 
Vincent Hancock targets Olympic gold At sixteen, most of us were busy doing homework, hanging out with friends, and menacing the roads. Skeet shooter Vincent Hancock was busy winning his first world championship. Since that 2005 accomplishment, the phenom from Eatonton, Georgia, has been chasing perfection. He caught up with it during the 2007 World Cup competition in Lonato, Italy, setting the current world record in international skeet by hitting every one of his 150 shots. Now nineteen and a member of the U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit in Fort Benning, Georgia, Hancock will bring his Beretta DT10 Trident to Beijing this August as the youngest member of the 2008 U.S. Olympic shotgun team. He took some time to chat with G&G about his love of shooting and what it takes to be the best in the world. G&G: When did you first start shooting? Hancock: I began shooting about the age of ten. I started with American skeet with my dad. Then I went on to sporting clays. At about the age of twelve, I got into international, and it just kind of went from there. I don’t shoot anything else now except for international skeet. G&G: You’re often competing against veteran shooters who are much older than you. How do you think you’ve been able to do so well at such a young age? Hancock: Really, I just had to mature a lot faster than a normal teenager. I had to give up a lot of stuff during high school, a lot of friends. I was huge into sports. I’m very athletic, and I had to give all that up to be able to do what I want to do. But I think by understanding why I had to give that up and wanting to win so bad, that helped me to mature and to overcome the pressures of having to shoot against much older guys who have done it for as long as I’ve been alive. G&G: Have you always been competitive by nature? Hancock: Oh yeah, always. I don’t think there’s ever a time that I don’t try to win or that I can actually give up and say I lost. I hate it. G&G: What’s your current practice regimen like? Hancock:I’m shooting anywhere between three and about ten boxes of shells a day. It just depends on what I’m feeling like that day. Normally it’s about six or seven boxes. G&G: How do you unwind? Hancock:I like to golf and to fish sometimes. That pretty much is my unwinding. If I can’t do that, then my alternative is to shoot sporting clays or something like that, just anything different than international skeet. G&G: Do you hunt as well? Hancock:I try to. I went deer hunting a little bit this past year. I love to bird hunt, but I just don’t ever get a chance to do it. I’ll probably try to do some more hunting this coming year. G&G: Has making the Olympic team always been a goal of yours? Hancock:Since I found out about international skeet and that I could go to the Olympics in this game, I’ve always told my dad that my goal is to win the Olympics. So I finally made the Olympic team, and now it’s time to go over there and win it. G&G: Do you ever get nervous before a competition? Hancock:Oh, yeah, every time. It’s something that I like, though. I like being nervous and anticipating going out there and having to shoot a perfect score. I thrive off of that. I love the pressure. G&G: Are there certain techniques you use to help keep yourself focused? Hancock:There are, and I don’t really know how to explain it. If anybody watched me shoot, then they’d say, “Wow, that guy is pretty crazy” because I’m all over the place. I can hardly ever stand still. I’m just going a hundred miles a minute. G&G: What’s the biggest tip you would tell readers to help improve their shooting? Hancock:Before you pull the trigger, you want to make sure that your eyes are locked on to the front edge of the target so that you know where the target’s going. After you pull the trigger, don’t pull your eyes off that target until you see it break. G&G: So what teams do you think will pose the biggest challenge this August at the Olympics? Hancock: The Italians, the Cypriots, and the Norwegians. They’re all good. But pretty much everybody that’s going to be there can win. It just depends on who’s having the better day. — David Mezz ALABAMA The Un-Carpetbagger For such a rock-ribbed Yankee—born in Farmington, Maine, in 1878—Roland McMillan Harper made a damn fine Southerner and an even finer plantsman. This summer Elizabeth Findley Shores brings out a rollicking biography of the seminal botanist, On Harper’s Trail (University of Georgia Press). The pioneering scientist and forester spent the lion’s share of his professional life cataloguing and husbanding the flora of the Deep South—during his forty-plus years of legendary fieldwork, he personally added over two dozen flowering species to the lexicon of botany. Harper’s major contribution was to illuminate the importance of forests and wetlands to the ecology of the South’s coastal plain. He was the state geographer of Alabama, a botanist in Florida, a professor at New York’s Columbia University, and president of the scientific colloquium that founded the New York Botanical Garden. He published prolifically—some five hundred papers—and his 1943 book Forests of Alabama remains the standard. For all this and more, the rarest of lilies, Harperocallis flava, was named. He died in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1966, at eighty-eight. Shores’ biography of the outspoken, peripatetic Harper is an excellent companion volume for touring the gardens of Alabama and Florida, where he did his greatest work. He may have been a Yankee, but his love and understanding of the South knew no bounds. ARKANSAS Whatever Floats Your Cardboard Boat An ordinary American would think, well, if I had a 40,000-acre lake and it was July, I’d consider a boat. In Heber Springs, Arkansas, on Greers Ferry Lake, the thought process runs like this: Let’s invite a couple hundred people from around the region to build cardboard boats, and then get everybody to race them and ram each other until they all sink. You should not miss the 2008 Heber Springs World Championship Cardboard Boat Races—this year on July 26 at 10:00 a.m. sharp down at the Heber Springs city marina. The brainchild of native Pat Zellmer, the races have drawn hundreds of thousands to the noble hamlet of Heber Springs since 1987, along with a blitzkrieg of media coverage. Even the pickiest ESPN cameramen will show up to cover a few dozen doughty Arkansans going down, more or less valiantly, with their ships. According to the race entry form, the trick is to laminate enough cardboard in layers strong enough to last the five laps around the two-hundred-yard course. There are special substances that will do this. If the judges suspect that you have, say, laminated a layer of plastic or fiberglass in your boat’s hull, they will perform what they call the ice pick test. The craft—from pirate barkentines to mock spaceships—run on people power, meaning paddles, sails, spit, string, chewing gum, beer, and, of course, prayer. The point of the race is not to win by being the fastest but—in what we think of as a splendid Arkansas characteristic—by being the most spectacular. One of the most coveted prizes is the Titanic Award, given for the most dramatic sinking. But in a larger sense, the town and its race committee seem to have captured the very soul of puckish summer mischief in the event. Any race committee that writes into its formal bylaws “The only way to sink another boat is by ramming” is running a race that you want to see. heber-springs.com FLORIDA Get Cooking Miami has been an outpost of Cuban culture and cuisine for a long time, but this city’s large Latino community—drawing from all over Central and South America—took a decided Cuban uptick post-1959, when the refugees escaping from Fidel’s revolución put the ninety miles of the Florida Straits between them and him. Not surprisingly, this wave of immigrants has brought a treasure trove of athletes, musicians, artists, and chefs to America. World-class chef Douglas Rodriguez, son of Cuban immigrants, grew up in Miami and, at the ripe age of twenty-four, opened his first groundbreaking Cuban restaurant, Yuca, in 1989. His talent drew the money, and he quickly followed it with a string of restaurants and tapas bars in Miami and New York, among them the New York Times three-star Patria. He’s now credited as the progenitor of “New Latin Cuisine.” This summer, Rodriguez’s latest creation, Ola, in Miami’s posh, tucked-away Sanctuary Hotel, is offering cooking and cocktail lessons for the brave foodie—and yes, the inevitable mojito is on the list. Ola—Rodriguez’s acronym for “Of Latin America” and very much not hola, or “hello”—has landed on practically every national food critic’s top-restaurant list since it opened in 2006. On the syllabus for the courses this summer is an afternoon of learning how to make some of the maestro’s exuberant, category-defying ceviches. His palate-bending melon ceviche, for instance, is composed of wahoo, cantaloupe, lime juice, watermelon, chives, red onion, honeydew, and opal basil. Your professors will be all the people who do the cooking—or the bartending—to executive chef Rodriguez’s exacting standards. If summer is the time for reinvention, then the best thing about Rodriguez and his people is that lessons in his kitchen will crack open your mind—and scramble it—about what tastes great with what. sanctuarysobe.com GEORGIA Broadway heads south The Lake Oconee region in Greensboro, Georgia, doesn’t need much help drawing the sporting crowd, but now, thanks to the Oconee Performing Arts Society, the proper set is giving the area a nod. This regional renaissance kicked off in the spring of 2007 with two visits by legendary composer Marvin Hamlisch (remember A Chorus Line?) and several of his Broadway cohorts at the Sandy Creek Barn, an elite entertainment venue owned by the Reynolds family, major OPAS supporters. This July 5, watch the society’s handiwork when it partners with the Ritz-Carlton Lodge to welcome the Atlanta Symphony Pops Orchestra for the annual “Fireworks on the Lawn” event. Tony Award winner Brian Stokes Mitchell will headline. Mitchell has delighted Broadway theater-goers for decades with a number of lead performances in shows including Kiss Me, Kate and Ragtime. opas.org KENTUCKY Drinking and Driving But not at the same time, okay? Kentuckians usually use horses as the best excuse to break out their best barrel-aged stuff—e.g., the Derby—but for the last few years the managers of the Keeneland Race Course in Lexington have been hosting what they call the Concours d’Elegance, a four-day antique car show and rally, culminating in a seventy-five-mile-long parade of the elegantly restored dinosaurs of internal combustion through the bluegrass. It’s a bit like eventing, but for 1931 Packards, not jumping horses. Kicking off this July 17 with a tour of the Maker’s Mark distillery, the 2008 Concours offers a flapper-era Gatsby-themed dinner dance. Black tie, of course. Ladies, get out your fringed skirts and start studying the Lindy and the Charleston. Gentlemen, for the proper swagger, buy some Jimmy Cagney DVDs and remember when you’re there to check your hats and gats at the door. MISSISSIPPI It Isn’t a Fair, It’s a Way of Life Think of the Neshoba County Fair as Mississippi’s attempt at a midsummer salon, minus the white gloves, minus the tea sipping, and minus the discussion of literature. In fact, don’t think of it as a salon. Think of it, instead, as a giant eight-day sprawl of drinkin’, politickin’, and lookin’ at hogs. That’s about as good a definition as you will get of a salon in that beloved state anyway. But the Neshoba County Fair was in fact begun as a salon—an interchange of ideas about politics and farming—in 1889. It’s still about that. It’s also huge fun, precisely because of the way Mississippians go about it. The way to do it is this: Rent a cabin from the fair authorities. Preferably one with air-conditioning. Buy enough food to feed an army and enough liquor to satisfy the Russian army. Then drive over to Neshoba County, take possession of your cabin, and swing open the front door. Do not worry. You don’t need to invite a single soul. We guarantee that Mississippi, in its entirety, will show up. neshobacountyfair.org LOUISIANA Mix Makers and Shakers There’s probably no better place to celebrate the cocktail than in the Big Easy. This July 16–20, the Tales of the Cocktail festival will bring famous authors (Roy Blount, Jr.), chefs (David Myers), and mixologists (Dale DeGroff) to discuss the finer points of mix making. Some topics of discussion: how to use eggs as ingredients in your cocktail and the proper way to establish a “green” bar. If a lecture is not your thing, it’s hard to imagine anyone passing on the World Bloody Mary Championships. Need further testimony? Last year’s event burned through 7,250 mint leaves and 3,580 lime wedges. We’ll drink to that. MARYLAND The Hard-Fought Cake Vote The watermen of Smith Island, Maryland, population 300—about a half hour by ferry from Reedville, Virginia, in the middle of Chesapeake Bay—bear a justified reputation for a heavy sweet tooth. They’ve been packing the awesome, artery-busting, eight- to twelve-layer “Smith Island cake” in their lunch pails for six generations, at last count. Their wives make it “from the stump” in the Chesapeake tongue, meaning from scratch. It has deep chocolate icing between each layer and looks like a suitcase nuclear bomb, which we think is apt, because if you eat it, it will blow your cholesterol count sky-high. Like the infamous Chinese northern snakehead, the “walking” fish Maryland has been battling for years, the Smith Island cake—and word of it—have crept landward over the last few years. It’s now commercially available to mainlanders at several locations on the Eastern Shore. This is where it gets interesting. Maryland’s state legislators—or those who have been pigging out on their Chesapeake fishing trips, at any rate—have responded with a bill, which the governor signed into law at the end of April, to ennoble the cake to the status of the “state dessert.” You’d think that any dish whose two-hundred-year-old recipe begins “Take three sticks of butter…” would be the kind of thing that should be outlawed. But not, apparently, in Maryland. In this year of the belt-tightening national elections, we applaud this rebellious political celebration. Long derided as a “border state,” Maryland, we now declare, is officially Southern. marylandstatehouse.org NORTH CAROLINA Hunt the Hunters Like everything else we love—food, wine, horses, houses—great antiques are always about the hunt. Whether they’re collecting dust in family dining rooms or are highly prized in collections, antiques have to be found to be won. Collectors have choice in this game. They can spend eons scouring the papers for estate sales—which is to say, reading the obituaries of the locally famous (or infamous) and then driving out to the town where the grande dame just died, only to lose the Hepplewhite sideboard to the angry grandchildren who now live in Chillicothe, Ohio. Or, they can turn to the professional hunters, running nationally known shops, who are especially good at knowing which living rooms hold the good mahogany—or the good china, or the good silver—before the grande dame dies. A convention of such professionals has come to Asheville every summer for the past sixty-one years. The 62nd Asheville Antiques Fair—this year August 1–3 in the Civic Center—was the brainchild of a group of preservation-minded ladies in Asheville, the enigmatically named Vetust Study Club (Vetust from the Latin meaning “of the ancient”; Study Club because the members are required to give papers on art and antiques). There are just twenty-four Asheville women in the venerable order. If we tapped them for the job, they could probably pacify Iraq. Some fifty dealers in English, American, and European furniture, eighteenth-century Meissen china, English and European silver, antique brass hardware, and architectural antiques, among other things, will have stands. The spectacular offerings are for sale, but the overriding notion is charitable: Over the years the Study Club has used the fair’s administrative proceeds to support the restoration of buildings of special architectural or historical value in Buncombe County, such as the Thomas Wolfe house, which fell to an arsonist ten years ago. This year’s proceeds will support the restoration of architect Richard Sharp Smith’s building at 73 Broadway in Asheville. And, for a small fee, bring three items of your own and have one of the Study Club’s expert appraisers perform a “road show” analysis of your heirloom. There’s nothing more enjoyable than driving home with a new appreciation for Aunt Meg’s old silver chargers. SOUTH CAROLINA Tour De Greenville Cyclists need the chance to stay in form year-round, which is part of the reason there are so many international races before and after the midsummer Tour de France. We might be forgiven for thinking this has nothing to do with Greenville, South Carolina, but Lance Armstrong’s most famous domestique—the French cycling slang that translates roughly as team rider/centurion/paid assassin—is Greenville’s George Hincapie, who helped Armstrong immeasurably in his world-record quest for seven yellow jerseys. Hincapie’s brother Rich, creator of Hincapie Sportswear, is one of the sponsors of this summer’s USA Cycling Professional Road and Time Trial Championships, in Greenville August 30–31. It’s a star-studded cast of characters, with some eighty-five thousand cycling-mad spectators strewn up and down the slopes of the aptly named Paris Mountain, which, at 2,000 feet, is a more than respectable imitation of a Tour de France hill. George Hincapie, who finished second last year, will be looking to take the title home this year. So, before you get on to the serious eating and drinking through Labor Day, stuff a cooler full of Gatorade and watch the fastest skinny boys in the country give you angina as they pull the hill. It might even inspire you to grind out those extra sets of abs crunches in the mornings. TENNESSEE In Vino Caritas The notion of a wine auction has been around for a few hundred years. But the idea of using our fondness for the grape in the service of a good cause—a wine auction for charity—is a more recent development. Since 1980, a group of leading citizens in Nashville has raised some $14 million for cancer-related charities by auctioning rare, donated wines. The event, L’Eté du Vin, or the Summer of Wine, takes place in July—this year, July 10–12. Let’s tip our hats to the Tennesseans and put this another way: $14 million over twenty-eight years means that the Nashvillians raise, year in and year out, a half million dollars in those three days. L’Eté du Vin has become a real summer fixture in Tennessee, and in the wine world, over the last three decades. The ’08 lineup features the awesome Pomerol house Château Palmer, and its CEO Thomas Duroux, as well as a host of great chefs and other vintners. If you can drag the best vintners out of France in July (the height of the growing season) for a charity event, you’re doing something right. Despite the dollar’s losing value against the euro over the past eighteen months, if you feel like you’ve got a little extra scratch, bop on over to Nashville and pick up a magnum of ’82 Château Palmer (about $1,800) for a good cause. It’ll taste great at Christmas for two reasons: Whatever charity received your money, and whoever is at your holiday table, will feel blessed. TEXAS Sleeping in Style The design doyenne and original early-twentieth-century career girl Dorothy Draper designed the interiors for department stores, Broadway theaters, commercial airliners, and, not least, the most luxurious hotels of her day, including the Carlyle, the Plaza, and Hampshire House in New York; the Beverly Hills in Los Angeles; the Mayflower in Washington, D.C.; and the Mark Hopkins and the Fairmont in San Francisco. The restaurant in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, designed by her, was nicknamed the Dorotheum. You could fairly say that from the thirties to the sixties, Draper determined what American commercial spaces looked like. Her protégé and the president of her firm, Dorothy Draper, Inc., Carleton Varney, has just brought Draper’s signature black-and-white modernism to the $36 million renovation of Dallas’s Stoneleigh Hotel and Spa. The hotel’s owners wanted to preserve the celebrated Art Deco character of the place, which opened to great fanfare in 1923. Whom else to call but Draper’s people? The Stoneleigh has a few other secret weapons in its arsenal, such as Bolla, an Italian restaurant run by Iron Chef contestant David Bull, and a world-class spa. Be sure to pack the full Fred Astaire DVD collection. You’ll swear you’re staying down the hall from him. VIRGINIA Beyond the Legal Limit Since 2000, when his hilarious first murder mystery, The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living, hit the best-seller lists, the author Martin Clark, a circuit court judge who lives in Stuart, Virginia, has been touted for his double-black humor and his on-point observations about life in all the many classes of Old Dominion. Somebody has to die, and in a Clark novel, the deaths are usually the catalyst for the real examination of the South. Publisher Knopf releases Clark’s latest, The Legal Limit, on July 8, and not a moment too soon. In this riveting read, the problem is not, actually, the murder. The problem is the cover-up. For some real beach reading, the kind that makes you forget you’re sitting on the beach, delve into the saga of Gates Hunt and a murder that—of course—splits a good old Southern town. WASHINGTON, D.C. Locked & Loaded Barring injury, John Isner and Mardy Fish will give 2007 Legg Mason Tennis Classic winner Andy Roddick a run for his money August 9-17 in this year’s tournament at William H.G. FitzGerald Tennis Center in Washington, D.C.’s Rock Creek Park. The $600,000 pot will be hotly contested, not least because the event is considered the best possible runup to the U.S. Open in New York two weeks later. This year is the fortieth anniversary of the venerable tourney, so look for the boxes to be full and for Virginia and D.C. tennis bigs to be hosting parties through the week. But mainly, keep your eye on Roddick’s game. He will be gunning for big blood in New York in late August, and there will be big blood gunning for him. This will be the perfect warm-up. WEST VIRGINIA Smallmouth Rules Ain’t nothing mountains are better for than making rivers and creeks—that, and keeping us cool. The thing about rivers and creeks is that there are fish. West Virginians understand this well—they like to keep it to themselves, in fact—but this is why G&G’s intrepid game sleuths have compiled the following top-secret list of the best smallmouth bass fishing in the state (smallmouth being the inland summer species and all). A word to the wise angler: Tear this page out of the magazine and keep it in your pocket when you go for your license. If the West Virginians see you with it, they’ll charge you double. • Best River for the Family: The Greenbrier River from Caldwell to Ronceverte provides great, reliable fishing with quick access to the Greenbrier resort and historic Lewisburg. So when the kids get bored, they’ll have plenty to entertain them. • Best Guided River: The Lower New River from Cunard to Fayette Station isn’t for the faint of heart—it has class III and class IV rapids. But you can’t beat the fishing. • Best River for the Pro: The Ohio River provides excellent opportunities for experienced anglers. With several BASS-sanctioned tournaments held on the Ohio each year, it’s definitely where the pros go. • Best River for the Novice: The Lower Greenbrier River from Fort Spring to Alderson is a six-mile stretch of pristine water where smallies abound, but beware of the class II rapids, particularly around Anvil Rock, which have been known to flip a johnboat or two. • Best River for the Adventure Seeker: Even at low water levels the Gauley River can be extremely dangerous and is only for expert boatmen (even then we suggest a guide). The Gauley is perfect for those looking to spend several days on the water. The trophies are there, but you have to go through serious rapids to get to them. CARIBBEAN Rocking the Rock Iguana From the game preserves of East Africa to the dive resorts of the South China Sea, the managers of high-end resorts have begun to work hard at preserving what we all realize is our ecological capital, namely, the rare natural phenomena, both animal and mineral, that draw us to resorts in the first place. There are, thank God, big-game savers in Botswana and Tanzania, reef savers in Belize and Australia and the Philippines, and billfish savers in Costa Rica and Baja. Ambergris Cay, 1,100 acres of sugary sand in the tiny Caribbean archipelago of the Turks and Caicos, is the last place on earth where the very nearly extinct rock iguana coexists with humans. Now the island’s owner, the Turks and Caicos Sporting Club, purveyor of luxe second homes, has stepped up to the plate. The Turks and Caicos rock iguana (Cyclura carinata), a marine desert inhabitant, has been in trouble for years. In 2002–3, Dr. Glenn Gerber, species conservation czar at the San Diego Zoo, painstakingly and successfully relocated entire populations of rock iguanas from threatened Caribbean areas—where human habitat was encroaching on iguana habitat, much to the detriment of the iguanas—to four smaller, protected islands. The Turks and Caicos Sporting Club developers realized the rock iguana was in trouble on Ambergris and reached out to Dr. Gerber, throwing in their own naturalist to help him capture and relocate the entire population—some several hundred big-ass lizards—to the uninhabited Bush Cay. Rock iguanas grow to about three feet, and they strongly resemble the football-shaped stegosaurus, with spines down their backs and yellow eyes. More than anything else, they look like dwarf versions of the legendary professional football coach Bill Parcells. But they’re not near as mean as Parcells! Gerber and the Sporting Club naturalists trap them with ropes and nets, sort of how game wardens trap rhinos for study in Tanzania, but without all the goring and sudden death. So, if you’re lucky enough to be invited to bonefish at the Turks and Caicos Sporting Club this summer, and you see a couple of sunburned dudes wander by with ropes, pat them on the back and buy them a drink at the end of the day. |
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