I began my paintball journey long ago. I'm not Charles Holton old, but I've been in paintball since before Milli Vanilli was exposed as a fraud act. Paintball, unlike virtually anything else in life, has been a perpetual motion machine for me since day 1. It's been more than 20 years since my first day of play and yet I know I was wearing an OD green USMC t-shirt, BDU pants, and white Converse hi-tops. Go ahead and laugh jerks, they were all I had with ankle protection. If I was cool I would have had Reebok pumps back then. But as you will see in the future my friends, I was uncool before uncool was cool.
Back to paintball and its decaying orbit. Besides my dubious wardrobe choices that June morning in the pre-interwebs years, I remember quite a bit more. It was summer in full flight. The woods were like a limitless greenhouse: verdant life in all directions with humidity so dense and invasive that you could rest your teeth on it as you gasped for a deep breath. The sweltering sunlight fractured and lanced towards my eyes through my rental JT Whippers,scratched and spidered from dozens of first time squids before me. My cutting edge rental (read: it had constant air-a full 7 ounces!) was a private label Bushmaster, with a pickle green pump handle. Strangely, I don't remember what number rental I had, only that that son-of-a-bitch Tony got #007, the lucky bastard.
Most of all I remember the paintballs. Yellow. 10 round tubes. $1.00 each. 10 cents per ball. What a deal. Attractive, exciting, the point of it all! In the first minute of that first game of the first day of the first time I played paintball, I was the first one to wear a paintball. It hit just below the sleeve of that damn t-shirt, introducing pasty skin to accelerated gelatin doom. It hurt, it shocked, it shamed me into being the first kill of the day. Above all, it was the first kiss of my love affair with RP Scherer paintballs.
That's right, I said love affair. No other ball did for me what RP Scherer did. I shot any and every color of the brand I could. Super Shell yellow? Yes please. Gator Black? Yes please, plus a maniacal laugh. Camo Ball, Premium Gold, and *gasp* Marballizer. It was everything in one; high quality, straight shooting, cool looking shells, bright fills (yeah I'm looking at you Premium Hot Pink), consistency. It was, like virtually every product in the industry at the time, made in the USA, with love. Or at least it seemed that way to me.
I grew, paintball grew. I got involved in the industry. I got more involved in the industry, I became part of the industry. Now I sold RP Scherer paint and sung its praises to every customer who would take a pew to listen to my sermon. None better, none brighter, none straighter, American made. Aftershock won with it, the All A's too. Those teams even had their own special paint! It was so bright and thick it stained skin and shamed cheaters into submission. It was unholy, it was merciless, it was...evil! That is how committed to paintball RP Scherer and PMI were to paintball.
We paint the world. It was right on the box, with a sticker of the world. And they did. The most powerful marketing symbol in paintball was a plain brown box with that tiny globe sticker. You were staging area royalty if you had a white box with that sticker: behold the Marballizer king! But, as is the case with everything in this life, paintball began to change. The game was growing rapidly. New players arrived in droves. Business was great, not just good. We were on our way. The next best thing was crawling out of the woods and into the water cooler discussion. We were the next big thing. Ahh, the smug pride before the inevitable fall. Industry numbers began to fall. Outsourcing in America became popular for every industry. Paintball followed the sun. Not my RP though. Made in America. American paintballs for an American game. Made by American people who love paintball as much as you. Hell, I'll even go this far: RP Scherer- 'MERICA!
It appeared to me, through it all, that RP Scherer paintballs were the symbol of American resistance. Like Washington at Valley Forge, Fox Company of the 1st Marines at Chosin, or Taffy 3 off of Samar in 1944 (look these up and really understand what your national history is dorks), paintballs made in Florida not only kept going, they did so in full defiance of the odds surrounding them.
But as the Alamo fell, so did All-Star. I've heard it was from quality issues. Believable, as lately, old reliable seemed rather old and a lot less reliable. I've heard KEE are nothing but corporate masters, wanting to realize only profit without holding a property or a liability. I was even told by an EXTREMELY well known member of the industry that it was due " ...to the damn Obamacare costs!" He was going to a Tea Party later that day. In the end, all that matters is that something special has passed.
So all of this is nothing more than a long winded requiem for Robert Pauli Scherer's most wonderful invention. Very little has lasted in paintball as long as RP Scherer's paintballs did. From 1982 to 2014, 32 years of ascendancy and glory. They were the only continuous line between the infancy and adulthood of paintball. And now, the king is dead. Boxes from KEE no longer say RP Scherer anywhere. Empire is now the headliner, with only a tiny RPS tag to remind us veterans of what was. The sun has set in Florida, only to rise in Asia, like so many others. It may say RPS technology, but it's not the paintball I sold to my friends, shot from my gun, or gave to some kid short on cash. It is now many things, but one thing it is not is the ball that smacked my bare arm and sparked a passion in my heart.
Long live RP.
