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Ged Green
John Gregory
Rose Griffith
James Hale
Mike “Blue” Hanse
August 2014
Ged Green
WDP, the company owned by
Ged Green, was really the
first company to take the
tournament game out of the
woods in a permanent fashion. Once they introduced
Hyperball in ‘96, the tournament game never went back
into the woods. Of course
his company WDP also introduced the Angel paintball
gun.
John Gregory
Taking an already-successful
company making motocross
equipment and completely changing its direction by
entering a new and growing
sport like paintball was nothing short of gutsy. However, it paid off for JT’s John
Gregory, as the company
made the very first paintball-specific goggles, forever
making the sport safer, then
made the first non-camouflage playing clothing like
concept pants and jerseys,
adding colorful legitimacy to
the sport of paintball as the
game came out of the woods
and shrugged off its “militia”
image. John Gregory was
inducted into the Motocross
Hall of Fame in 2010.
Rose Griffith
Unique Sporting of Anaheim,
California was owned and
operated by Rose and Al
Griffith (brother). In the early 90s Rose was a big player
in paintball - as a manufacturer, an event sponsor and
paintball ambassador, traveling to events around the
U.S. supporting teams and
players. Rose’s claim to fame
was her very ahead-of-their
time packs, which were hand
sewn right in their Anaheim
warehouse/retail store.
James Hale
Almost ten years before the
first game of paintball was
played, James Hale invented the Nelspot paint marker.
Without this simple, bolt-action pistol, initially intended for marking cattle for
slaughter or trees for logging, paintball might have
been a lot different, if it had
come to be at all.
Mike “Blue” Hanse
Mike “Blue” Hanse is one of
the rare rec-ball paintball
celebrities. His team, Blue’s
Crew have left an indelible
mark as ambassadors in the
scenario paintball world, as
they’ve traveled to 100-plus
events as a team the past
dozen or so years. Blue also
happens to own one of the
best paintball fields in the
world as well. EMR Paintball
(New Milford, PA) and its famous bunkhouses and castle fields are home to Castle
Conquest, a must-attend
event for any serious paintball player. The field that is
now known as EMR Paintball
was once known as Wolf’s
Lair and to say it’s steeped
in tradition would be a great
understatement.
Laurent Hamet
By 1999 Laurent Hamet had
already introduced Sup’Air
Ball to the world, but it was
in ’99 that he was responsible, at least in part, for the
debut of the Millennium Se-