THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 14, 1996 TAG: 9607120586
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE MAYFIELD
STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: 231 lines
Standing in the center of a field behind his Lynnhaven Parkway office, Richard T. Cheng squeezes the trigger on an air-powered rifle and launches a barrage of brightly glowing balls into the night sky. They soar one by one over a distant stand of tall trees, their greenish tails still visible hundreds of feet away.
Cheng smiles ever so slightly, and mischief dances briefly in his eyes. Then he straightens his slight frame into a prideful stance.
``You see now how it works,'' he says.
In a lifetime of building all manners of things - from sophisticated computers to the $40 million company that he's now president of - few achievements have given Cheng so much pleasure as the invention he's showing off on this muggy July night.
At 62, the Chinese-born Cheng is the proud father of a system he and others believe will revolutionize a fast-growing action-pursuit game known as paintball.
Tinkering into the midnight hours in a closet-turned-laboratory at his home along Linkhorn Bay, Cheng figured out a way to make the little gelatinous spheres that paintball players splatter all over each other glow in the dark.
It took him well over a year to perfect the system that he dubbed ``Tracerball.'' It meant building from scratch a high-powered strobe that attaches to the barrel of any paintgun, and formulating a new type of ball that glows when it zips through the light-emitting device.
If everything works as hoped, paintball players say Tracerball will make their action-filled game even more exciting by making it easier to play outdoors at night.
``For those of us who can be classified as junkies, to now suddenly be able to see a projectile coming across a dark field that could eliminate you - that's guaranteed to give you a couple of squirts of adrenalin,'' says John Henry, a partner in the monthly magazine Paintball Player's Bible.
Cheng plans a press conference Monday to unveil his system. With 43 patent claims pending, he says his new Beach-based company, RTC International Ltd., is ready to fill orders for the strobes at $249 a pop. First-year sales projections: as much as $10 million. Jobs: as many as 80 in Virginia Beach devoted just to the new product.
At first blush, Cheng's achievement seems uncharacteristically whimsical.
This is a man who, after earning a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Illinois, went on to build computer-science programs at four other U.S. universities.
In his second career as a multimillionaire businessman, his flagship enterprise, the Beach-based Eastern Computers Inc., maintains computers and other systems for the no-nonsense Internal Revenue Service. He is a senior computer consultant to Saudi Arabia.
But Dr. Cheng, as he is known to his 375 employees, has long harbored a playful spirit. Deep beneath his trademark dark-blue suits and his gracious and composed demeanor lies the heart of a curious child.
Combine that with a longtime fascination with guns, a knack for tinkering and a strong entrepreneurial instinct, and it's no wonder that Cheng has pursued his paintball initiative so heartily.
``I don't think that he's been so interested in something for quite some time,'' says his 36-year-old son, James Cheng. ``For most of his life, he has worked on things that are very difficult for the average guy on the street to understand. This is something that just about anybody can get ... It's neat. He likes that.''
That he could fashion what has the potential to become a multi-million-dollar business with his own two hands proves to Richard Cheng that he made the right decision 35 years ago to become an American.
Not that he had any doubt. After all, a framed picture of himself shaking hands with President Bush hangs on the wall outside his office door - a memento of Cheng's 1991 award as the federal government's Minority Small Business Person of the Year.
``I have long felt,'' Cheng says quietly, ``that you could have any opportunity in this country if you worked hard enough.''
Richard Cheng's paintball passage is just the latest chapter in a long and amazing journey marked by inventiveness and derring-do.
It starts in China's Sichuan province, where Cheng grew up. As a youngster, he made his own slingshots, fashioned air guns from bamboo, and drew a design for a hand-pedaled tricycle. By 13, he was tinkering with crystal radios and small motors. He'd grown thoroughly fascinated by electronics.
But Cheng's father was a colonel in Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist army at a time when Communists led by Mao Tse-tung were overrunning the country. Remaining meant imprisonment or execution for Cheng's father and outcast status for the rest of the family.
Escape for Cheng began when he and his mother stepped onto a sampan one August night in 1949 with only the clothes on their backs and their pet dog. Associates of his father poled the small, flat-bottomed boat 10 miles down the Min River to a harbor near the city of Fuzhou.
From there, mother and son escaped by troop ship, eventually reuniting with Cheng's father in Taiwan in a scenic suburb of the coastal city of Kaohsiung. Young Richard's entrance was anything but quiet. Soon after arriving, he jury-rigged a small cannon from discarded water pipes and gunpowder he'd scrounged from a bombed-out Japanese munitions depot. Its detonation blew out windows throughout the community.
``I was grounded for some days,'' he says, clasping his hands across his chest and grinning sheepishly. ``I was not naughty, but a little troublesome for my mother.''
In the first half of his initial year of high school, Cheng ranked 42nd out of 50 students in his class. ``I got a lecture from my father, and the rest of the year I was No. 1,'' he says. The humiliation of knowing ``I could do much better'' was something he decided never to endure again.
At National Taiwan Normal University, he earned a bachelor's degree in industrial education. And he finally got his hands on real weapons, like M-1 rifles, as a participant in the ROTC program.
His marksmanship helped him court his future wife, Nancy. He dated her on days off from training that he was awarded for winning target-shooting contests.
After graduation, he taught at the university. His $20-a-month salary comfortably supported Cheng, Nancy and their young son. But Cheng longed to study in the United States. So he landed a scholarship from the University of Wisconsin in 1961. He planned, after earning his master's degree in education, to rejoin his family in Taiwan.
Opportunity after opportunity has kept him in America ever since.
Within a week of arriving in Menomonie Wisc., with $30 in his pocket, he'd snared a part-time job repairing televisions and radios. It paid more in a week than what he'd earned in a month in Taiwan.
Three years later, with his wife and child in tow, he moved on for another master's degree and a Ph.D. at Illinois. Then he embarked on a four-university circuit of building computer-science programs.
His last stop was Old Dominion University in Norfolk, where he arrived in 1979. He went right to work launching what is now considered a solid computer-science program. But a year after arriving, Cheng also began testing the entrepreneurial waters by launching his own computer-software company.
Within two years, with the help of a Taiwanese company, Cheng had developed an innovative computer-mounted circuit board. With it, a person typing different combinations of letters on a standard 26-character keyboard could generate tens of thousands of characters in a dozen languages.
The invention earned Cheng and his company, Eastern Computers, fame and some fortune. But counterfeiters in Hong Kong soon churned out similar boards with bearing Eastern's name and sold them throughout Asia, taking advantage of Eastern's slowness in filling orders and its poor job of handling service problems. Cheng threw in the towel after five years and only $1.5 million in sales.
After the disappointment, he and his financial backers took a safer tack: federal contracting.
The early and mid-'80s were a boom time for defense contractors and a time of unparalleled opportunities for minority-owned businesses like Cheng's, which tapped into federal ``set-aside'' programs. By 1987, Cheng had left ODU and turned his attention full-time to Eastern Computers. The company's revenues by the early '90s were approaching $50 million a year.
The federal budget crunch of the early 1990s caught up to Cheng's company at the same time that its minority preference in contract bidding expired. So for most of the past several years, he has been steering Eastern into commercial markets, particularly for telecommunications products and services. Commercial sales now generate 40 percent of Eastern's revenues, which have fallen to about $40 million a year.
It's no wonder Cheng's eyes and ears were wide open for new product ideas when son James and his wife came by for dinner at the elder Chengs' Alanton home one February evening last year.
Neither father nor son remember exactly how their wandering conversation turned to paintball, a 15-year-old sport with an estimated 1 million enthusiasts worldwide. But the father was immediately intrigued when his son introduced the subject.
James had played, but never outdoors at night because it's impossible to follow the balls, either as a shooter or a target. And while some paintball ranges use specially formulated balls that glow under black light, they're for indoor use only. That limits the game's fun.
Though he'd never played paintball, Richard Cheng's expert knowledge of guns immediately kicked in. A licensed collector, he has amassed more than 100 in his or his company's name - and has devoted many hours in recent years to developing advanced target-shooting simulators for the military.
Cheng had already considered lighting up projectiles with strobes. Paintball suddenly seemed a perfect application for the idea.
That night, after James and his wife went home, Cheng retired to the large walk-in closet off his bedroom. Instead of clothes, the space is packed with gray metal file cabinets and tables, atop which Cheng had spread computers and various electronic measuring devices - from spectrum analyzers to oscilloscopes. Pliers, screwdrivers, prototype circuit boards and rolls of solder are scattered about.
In this ``laboratory,'' Cheng says he stayed up late many nights for the next several months tinkering his idea toward reality.
``Tracerball'' took on its first real shape just about a year ago, after he and wife, Nancy, walked into the Farm Fresh supermarket on Great Neck Road looking for something he could turn into a tubular housing for his strobe attachment.
They found what they were looking for in a white plastic Johnson & Johnson baby-powder bottle, which Cheng cut and quickly painted black. Just after July 4 of last year, he'd taped and glued together his first prototype. He had also developed on his own a formula for a phosphorescent ball, and had a batch of balls specially manufactured.
One night, Cheng toted a loaded paintgun into his backyard, screwed the strobe into the barrel and aimed straight up.
The very first shot glowed brightly high into the sky. Cheng didn't shout or jump for joy. ``I was happy,'' he says, ``but I was not dumbfounded. I knew it was going to work. But that it glowed so brilliantly so far was beyond my expectations.''
Since then, there's been many prototypes, each new version designed to be sturdier, smaller, less costly and easier to assemble. Cheng hired a Chinese company to make the plastic injection-molded pieces and do some circuit-board assembly. He says major assembly and testing will be done in Virginia Beach. The strobe will be powered by four AA batteries.
Because he didn't want leaks to reach potential competitors in the small world of paintball, Cheng has closely guarded information throughout the development process. He didn't tell any of his own employees about ``Tracerball'' until last September.
And he has demonstrated his system to only one person in the paintball industry: Nick Lotuaco, president of the Beach-based Air Power Enterprises Inc., which makes paintguns and operates a paintball field in Pungo.
Cheng dropped by Lotuaco's Lynnhaven office one evening last August. They went outside and splatted garbage cans. Lotuaco was overwhelmed.
``People have been talking about doing something like this for years, but the problem is nobody could ever keep the ball energized so you could see it glow brightly,'' he says. ``This is the best I've ever seen.''
Lotuaco says he is already planning to open his paintball field for night play using Cheng's system. And he predicts other potential markets for Cheng's innovation: police and military training, particularly.
Cheng is already eyeing those possibilities. This time, he says he'll squeeze every last dollar of profit from his invention. He can cut prices so dramatically - and still make money - that counterfeiters won't stand a chance to steal his business, he proclaims.
``To have a successful product, you must be well-prepared on all fronts,'' Cheng says, gently unscrewing a strobe from the paintgun he has just demonstrated. He takes a breath and, almost embarrassingly, fires a boast.
``We are prepared to revolutionize the paintball industry.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]
MOTOYA NAKAMURA
The Virginian-Pilot
Richard T. Chang
LIGHTING UP THE PAINTBALL WORLD
THE INVENTION
The paintgun Tracer Unit, manufactured by RTC International in
Virginia Beach, attaches to the muzzle of paintguns. It illuminates
the paintballs, allowing players to see their trajectory and guide
them to their targets.
THE GAME
Paintball is a 15-year-old sport played by an estimated one million
enthusiasts worldwide.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE by CNB