‘Full Metal Jousting’ taps Dexter man’s expertise

Oh, this is going to be good.

Grown men in full metal jackets trying to knock each other off their horses? Surely you joust!

Nope. They’re serious.

In the latest in reality television, the History Channel brings you 10 weekly episodes of “Full Metal Jousting” starting at 10 p.m. Sunday. And there’s a local man right in the middle of it all.

Ripper Moore of Dexter, a professional jouster for 16 years and two-time world champion, coaches the Red Team in the series that was filmed last summer and early fall in Jackson, Miss.

“Pain tolerance,” the 45-year-old Moore said during a phone interview earlier this week, when asked the key to being a good jouster.

You’re saying it doesn’t feel good to get poked with an 11-foot lance by a guy charging past you on a horse?

“It really doesn’t,” Moore said.

A lot of guys quit after trying, he said, including several of the 30 men chosen to try out — despite no jousting experience — after they applied via video for the 16 contestant spots on the show.

One of the contestants also is from Oregon, David Prewitt, 25, a Marine veteran, bull rider and mixed martial arts fighter from Klamath Falls.

“What it really takes is the will to ignore the pain and the little hurts and the willingness to get back up on that horse and keep going,” Moore said. “Once you’ve got that, you can learn the rest.”

If you think this is just some staged deal like you might see at one of those Medieval Times dinner-theater-style restaurants, well, that’s not the case, even if several of the contestants, not surprisingly, are jouster/actors for the Medieval Times chain.

This is 16 tough guys — ex-Marines, a steer wrestling champion, firefighters, horse trainers, polo players, stunt men and others — competing for the grand prize of $100,000.

Each episode features full-contact jousts in which contestants charge on horseback and collide at 30 mph.

“The hit itself does not really concern me,” contestant Jake Nodar of West Hollywood, Calif., says in a promo on the History Channel’s website. “Falling in 100 pounds of armor scares the hell out of me.”

The contestants, who range in age from 23 to 43 and in size from 5-foot-10, 160 pounds to 6-foot-4, 240 pounds, are divided into two teams (Red and Black), and each episode features two contestants, one from each team, competing against one another, Moore said.

Jousters pass each other eight times in a match, with the winner being declared by a point system, he said. A jouster gets 1 point for a touch on target, 5 points if he breaks his lance on the other man and 10 points for knocking him off his horse.

Moore bought 27 acres of property in the Dexter area last year when he moved from his native Tennessee with wife Carrie Easley, an Oregon native. He was a bookseller at Tower Books in Nashville in 1995 when the centuries-old combat-inspired sport of jousting found him. He went to a “moving party” for a friend and met a man there who ran a jousting troupe. The man convinced Moore he should give jousting a try.

Moore had no serious horse-riding experience and, although athletic and fit, was not an athlete growing up in Nashville. But the thrill and exhilaration he felt putting on Gothic-style 16th-century armor and setting all his fears aside and besting a fellow jouster was an irresistible adrenaline rush, Moore said.

“The feeling when you put your lance on target and you feel the lance break is just indescribable,” he said.

The draw is like that of any sport, said Moore, who still competes in several tournaments a year. The crowd, the competition, the feeling of achievement …

“You feel the other guy go,” Moore said of a successful hit. “You never get to see it, but you can feel it,” he said of having already passed the other jouster by the time he’s fallen from his horse.

Moore said he got offered the job to coach one of the teams on “Full Metal Jousting” by fellow champion jouster Shane Adams, who came up with the idea for the show and is its host.

“He remembered me because I’d beaten him in several tournaments,” said Moore, who has won everything from a knife to $8,000 prize money competing in tournaments.

“I had no idea what I was getting into,” Moore said of that day more than 16 years ago when he decided to give jousting a try. “Not a clue.”