Sporting clays originated in England as a game designed to exercise one's favorite bird gun and keep the old shooting eye sharp in the off-season. I've seen a couple of the old layouts in the British countryside and they reminded me pleasantly of my early shooting days when a simple trap was set up in the field behind the firehouse and the trap boy was sheltered from harm by a couple of hay bales and maybe a borrowed window shutter or a piece of plywood.

The English, who often dislike excessive "show," did much the same thing with hay bales, a stray board or three, and a few traps set up to replicate a flushed partridge, a running hare, or a high driven pheasant. As often as not, the shooter had no idea or much interest in the dimensions of his gun or its chokes. He went through a couple of boxes of shells, had a fine time, and didn't bother much with the score, if indeed one was even kept.

Times have changed, and so has the sporting game.

I arrived at my first sporting clays shoot with my old bird gun, a decent enough side-by-side 12-gauge. The other shooters in my squad looked at me as if I'd just stepped out of a Charles Dickens novel. To a man, they were equipped with the latest state-of-the-art sporting-clays guns, and every one of them had a pouch of choke tubes and an electric wrench to effect instant changes as the stations and their whims dictated. I had known, of course, that sporting clays was off and running, but I really didn't know it was already up to flank speed.

I am very familiar with the excesses of my peers in the shooting field, and will admit to a few quirks of my own. I doubt if the makers of my skeet and trap guns could easily recognize their creations. But I was really surprised at the grim-jawed seriousness of the sporting-clays shooters. And I was astonished to learn that the English have gone exactly the same way and virtually stand at the head of the competitive ranks.

I liked the original idea of sporting clays very much, the casual noncompetitive afternoon with the bird guns, the relaxed small talk, the friendly coaching, the chance to try this or that technique, the opportunity to run a box or two of 8s through a little 28. I also like the competition of skeet or trap. My level is not very high, but a little serious shooting is good for the soul. The thing about sporting clays was that it originally didn't involve much emphasis on "how many" except as curiosity, and the concept of something to do with your field gun was highly appealing. I also feared that it wouldn't stay this way in our world of compulsory scorekeeping.

Still, I really like the way sporting clays has grown. Anything that benefits the shooting sports is basically good. It's good that the scores are relatively low, and that the game is not fixed in its structure because the fields are different as are the shooting situations.

The gunmakers have had a chance to introduce new sporting-clays arms and the gun nuts have a new excuse to get hold of something else that's "necessary." Along with special shotguns and a battery of choke tubes, the complete sporting-clays shooter can outfit himself or herself in a variety of garments and accessories that make your normal trout or salmon fisherman look like a model of self-denial. And why not? If money can't buy happiness, what good is it?

The old saying about every man having his weakness applies perfectly to sporting clays. I am, unfortunately, the kind of shooter who can run a perfect 10 on one station and a perfect zero on the next--even if the targets aren't all that different. One of the common descriptions of the sporting-clays game is "golf with a shotgun." My interpretation of this is that disaster awaits you when you least expect it, as when you've just broken some tough targets and you are thinking that perhaps you were born to shoot a shotgun; or someone has just remarked on the fluidity of your swing or some other such nonsense. Or you hit a station that is a blend of several things you don't do well--hard right-to-left angles going from high to low, for example.

One standard shot that I dread is the "rabbit." As a kid I was a poor rabbit shot, even when I was hunting all alone, and I am worse now with age and witnesses. It's my equivalent of a long downhill putt on a fast green for money. Just knowing I will have to shoot it sooner or later makes me nervous and jumpy. The fact that no one else has any particular trouble with it doesn't help much.

I stand in awe of the shooters who turn in good scores at various sporting-clays fields and spice their deep understanding of the game with arcane phrases like "waiting for the target to develop" and "shallow angles of intercept." I admire their mathematical ability to match choke tubes and loads with the size and distance of the targets at a variety of stations. I envy the ease with which they wear fluorescent colors with elan and grace, and the way they can compare exotic stations at various clubs as skiers compare downhill runs or golfers long par fives.

"Shot the springing teal at Broadmoor yet?" says one sporting-clays shooter to another. "Not quite the struggle, at least for me, as the woodcock pair at Gleneagles--but then the foreign courses go out of their way to be testing, don't you think?"

"Not so in Spain," the other shooter answers as he walks away, clearly the winner.

Sporting clays is here to stay and it's growing. But I trust there will be a place for the odd bird shooter dressed in worn field clothes and lugging his old gun. I like the idea of skipping some stations and hanging around others where I can see a pair of mallards or high, wind-borne doves from another time and place. It's just another way of keeping score--of winning at a more private sporting game.