In 1984, Pin Oak Acres Shooting Grounds, just outside Houston, Texas, was the only sporting clays course in the entire United States. Only a few dozen Americans, who had shot clays in Britain or in Europe, had any first-hand experience with the game. Now, less than seven years later, courses number in the hundreds, and new ones continue to sprout up like mushrooms on a warm spring night. Shooters number in the tens of thousands.

That sporting clays should catch on so well and grow so quickly is remarkable but not very surprising. Until recently, the target-shooting world idled in doldrums that grew deeper every year. We needed a new shotgun game, one relevant to bird shooting, a game less formalized than trap and skeet, more adaptable than Crazy Quail, and more demanding than targets lobbed, butterflylike, out of a hand-held thrower or a portable trap. The wilting American arms and ammunition industry needed a boost as well.

Sporting clays answers these needs and more. No two courses are alike. Indeed, not even consecutive targets at the same stand are exactly the same, and five minutes' work on the elevation and angle of the trap can change the shot entirely. Using topography and available vegetation, a clever designer can set up shooting fields to present targets that are as birdlike as clay discs can be.

Such infinite variety could hardly help but capture a bird-shooter's fancy, and the game's appeal has in turn made sporting clays the best thing that's happened to our shooting sports industry in a generation or more. More new guns and cartridges have come onto the market in the past 3 years than in the past 20--to say nothing of the vitality now humming in the peripheral markets that supply everything from clothing to cartridge bags, earplugs to shooting glasses.

All told, sporting clays has done shooting a world of good--stirred new interest, attracted new people, prompted new technology and new products. It has provided a fine new game to those who enjoy shooting for its own sake. It offers hunters new opportunities to be better stewards of the sport, since good shots waste less game.

This much I believe is true. What other virtues might reside in the bosom of the game depends upon your level of credulousness and your tolerance for blather. Plenty of breathless ink has been dumped on the subject over the past couple of years, and if you care to look, you probably can find someone who's been willing to testify that sporting clays is a sovereign remedy for everything from marital strife to smelly feet.

Maybe so. But the future, as I see it, is not necessarily one of unmitigated bliss. Sporting clays may be the best renaissance that's come to shooting, but it isn't the first, and history holds a lesson worth some thought.

Until sporting clays came along, skeet had more to offer a bird shooter than any other target game. In fact, the whole thing was invented by a grouse hunter as a way of keeping his field-shooting skills in trim. The range layout went public in 1926 in The National Sportsman and Hunting and Fishing, sister magazines that conducted a contest to give the game a name. Gertrude Hurlbutt of Dayton, Montana, won $100 by suggesting skeet, which is a phonetic spelling of an Old Norse word related to the English shoot.

Within two years, skeet fields by the dozen had been built all over the eastern United States, the first national championship had been held, a governing body was organized, and Remington Arms was selling skeet-load cartridges. In the 1930s, when times were tough and game populations dwindled, every sporting magazine in the country promoted skeet as a tonic for ailing gun clubs and conservation-minded hunters. All of the arms-makers brought out guns specially tailored to the game. In 1936, Hunting and Fishing estimated the number of skeet fields nationwide at 1,600. Skeet was the fastest-growing, most popular shooting sport in the country.

Fifty years later, it was by comparison a moribund exercise in boredom, scorned among bird hunters as artificial frippery utterly irrelevant to field shooting. Some of that sentiment, of course, was largely sour grapes fermented by shooters equally unable to hit a clay target, a game bird, or the backside of a gentleman cow--but there was truth in it nonetheless.

What happened to skeet derived in some measure from its predictability. When the traps are set according to rule-book prescription, targets fly along precisely defined paths. Even though they truly do, in concept at least, represent a great many shots a hunter encounters, the angles are easily memorized. Taking all advantages the rules allow, I daresay that anyone of normal motor skills can, after a bit of coaching and a case of cartridges, turn in a respectable score.

But that's also the rub, because a mania for score was what really turned skeet from dazzling to drab.

The original rules forbade any shooter to shoulder his gun before calling for the target, which makes sense in a game intended to refine field-style shooting. Low-gun skeet is more interesting, more challenging, and far better practice. It╒s also likely to cost even an extremely good shot a target or two now and then. The best shots of the 1940s and '50s turned in some impressive runs, but widespread agitation in favor of pre-mounting the gun finally won out. Nowadays, skeet is largely an exercise of endurance; the longer you can maintain concentration through shot after tediously repetitive shot, the higher your score, and the game has long since reached the point where runs of 500 targets or more is minimal qualification for being a serious contender. The burnout rate among good shots is quite high.

Although skeet always has been a far more relaxed and friendly game than trap, all the emphasis on cumulative scores, averages, classifications, and the other rubbish that goes with competition puts off a lot of people who might like to shoot simply for fun. Beginners, moreover, can easily be intimidated by what appears to be great skill on the part of even middling shooters and shy away before they have a chance to learn how easy skeet really is.

Under the circumstances, it's small wonder that sporting clays has been met with such enthusiasm, not only among target shooters but among hunters as well. So far, the game remains true to its historical purpose, which is to duplicate as closely as possible the conditions and challenges of field shooting.

But history is cyclical, and some of the same things that ultimately took much of the fun out of skeet are beginning to loom over sporting clays. Big-money tournaments sprang up early on, and with them came systems of classification, registration, and the rest. Two separate sanctioning bodies are wrangling with one another, maneuvering for control over registered competition and the power to establish rules of the game.

In short, preoccupation with score already has exerted considerable influence over sporting clays. Those who enter high-stakes matches are beginning to insist that means be devised whereby every shooter should have precisely the same shot at a given stand--an understandably democratic view but a difficult thing to accomplish in a game whose interest depends to a great extent upon variability. There's even talk of allowing pre-mounted guns.

Arguably, none of this affects those who don't care to compete, who simply want to shoot for fun and for practice when the bird seasons are closed. Perhaps. But I'm not convinced. I have no quarrel with anyone who likes competition--until it begins to interfere with those who don't. And I see a certain attitude accruing to sporting clays that disturbs me: a subtle implication that score is the be-all and end-all of reasons for shooting; a suggestion that if you can't score well, you have no business being on the course; an inclination to follow every missed target with a surge of gastric acid and words of Anglo-Saxon etymology.

Sporting clays' popularity predictably has spawned a spate of "expert instructors." Some of them really are. Others are charlatans, bozos, and assorted clods who attempt to make the simple, elegant act of shooting into something complicated and arcane, mainly to impress you with how much they know that you don't. Their attitude seems to be that if you don't do it their way, or with a gun like theirs, you're doing it wrong.

It's all fairly subtle, but it has a cumulative effect. I've met lots of people who've said they're intrigued by the idea of sporting clays--but they've read so much about how difficult it is, and how good a shot you have to be, and how you have to have the "right" gun...on and on. The fact is, they're intimidated by the whole thing and don't want to embarrass themselves. No one does. The sad part is that there's nothing inherently embarrassing or intimidating about the game; the problem lies in the atmosphere growing around it.

If you know the feelings I'm talking about, let's speak plainly:

You don't need the "right" gun for sporting clays. It was meant to be shot with field guns. Nor do you need screw chokes or battery-driven choke wrenches. You may one day decide to buy a specialized clays gun--there are some extremely good ones on the market--but believe me, you can have just as much fun with your favorite fowling piece, whatever it is.

If keeping score bothers you, don't. You don't have to. Tell the range officer or trapper you're not interested in keeping score, and if he makes you feel in any way uncomfortable about it, go elsewhere to shoot. After all, you're paying the fee.

If any shooting stands or fields don't appeal to you for some reason, don't shoot them. You don't have to attempt every shot on the course just because it's there, and besides, any shot that isn't reasonably birdlike is a poorly designed presentation anyway.

Shoot with like-minded people. You'll meet some nice chaps at every course and they usually outnumber the yo-yos. If you only want to shoot for fun, go with those who feel the same way.

Don't be intimidated by what you've heard or read about the game. Some shots are tough, and some aren't, but nobody hits them all.

Above all, relax and have a good time. The point isn't how many targets you break or miss. As I see it, any day spent shooting is a good one, even those not-infrequent days when I'm hard-pressed to hit the ground with my hat. The point is to enjoy the experience, and sporting clays offers the best opportunity in years to do just that. If we're careful not to take the game, or ourselves, too seriously, it can stay that way for a long time to come.