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Dave Smith's A Human Cannonball

Sarasota Herald Tribune

Dave Smith of Englewood will attempt to set a world record on Saturday when he is shot out of a cannon over 18 cars at the DeSoto Speedway in East Manatee County.

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By BILL HUTCHINSON / Sarasota Herald Tribune

Published: November 25, 2007

Englewood newcomer Dave Smith is ready to kick off his new life in Florida next week by being shot out of a cannon across 160 linear feet of parked cars.

It's a living, Smith shrugs. If you want to know what real pressure is, "try raising twins."

The Smith twins, a year old, are among the reasons why their mother, Audrey, put her foot down and insisted that Dave finally buy a house after 11 years mostly spent touring America, Australia and the Middle East as "The Bullet."

Dave Smith's wife, Audrey, is at the
controls of her husband's shot.
COURTESY PHOTO/ DAVID SMITH

He is 30 now, and beginning to settle down -- a young family man with four children and a suburban minivan, just a regular Joe living a life of juice boxes and disposable diapers.

Except, of course, for the matter of his work, which next Saturday brings The Bullet to the DeSoto Speedway, where he will be projected out of a dark, narrow tube at a force equal to nine times his body weight.

In Dave Smith's world, though, there is nothing unusual about being hurtled so fast toward the sky that, as he says, "you feel the wind on your face before your brain catches up and tells you you're in midair."

His father was a professional human cannonball before him. Indeed, now more or less retired at more or less 65, Dave Smith Sr. is still known on the circuit as The Human Cannonball.

Every one of Dave's six brothers and sisters has been shot out of a cannon at least once.

Dave himself has done it 5,000 times, he guesses, and sometimes, in a busy season, with two shots a day and three a day on weekends, the whole thing gets "almost mundane," he says.

Particularly if the weather is bad and there is not much of an audience for the state fair or the rodeo or the auto race where The Bullet is the featured attraction.

"I think of myself as an entertainer," he says, and "without that audience going on the ride right along with you, it's hard to get yourself pumped up."

The first time he did it, the fear alone had him plenty pumped.

"Scared me nearly to death," Smith says of the experience, which took place in his teenage years. "I didn't have much of a desire to do it again."

A few years later, "The Human Canonball" was injured during a show in Wisconsin, and Dave Jr. drove all night to fill in for the rest of the contracted engagement.

By then, young Smith had spent time doing back flips off the high board as a competitive diver, so "nothing much scared me."

And he had begun to see being shot out of a cannon as a matter of physics, of angles of trajectory and speed-times-weight, and all manner of puzzles that he could work out in his head, thus distracting him from the loud thumping in his chest that even after all these years he still feels when he hears the countdown begin ... 5 ... 4 ... 3 ...

He has until 3 to end a count, but he never has. There can be a split-second of doubt while he waits there in the dark, listening to Audrey's voice do the countdown in the trailer where the controls are -- yes, it is his wife who pulls the trigger, as it were -- but he has always been able to re-summon his nerve.

"It's like throwing a switch," he says. "You feel the fear and then you just shut it off."

There is certainly skill involved in being a successful human cannonball -- both Dave Smiths started out as trained gymnasts, which helps give them sufficient record-setting spring off the cannon platform -- but it is this ability to control fear that sets The Bullet apart from normal mortals.

Even so, mortality is seldom far from his mind.

"In my job, you can't really make a mistake, not even a little one. A couple of feet short or long, you miss the net, you're done."

He broke his leg once in a shoot, and sometimes his back hurts so much "I don't know whether to lie down or crawl," but he has stayed remarkably free of injuries, he admits, which is how he is able to remain "heavily insured" against accidents and death, even though the insurers are made aware of his line of work.

"I used to try and avoid it -- I'd put down 'entertainer' for employment -- but then I thought, well that's not gonna work. What if I do get injured? How do I explain being in that cannon when it went off?"

Now, he says, for the IRS or anybody else who wants to know, "I just say I'm a human cannonball. I mean, that's what I am."

To spend even an hour with Dave Smith Jr. is to learn that successful human cannonballing is not as much a matter of skill, or even luck, as it is genes.

The dynasty looks likely to continue. Of all his children, it is 3-year-old Chloe who would not surprise him, he says, "if she had her own cannon in another 20 years. She's fearless."

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