Doug Koenig wins the 2000 World Speed Shooting Championship, capping a stellar year for the Bianchi Cup Champ.

Fresh off a victory at the Bianchi Cup, professional shooter Doug Koenig of Team Leupold won the 2000 Steel Challenge with a Leupold red dot scope atop a single-stack 1911 in .38 Super. The win marked Koenig's second trip to the winner's circle in this chameleon-like match that seems to have a magic attraction for action shooters.

The difficulties inherent to staging a big match are formidable. It seems a miracle some of these shooting championships ever happen. You've got to have real estate where shooting is legal and tolerated by the local citizenry. It's got to be accessible with a major airport within driving distance and suitable lodging near the range. It's also nice to have tourist attractions nearby. Most of all, you need strongbacks and willing volunteers from the host club to serve as rangeofficers, score checkers, parking coordinators, T-shirt sellers and other support roles. A good, active club is essential.

You also need the support of sponsors. Ah, the beauty of a groaning prize table laden with everything from expensive custom guns to checks for thousands of dollars for the top winner to a memento still worth more than the entry fee for the last place finisher.

There is no event that better illustrates the ups and downs of running a big match than the Steel Challenge. Founded by Mike Dalton and Mike Fichman in the late'70s, the match was a radical departure from any other shooting contest ever held- an all-steel target speed shooting match. Stages would be fast to run and easy to score, based on pure time and with time penalties for missing. Ringing steel would attract shooters from far and near.

The format promised fast, demanding handgun shooting with only minimal physical movement on a couple of the stages. It would be great training for skill and dexterity, but less controversial than other "combat shooting" matches. the targets would not be humanoid and the stages would not be scenario-based like IPSC.

The Steel Challenge quickly rose in prominence to be considered one of the "big three" matches on the practical shooting circuit, along with the IPSC Nationals and the Bianchi Cup. American Handgunner referred to the three matches as the Triple Crown when an upcoming young shooter named Rob Leatham won all three in 1985. No one objected to to the comparison to the Belmont, Preakness and Kentucky Derby- indeed, these matches were the cream of the handgun racing world.

The Steel Challenge developed its own unique character and following. Gunsmiths began to build "Steel guns" with specially lightened slides to swing faster between plates. Loads were reduced to anemic levels because there is no power factor in the speed shooting format. Competitors even began to think of themselves as primarily "Steel shooters" and many specialized in shooting just this match.

One of the more dedicated groups of Steel shooters came from Japan where it is unlawful to own a handgun. Practicing with only air pistols firing plastic pellets, the Japanese Steel shooters have been coming to Southern California for the annual match for some 20 years now.

By the mid-'80s, the mountains just north of Los Angeles where the Steel challenge had always been held were falling prey to the bulldozers and earth movers of housing developers. The old Juniper Tree Range, home of the South West Pistol League, was getting crowded out along with the scenic Mexican land grant ranches around Santa Clarita. The owner of the range sold out, but he bought new land to open a replacement ranch.

However, big land deals take time. The Steel Challenge had to go somewhere. That somewhere was a small pheasant shooting club near Los Angeles. By 1988, the land deal went and the Steel Challenge moved to Holser Canyon. In the meantime, the South West Pistol League, which owned the rights to the match, had sold it to longtime shooting enthusiasts John Madigan and Don Hamilton. They ran the event successfully and then sold it to another party.

Among the changes the new owner initiated was a side-match called The Action Challenge. Another move was to classify the competitors, something that had never been part of the Steel Challenge tradition. This widened the gap between amateur entrants shooting just for fun and the professional hired guns who wanted to shoot for cash.

Hoping to make the Steel Challenge a paying proposition, the new owner thought the answer might lie in finding facilities in a lower-rent district. He moved the match out of Los Angeles to Bakersfield, Calif. When this didn't seem to work out, he moved the natch to Fresno in 1993.

Even longtime Steel began began to reach their limits with this gypsy match hopping venues every other year. Bakersfield and Fresno, for those unfamiliar with California, are Hicksville cities, known mostly for their unbearable heat and desolate location. "If God was going to give earth an enema, he would insert it in Bakersfield, "quipped on disgruntled shooter.

To the Steel faithful, it was becoming something other than the Steel Challenge they knew and loved. Prize money dropped off as a sponsors, learned how unpopular the new owner's policies had become. The last match was held in 1993, amid howls of protest and indignant remonstrations for change. It was not to be. The match folded.

All this time the two founders had never really been very far away, dropping in for a look, shooting an occasional match, helping out as advisors, certifying the prize table when it was suggested the new owner had filled his pickup with donated prizes and absconded. But now their beloved match was up for grabs, just wasting away as years passed. No one seemed brave enough to try to salvage it.

So the two Mikes agreed to come forward. A lot of delighted shooters expressed approval and said they wouldsupport having the original match back intact.

But it as a different day then, in 1997, than it had been in the mid-'80s when Fichman and Dalton had last ran the show. Reagan was president then, Clinton was in the Oval Office now. The firearms industry was feeling budget constraints for wave after wave of anti-gun laws and lawsuits. Sponsoring a match, especially a "failed" match that had fallen by the wayside, was decidedly down on the priority list. Would shooters really come back to an essentially outmoded '80s-style match just because Dalton and Fichman said they would?

Come they did, 116 in all, and the two Mikes put together the manpower and prizes for a fantastic rebirth match in 1997. Many previous champions from the'80s returned and continue to do so, as do many top men and women, championsin their own right, from IPSC, IDPA, SASS and other disciplines also coming to try their hand at Steel shooting.

These days, neither Mike is young any longer. Fichman underwent back surgery earlier this year and walks with a cane. Dalton is now a full-time cop. It is, really, more a time to plan retirement and play with grandkids than pick up Steel Challenge burdens again. But it's plain form the gleam in the eyes of the two Mikes, as they watch youngsters shoot the Steel Challenge, that it's a labor of love. "We're happy it's alive again." Fichman beamed.