Michigan's own Phil Morden was eliminated from Top Shot season 3 on Tuesday after a controversial elimination challenge where he faced a previously eliminated contestant brought in after Phil's designated opponent, Jake Zweig, suddenly quit the show.
I recently interviewed Phil about the competition, his relationship with the other competitors, and the allegations by a former season 2 cast member that the show is "rigged" by the producers.
Rob: In our previous interview you said you were “blown away” by the level of competition in the first couple of challenges. Once you saw the experience level of the other contestants did you think you’d make it as far as the individual competition?
Phil: When I saw the skill level of some of these shooters, their weapons manipulation and their accurate shooting, I thought my time there would be limited unless I could adapt to each weapon system as well as they did. Surprisingly, there were a lot of pistol guys and there were very few people who were very competent with a rifle. I think what helped me out mentally, to get me focused, was that our first three or four challenges were shoulder-mounted weapons. So, at that point, I started doing a bit better and got my confidence built up. But, in the beginning, for the first one or two challenges, I was very, very surprised that I was still there, to be honest with you.
Rob: Now talking about specific firearms, one thing I picked up on is, you are not normally a revolver shooter, are you?
Phil: No, I'm definitely not a revolver shooter. I own one .22 Cowboy Action type revolver that I bought in college as kind of a plinking gun. I think that before Top Shot I shot it maybe one time. Before I went out to the show I took it out to the range again to work on manipulating the gun. I think that helped with the Remington six-gun we had to shoot because fundamentally the weapon works the same. You have to half-cock to rotate the cylinder, you load the rounds the same, and you eject the rounds the same. So, I’m very glad I took this little Heritage Arms .22 revolver out to plink with a little bit and get familiarized with it more. I still wound up going down one point in the challenge to Jared, but Jared is a pistol guy, so I kind of squeaked by on that one against a very good shooter.
Rob: It’s funny that you were more familiar with the single action revolver because most shooters today would be more familiar with a double action revolver. That is where I saw you seem to have some problems a couple of times. That first Smith & Wesson .500 revolver and at least one other time
Phil: The manipulation of a revolver is different. I shoot semi-automatics, Glocks and H&K’s, so the grip is even different. And that’s where guys like Mike Hughes can adapt to pistol shooting very well. He used a grip crossing his thumbs over to work the hammer on the revolver and he was unbelievably fast with that gun. I was somewhat accurate with it until you got out to some range and then I started jerking the trigger because I was anticipating the recoil of that huge gun. But, yeah, revolvers are not my thing and I was happy we only had those two.
Rob: Looking back on the challenges, which ones stick in your mind as being particularly interesting or your favorite challenges
Phil: My favorite challenge for sure was the first one we did with the Larue OBR because it’s such a solid platform and I’m very familiar with the AR platform. The AK-47 challenge, again, was a great thing for me because the physical aspect of that challenge played to my advantage. But, at the time, if you looked at the teams, the Red Team was more physically fit then we were on the Blue Team. That scared us a little bit going into the challenge because you knew they were going to do very well on the course. I think, as a whole, the Red Team were more accurate shooters, but when you added speed into it, we struggled a bit. So, getting through that AK-47 challenge the way we did when Chris pulled off that last shot and beat Jake, that one was a huge win for us. I think that challenge is going stick in my head for a long time because it was such a mental victory for getting our team back together and bringing one of them home.
One of the challenges I disliked was the shotgun challenge because we did so poorly in it. We just could not get our gun sighted in the way we wanted and we all struggled with the gun. We wound up sending a guy home who wouldn’t have had to go had we had the time to actually sight in that gun. It was very sketchy shooting that shotgun and not knowing where we going to hit with it. Everybody was aiming in different places and hitting in different places, so it was very hard for us to go out there and be confident with that weapon.
Rob: That brings up a point that there has been some discussion about online. Some people, like Ashley Spurlin from Season 2, and then Jake after his last pistol challenge, commented that the guns weren’t always sighted in, or they went as far as saying that the results could be fixed by having guns not be sighted in properly or not set up right.
(NOTE – After rereading Ashley’s and Jake’s relevant Facebook posting and Twitter tweet I should clarify that Ashley made the statement that the results could be fixed by having the guns not sighted in properly and that Jake’s comment was about gun malfunctions. My question to Phil implied that Jake made statements about the results being fixed and Phil then answered the question as asked.)
Phil: I wouldn’t say that the producers are fixing anything. You know Jake, he would say something like that. But, in all honesty, and everybody knows this is the fact of the matter, is that people love drama on TV. The producers love the drama. Jake saying something like that is just stupid. They would love to keep him around because he continually draws in ratings. You know, there were times the guns didn’t work, there were malfunctions, failures to go into battery with the pistols, guns not going into slide lock, stuff like that. But, it’s a firearm, and anybody who shoots enough knows these aren’t going to work all the time every time.
Rob: In general, the guns that you used on the practice day, would you have the same guns on the challenge day? So, if you were able to sight in a particular rifle or shotgun on the practice day would the team have that same gun or would it be random?
Phil: For the rifle challenges you had to know where each rifle was hitting because there were several different rifles. With the VLTOR challenge there were five different rifles. You had to know, “Ok, rifle #4 shoots a little low,” because we were not allowed to change the sights on those guns. They were sighted in by the experts and we were told to leave them alone. They had been zeroed in at 100 yards. If you shoot iron sights you know that the zero is going to be a little bit different for each person that looks through those sights. So, we all had to shoot each rifle and take notes that on where they hit and keep that in the back of your mind. Before going into the challenge we’d go over the notes and say, things like,“Ok, whatever platform has rifle #4, remember to hold high, because it shoots low.”
Now, with the Infinity pistols, we each had our own pistol which we sighted in during the practice. We had a certain number of rounds for practice. You take five, six rounds, to sight it in to make sure your hitting on paper. Taran Butler helped us out with that. He was great, got everybody dialed in. Jake was hitting close to the bullseye with the pistol. You know, for Jake to say that the guns weren’t working all the time, yeah, they didn’t work all the time. But, some of that can be operator error and some of that can be just that the gun isn’t running as it should be. I had some problems with my Infinity and I fixed them as fast as possible and ended up shooting one less target than the guy who was in third place. So, I could argue the same case. That my firearm didn’t work at certain points. I had failures to go into battery and when I hit the slide home it took a few seconds. I could argue the point that I missed out on three or four targets because of that which took me out of the top three. But, you have to understand that it’s a gun and it’s not always going to work.
Rob: Let’s talk about the elimination challenges. You only saw the elimination challenges for your team during filming. Now that you’ve watched the episodes, what do you think of the other team’s elimination challenges?
Phil: There were very few elimination challenges I would have liked to shoot. The Corner Shot, I don’t know about that whole set up. It seems kind of Hollywood to me, but they say it works and he (Jake) proved that. There were some very cool old guns that if we weren’t going to shoot them, at least we would have liked to see them, because we heard really cool things about them. I would have liked to shoot the Hotchkiss cannon and the Gatling Gun. I would have liked to shoot Cliff and Drew's elimination with the cannonballs with the Glocks. That, I think would have been a very cool challenge to shoot in, even if it wasn’t for an elimination, because I shoot Glock for 3 gun and I think I would have performed pretty well You know, Cliff, He had an awesome run on that challenge, so I think even on my best day it would have been very very close with Cliff
Rob: Cliff seemed to be surprising. From the viewer’s point of view at least he tended to do poorly in the practices for the things that were non-handguns but then when it came to the challenge day he generally rose to the occasion and did very well in the challenge. Do you agree being there and seeing him first hand?
Phil: Oh, absolutely, there were times in the challenges that Cliff would just blow us away. In the practice with guns he was unfamiliar with he’d tell us, “Man, I’m not any good with this gun.” He was very uncomfortable with the VLTOR, the AR-15. Since that was my strong suit I tried to help coach people. Not in a demanding way, like we saw with some of the other competitors, just “Hey, what do you need help with?” Cliff needed a lot of help manipulating the weapon. He was not very comfortable with it, and then he goes out there and he shoots better then anybody else on our team. He went two for two at 75 and 100 yards. I think that is based on his competitive background. He falls into it immediately. With the challenge with Drew Cliff said he hates Glocks, and never shoots them, and he was afraid Drew would beat him, because Drew is a Glock guy. And then Cliff goes out there and just destroys the course with a Glock. It was really impressive to see Cliff shoot.
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Read Phil Morden talks about Jake Zweig's decision to quit Top Shot for Part 2 of the interview with Phil Morden.
In the meantime read about Phil's tips for auditioning for Top Shot and more behind the scenes info in my previous interviews with Phil:
Phil Morden talks about Top Shot season 3 with the Michigan Firearms Examiner and
Phil Morden wants to represent Michigan well on Top Shot season 3.
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