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INDIANAPOLIS, IN — “I was just trying to put the challenge back into bowhunting,” says Rolland Myers.  “Now doctors are saying I might never walk upright again.”

Only 37, Myers, a Richmond area contractor and self-described “wheel-head” has been bowhunting for almost a quarter century.

“In twenty-five years bowhunting with modern archery gear I never missed a season without getting my deer,” he says.

But a foray in traditional archery changed all that.

“One day the sport started losing its kick,” he says, adding that advances in modern archery equipment have “significantly shortens the learning curve along the path to proficiency allowing any idiot to kill a deer.”

“I hadn’t missed or wounded a whitetail in decades,” he says.  “And this may sound crazy, but I started wondering, What if?”

For years, Myers had seen more and more people shooting longbows and recurves at local 3-D archery tournaments around his hometown of
Richland.

“We used to joke about the stickbows guys,” Myers recalls. “None of them could shoot worth a damn.  It was funny.  You’d be out on the course and hear arrows clanging off trees.  There’d be cussing and screaming and, when you’d walk up, behind every deer target there’d be some guy with a longbow scratching around in the leaves looking for a busted arrow.  I mean, they were really bad—terrible.”

Myers was intrigued.  Most of the traditionalists he spoke to couldn’t remember the last time they killed a deer.  But they had a way of making an empty freezer sound like a virtue.  And they all insisted they were still having fun.

“Fun is something that is lacking when you get to a point where you know any deer you settle your sights on is as good as dead.”

So Myers bought a recurve and a book recommended by his new friends—Instinctive Shooting by G. Fred Asbell, regarded by many bare bow enthusiasts as the bible of how to properly shoot a bow without mechanic sights.

“Asbell talked about how the bare bow archer can draw and shoot without thinking about distance,” Myers recalls.  “He wrote that shooting competitively had little to do with being able to shoot a hunting bow.”

By the last chapter everything Myers thought he knew about archery had changed.  And on the range Myers found himself changing, too.

Myers adopted Asbell’s more fluid, swing-style of drawing the bow.  He even adopted what he calls “the Asbellian crouch.”

“Unlike in target archery where you stand perpendicular to the target, Asbell recommends a more oblique stance and—this is key—bending forward at the waist when you face the target, bending your knees and leaning a little forward, too, almost as if you’re about to squat.”

Myer’s admits that the first time he tried it his instinct told him this wasn’t natural.

“It was uncomfortable as hell,” he says.  “But I pushed on.”

Myers shot a hundred arrows every day for months.

“I couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn if I was standing in it,” he says.  But shooting so terribly and having no idea why only made me want to shoot more.  I was obsessed.  Something had to give.”

What gave was Myers’ back.  Doctors diagnosed a slipped disk compounded by a pinched sciatic nerve.  Then “target panic” set in.

“I followed everything in that damn book down to the letter and it not only turned me into a snap-shootin’ son-of-bitch…it also put me in traction for a week.  I’m on pain killers now.  Some days it feels like Satan himself is poking my in the ass with his pitchfork.”

In spite the poor shooting and chronic pain, Myers insists that for him the challenge and mystery of archery has definitely returned.

“What could be more mysterious then pulling back an arrow and having no fucking idea if the thing’s going to hit the target or not?” says Myers.  “Sure it’s hard and I’m miserable, but nobody ever said archery was easy.”