By this time, he had been broke more times than the Ten Commandments and decided he was qualified to become a financial planner.  He started that business with $200 and built it to a point where he owed the banks over two million dollars.  Needing a recreational activity to relieve the stress from work, he took up skeet.  Rocky found this sport to be a very difficult one, but quickly saw a way to gain an advantage over other competitors.  It seems that most people only wanted to shoot skeet and not get involved with the politics.  His plan was to move in and change things that caused problems for him in skeet.  By his own admission, this idea turned out to be a coyote and roadrunner cartoon, where everything he changed backfired on him.

The first thing he did was to reverse the order of skeet where the .410 was shot last, because he hated shooting the little gun first.  His scores went up, but his competitor’s scores went up even more.

Rocky was never a high average kind of guy and that was the way the All State team was determined at the time.  Being self-serving, he convinced the TSSA Board to change to the point system that the NSSA was using.  Again, that didn’t work as he qualified for a lower team than before.

The next brainstorm was to shorten the State shoot to a weekend, two and a half-day shoot.  This was to give him an advantage over the pesky younger shooters that seemed to hold up better in the long , hot, four-day shoots.  The problem was that more shooters were able to come to the shorter program and the difficulty level went way higher than he wanted.

Going back to the drawing board, his next plan was to organize a major shoot in his own backyard.  Rocky figured that being able to sleep in his own bed and practice at the NSC would give him a big leg up on the competition.  That’s how the Toni Rogers Shoot, which morphed into the Baser, came about.  Again, no cigar, as too many good shooters showed up.  Also, he was going through a divorce and not sleeping well.

But being a good coyote, he never gave up.  His next plan was to write articles in the TSSA newsletter about the difficulty and mental angst involved in skeet shooting.  Figuring that this would psych out the competition, he wrote about going out on the first Station 3 in a shootoff.  Reverse psychology kicked in, and, for a whole year, he went out on 3 every time.  He finally won a shootoff, but that was because of a no-show forfeit. 

The moral of this story is that when you are trying to serve yourself, you can still serve others.