At 93, He's Breaking Clays And Breaking (Society's) Rules

Nick, 93, won’t quit competing because of age, or because of what society expects of a 93-year old. His vision is 20-20 in his left eye, 20-30 in the right, so he shoots. Photo by Carol West. 

 

By Ray Glier

Many of us have blind spots when it comes to unused skills. We don’t think we can…but we can. We know our limit, we think. But have we explored our depth?

When I first interviewed Nick Cipollino in 2022, he was 90 years old and had just won five gold medals in shotgun shooting at The Huntsman World Senior Games. I know, I know, he should win gold. Most anybody over 90 is competing only against Father Time because their competition has passed.

Then Nick told me his background. I thought, “I’ll be writing about this guy again if he doesn’t get run over by a turnip truck.” His personality, his heritage, his hijinks, his personal culture of refusing to quit told me Cipollino—he won’t mind me saying—is not soon headed for the boneyard.

Sure enough, Nick is 93 and back on Geezer Jock’s radar. He just won four gold medals in shooting sporting clays at The Huntsman in Utah earlier this month.

I don’t necessarily hold up these Geezer Jocks as models. I hold them up as examples of what’s possible. Cip is a contradiction to everything we think we know about folks in their 90s. He magnifies human potential.

I mean, Nick is half blind and shoots a gun and hits things buzzing through the air. That’s just nuts. A guy half blind wheeling a shotgun from his hip to his eyes should only hit the broad side of a barn.

Cip has 20-20 vision in his left eye and 20-30 in his right eye without contact lenses, or glasses. But he does have glaucoma in the lower half of his right eye. When he looks down, it’s dark.

When he looks up, Nick knocks sporting clays out of the sky. What’s more, Cip does not get the adrenaline lift a shooter gets from a competitor standing behind him. He doesn’t need it.

“He competes against himself,” said Carol West, his partner.

Nick vs. Nick is a tough matchup when you consider this guy’s makeup.

Start with this. The man has had six strokes. They were not full-on strokes, or hemorrhagic. They were transient ischemic strokes and Cip says they have slowed his reflexes. Still, he won’t use them as an alibi to put away his shotgun.

What else about Nick explains Nick?

**

From my first story on Cip:

Cipollino’s parents came over on “the boat”, immigrants from Sicily in 1918 when his mom, Margaret, was 12 and his dad, Ignazio Ricardo, was 9. They met as kids as they sailed for Ellis Island and were friends first, then married.

Margaret and Ricardo started from scratch in Brooklyn. They had to navigate the Irish cops who ruled all but the rats. They had to wrestle with the poverty of the city that was endemic for new arrivals.

Soon, the Cipollinos had four kids in tow with Nick born in 1932. Cip’s grandfather, who taught himself English on the boat on the way to America, was so grateful to be out of the dictator Mussolini’s Italy and so proud to be an American, he sang the U.S. National Anthem every night before dinner twice, once in Italian and then English.

**

Nick was going to work at eight years old shining shoes on Coney Island so his family could afford a measly quart of milk, among other staples. He quit school after the 8th grade to help support the family.

Nick had an uncle, Louie, who fought for Italy in Ethiopia. He came home from the war and was lonesome for his family, who had fled to America. Louie stood on the dock and said to a captain, “I want to go to America.” He was told there was a long line to leave, so Louie got a job on a merchant ship sailing to New York City.

The ship got into the New York harbor and Louie leaped into the water and swam to shore. He avoided the red tape of Ellis Island. Cip was mesmerized by this uncle who “just got things done.” It was Louie and Ricardo, his father, who taught Nick the value of hustle and not quitting.

“Our first illegal immigrant,” Nick said with a chuckle about Louie. He was over 6-feet tall and became the family’s enforcer and Nick stayed close to that cat. Louie passed on his nerve to Nick, who didn’t jump off a ship in the middle of the New York harbor, but he did jump out of a helicopter when he was 74 years old to ski down a mountain……with no clothes on.

**

Nick did helicopter skiing in Canada and New Mexico, which is risky business on fresh snow, especially when you are 74 years old and have no clothes on. He also streaked a mountain in Taos, New Mexico.

**

Cip was on the ground in Korea in 1950 when 300,000 Chinese regulars poured across the Yalu River fighting on the side of the North Koreans, which flipped the war upside down on the Americans leading the United Nations force.

If you want to know some of the source of Nick’s never give up mantra, it was watching the Marines handle themselves in that bloody tundra.

“The Marines,” said Nick, who was in the 34th Infantry Division, “brought back every last one of their guys, wounded and dead. They were incredible.”

Fittingly, Nick was listed as a sniper in the Army—“sharpshooter”, he says he called himself because “sniper” had a nasty reputation and he would not use the term.

**

Carol and Nick live in southwest Utah, right next door to St. George, host of The Huntsman World Senior Games. The vast ski ranges didn’t beckon him. The state’s majestic scenery and the shooting did.

His first Huntsman Games was 13 years ago and he entered all seven shooting competitions: Skeet, Five Stand, Sporting Clays, Super Sporting Clays, Trap, Handicapped Trap, Wobbly Trap. Cipollino won golds in all the events and became a fixture in St. George at The Huntsman. He is in the Hall of Fame.

Cip swings a nine-pound shotgun, a heavyweight, into a firing line at clay pigeons. He did that 350 times in three days this October to win those four gold medals with a Browning 12-gauge and a Caesar Guerini 28-gauge, Italian-made, of course. He practices at his club at a place called Purgatory, Utah, so-named by the Mormons. It’s in Hurricane, Utah, which is more like Heaven than Purgatory, if you ask Nick.

**

My takeaway from Nick is that he will have very few, if any laments, when he passes. It will be partly because of the fun he is having late in life. The regrets will be few also because he and other Geezer Jocks understand the price of unused skill is a regret.

So ask yourself, “What is my unused skill?” Discover it, and make it unused no more.

Nothing is impossible, the word itself says ‘I’m possible’! ___actress Audrey Hepburn.

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