim Driver 1 3
Dewitt Wycoff 0 3
Bill Sprague 0 4
Bill Maywald 0 4
The contest was run by a unique, one-time, never-repeated format in which a "double elim-first round only" contest was run on Saturday, and another of the same on Sunday. So you needed to win at least 5 matches on one day to lock a place on the team. Howard and I had enough total wins to make something happen, but spread over the two "contests". Fortunately, this format was never seen again.
The early entries for 2009 are now closed and we will get an entry listing from AMA very soon. I'm sure that we will see several names from the 32-year-old list in the current TT.
Topic: Team Trials entries - 1977 and 2009. (Read 873 times)
