INSTINCTS OF THE TRADITIONAL ARCHER

The Training

EDITOR'S NOTE: As a big 8-point whitetail moved into bow range, Travis Fryman of Cantonment, Florida, stood in his tree stand and waited for the shot. Fryman, the former shortstop and third baseman for the Detroit Tigers, who now plays for the Cleveland Indians, recalled later that as soon as he saw the buck, his heart seemed to jump up in his throat. "My adrenaline was pumping, and I could hardly swallow I was so excited. To get off the shot, I knew I'd have to collect myself and calm down." To prepare for the shot, Fryman, who had a .275 batting average in the majors, went through the same mental processes he always had gone through before he stepped to the plate to take a pitch that could win the game for his major-league baseball team.

Fryman also mentions that a well-defined sense of eye-hand coordination will insure your success as an instinctive shooter or as a highly-skilled baseball player. But from where does that well-defined sense of eye-hand coordination come? Do you come into this world with it? Or, do you learn it?

Howard Hill of Harpersville, Alabama, one of the greatest instinctive shooters of all time, accomplished many feats with a longbow, including shooting an apple and a plum off a man's head.

"Although many people believe Howard Hill was born with a God-given talent to shoot the longbow instinctively," Byron Ferguson of Hartselle, Alabama, a trick shooter with a longbow on TV programs, reports, "what few people know is that Howard Hill practiced by shooting 100 arrows a day almost every day of his life. A well-defined sense of eye-hand coordination and the ability to consistently shoot accurately with a longbow or a recurve occurs when a man with talent works, trains and practices to develop that talent to its highest level of proficiency."

"A number of transfer skills involved in throwing a baseball helped me learn to shoot traditional archery accurately," Fryman says. "The ability to focus and concentrate on the target I wanted to hit, whether it was a first baseman's glove or the kill zone of a buck, required the same intuitive process." When he's turning a double play from shortstop to second base, Fryman often will catch the ball, turn around and throw the ball instinctively to the second baseman's glove without going through the process of determining where the second baseman's glove is or having to aim the ball.

"Also, once I've practiced enough to feel comfortable with the bow and my ability to shoot it, all I have to do is point the bow where I know it should be instinctively," Fryman explained. "Then I let the muscle memory I've developed from my practice take over and shoot my bow accurately. To learn to shoot the longbow instinctively, you must do the same things required to throw a baseball accurately and quickly time and time again. You must train and practice until you reach the point where you can bypass thought action and rely totally on muscle memory to produce the shot you're attempting to make. A good instinctive shooter has the ability to pick the spot on the deer he wants to shoot quickly, tune everything else out of his mind and concentrate on that spot while in one fluid motion drawing and shooting the bow without aiming. When you practice the fundamentals long enough in any sport, whether football, baseball or archery, you can eliminate the thought processes required to execute an accurate performance."

Too, as Byron Ferguson observes, an archer who has shot a compound bow for years often makes the mistake of trying to aim the bow rather than point the bow when he picks up a traditional bow. The longbow is designed to be shot like a shotgun. You simply see the target, point the barrel of the gun at the target and shoot. You don't consciously aim a shotgun if you're going to shoot accurately. But with a rifle, like a compound bow, you must aim it precisely to shoot accurately."

Fryman further mentions that a good infielder in baseball never thinks about what he does or plans what he'll do. His innate ability to react to the ball and make an accurate throw happens because of the repetitive, correct execution of the same skills for years. Fryman believes that to become a good instinctive shooter you must practice consistently. The longbow or the recurve becomes a part of your body. Although Fryman has found he can take extended periods away from shooting the compound bow and then in a short time start practicing again and become reasonably accurate, he knows he must practice to consistently shoot the longbow or the recurve accurately.

TOMORROW: COMPARISON OF THE FLIGHT OF THE BALL AND THE ARROW