Custom Colt Combat Commander: A Sheriff's Greatest Gift

Several years back, I was sitting in the shade on a range at Gunsite Academyawatching aspiring gunwriters send rounds downrange. I looked over at Sheriff Jim Wilson and asked, “You reckon any of them fellers ever pointed a gun at someone and meant it?” Wilson thumbed his hat back, grinned, and said, “Well, if they did, they probably apologized afterward.”

That was more than a decade ago, but just last year, Wilson and I were attending a team tactics training course he’d arranged at Gunsite Academy. On the first evening, he asked me to stop by his room. I did, and when we sat down, he laid a well-worn Colt Combat Commander on the table and asked me to take a look at it. I picked it up, gave it the usual function check, and it was clear the gun was put together well and that it had a history.

“That’s a damned fine pistol, Jim.” “I know it is,” he said. “It’s yours now.”

From 1968 until 1980, Wilson worked at the Denton, Texas, Police Department as a patrolman, detective, detective sergeant, narcotic sergeant, and as a lieutenant. In 1980, he became the chief deputy in Denton County and dealt with the infamous serial murderer Henry Lee Lucas, also known as the Confession Killer. Wilson held that position until 1984 when he became the chief deputy in Crockett County, and from 1989 until 1997, Wilson was the sheriff of Crockett County. That’s nearly 30 years of law enforcement experience pointing guns at folks in bad situations, all the while hanging with the likes of lawman and author, Bill Jordan, and legendary close-quarter-combat expert and author, Rex Applegate. Experiences like that may not make you a gunwriter, but it makes you a subject-matter expert.

But Wilson is a gunwriter. More importantly, he’s an exceptional storyteller, and he’s applied his skills to the pages of Petersen’s Handguns, Guns & Ammo, Shooting Times, Handloader Magazine, Gun Digest, American Rifleman, and Shooting Illustrated. He also puts his skills to work in the recording studio. Wilson has released three albums containing eloquent renditions of the country songs he grew up listening to his father sing and others he’s written. As a young patrol officer, I read his articles and never figured we’d meet. But for more than a decade now, we’ve been shooting together, training together, and hunting together. I once watched him expertly knock out an African buffalo in the Mozambique swamps with a single and perfectly placed shot from a Ruger No. 1. Next, he watched me muck up a shot on a buffalo and have to wade into the tall grass to sort it out.

When it was all over and we were standing over the buff, he said, “I was hoping your life insurance was all paid up.” “I never gave that a thought,” I said. “You were there.” Wilson’s Colt Combat Commander started life in 1982, the year before I graduated high school. More importantly, it was a year before Colt transitioned to what has become known as the “Series 80” 1911 that included the addition of a trigger-actuated lever that depresses a scalloped pin inside the slide. Until this pin was depressed, it blocked the firing pin to make the pistol safer if dropped. This addition did nothing to improve the trigger. After Wilson got the pistol, he sent it to Novak’s in West Virginia for some practical modifications. In the 1990s, Novak’s was considered the premier 1911 customization shop. Novak’s still does great work, and, what sets Novak’s apart from many custom 1911 shops is their practical approach to customization. Novak’s guns look good, but more importantly, they’re tuned to work every time.

Novak’s gave Wilson’s pistol a thorough tuning. It received a complete action job; after just a miniscule amount of takeup, the trigger breaks clean and consistent at 3 pounds with almost no overtravel. They also polished the feed ramp, tightened the slide-to-frame fit, and installed a Kart National Match barrel and barrel bushing. An extended thumb safety was also fitted to the Commander. The most noteworthy modification was the installation of Novak’s unique Answer one-piece backstrap. The Answer replaces the factory mainspring housing and grip safety but also has a beavertail tang extension. With the elimination of the grip safety, there’s no possibility the pistol will not fire if you fail to establish a proper grip.

I asked Wilson why he went with the Answer on this pistol, and he told me, “On occasion, my grip has failed to disengage the 1911’s grip safety. The grip safeties on all my other 1911s are pinned.” I’ve never had an issue with 1911 grip safeties, but what I like about the Answer on this pistol was that the mainspring area of the one-piece backstrap was not checkered. During a multi-day pistol class, a checkered mainspring housing will eat away at your hand just as a checkered frontstrap will. To match the uncheckered Answer on this pistol, the frontstrap was also left smooth. The next addition was a Novak rear sight. This sight does not have those silly dots on either side of the notch. It’s plain black and mates perfectly with the gold bead front sight that’s been dovetailed into the slide. Unlike fiber-optic rods that often fall out of front sights and tritium sights that will eventually lose their glow, this is an easy-to-see sight that stands out well in low light.

The last touch of Novak’s sweetness was a complete carry bevel package that slightly radiused every sharp edge, so it won’t eat away at the insides of a leather holster. Novak’s finished it off with a new blued finish and unchecked walnut stocks. After our last day of training at Gunsite last year, Wilson and I spent time shooting the pistol. I still felt embarrassed accepting such a fine gift, but at the same time, I knew no one could appreciate it more. As I slid the Commander into a gun rug, he asked, “What’re you going to do with that pistol?” “By God, I’m gonna carry it, sometimes hidden and sometimes for the world to see. I feel kind of like you deputized me, Jim.”

The day after returning home, I was on my range working with the pistol again. I ran it through my two favorite defensive drills. The first is the Forty-Five Drill, and the goal is to draw from concealment and get five hits inside a 5-inch circle, at 5 yards, in five seconds or less. My average time on this drill was just a shade more than four seconds, about a half second more than my times with the Novak’s tuned lightweight Browning 
Hi-Power I often carry. The next drill was the Step Back Drill. In this drill, you draw from concealment and get two hits on an 8-inch plate at 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25 yards. The draw and two shots at each distance are timed separately, and the objective is to get all 10 hits in less than 20 seconds. It’s harder to do than you think, and I can’t shoot it perfectly every time with any pistol, but I shot it better with this old Combat Commander than any other open-sighted handgun I own.

I’ve put about 500 rounds through Wilson’s pistol, and it’s never hiccupped. It seems like it has a mind of its own. I guess decades of being ran the right way by a real shootist has taught it how to act, and now it’s helping (teaching) me. As I write this, the pistol is riding on my side in a Galco Avenger holster (like it does almost every day), and its Nighthawk magazine is stuffed with 8 rounds of Federal 210-grain Hydra-Shok Deep. There’s another round in the pipe, which makes 9 rounds of nastiness at my immediate disposal. Of course, I’m not really deputized; Wilson is no longer a sheriff, and my bad guy chasing days are behind me. And while we’ve never ridden the river together, Wilson and I have shared some campfires and dealt with a few unsavory characters of low moral standing along the way. I hope I’ll never have to point a gun at another human again. But if I do, and if it’s Wilson’s pistol, I’ll mean it, they’ll know it, and I won’t be apologizing. And the next time we are sharing a bottle, I’ll tell him how it all went down.

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