TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Human Cannonball Talks Shop: 'It's A Living'

ADVERTISEMENT

By BILL HUTCHINSON, Sarasota Herald-Tribune

Published: November 26, 2007

ENGLEWOOD - He has switched over his driver's license and sent Blue Cross a change of address, so Englewood newcomer Dave Smith is ready to formally kick off his new life in Florida this 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 terror is, he says, "try raising twins."

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

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

Except, of course, for the matter of his work, which on Saturday brings The Bullet to the DeSoto Speedway, where he will be projected out of a dark tube at a force equal to nine times his body weight, or roughly 1,500 pounds.

In 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 mid-air."

'Scared Me Nearly To Death'

His father was a professional human cannonball before him; indeed, he is still known on the circuit as the Human Cannonball. Now more or less retired at more or less 65 - "It seems to me I've been saying he's 65 for years" - Dave Smith Sr. holds the world record for cannon-shot distance: 201 feet. Dave Jr. is seeking to set a record for number of cars jumped.

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

Smith 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's bad and there's not much of an audience for the state fair or the rodeo or the auto race where "The Bullet" is usually 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 teens. "I didn't have much of a desire to do it again."

A few years later, "The Human Cannonball" was injured during a show in Wisconsin and Dave Jr. drove all night to fill in for the rest of the 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, angles of trajectory, 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 feels when he hears the countdown: 5 ... 4 ... 3 ...

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

While there is skill involved - both Smiths are trained gymnasts, which helps give them sufficient record-setting spring off the cannon platform - it is this ability to control the fear that sets the human cannonball apart from normal mortals.

Remarkably Free Of Injuries

Even so, mortality is seldom far from his mind.

"In my job, you can't really make a mistake. 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 the question - 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, you know, 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, but genes.

The dynasty looks likely to continue. Of 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."

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT