Colorado Springs – Jeff Fabry and Kevin Stone sat side by side in the pouring rain along with hundreds of other archers at the National Archery Association’s recent National Target Championships here.
Fabry, a world-class archer and avid hunter, sent arrow after arrow slicing through the air, each one piercing the center of the target 50 meters away.
Thump. Thump. The arrows began to crowd one another for space inside the bull’s-eye.
After a while, it didn’t seem like such a big deal. You began to ignore the wheelchair. You stopped glancing at the stump of his right arm, severed just below the elbow.
By the 10th arrow, the effortless way he drew back the string seemed easy. Almost natural. As did the rock-solid pose as he held the string’s 60-pound pull weight. Then he released it, sending the arrow straight and true through the heavy rain.
It was, of course, not natural at all. Fabry was pulling the string back and holding the arrow with his teeth.
“I don’t think of it as being very remarkable,” said Fabry, 32. “This is my life. This is how I decided to live it.”
He paused then, staring for just a moment at the rain or something beyond the rain. He took a deep breath, and a small smile creased his face.
“What it comes down to,” he said, “is that either you do it or you don’t.”
Stone had to find a way, too.
He was riding in an Army truck in 1985 when it lurched off a cliff after a training exercise in Texas. The crash shattered his spinal cord and damaged his brain.
“I was a grumpy vet who couldn’t jump out of helicopters anymore and couldn’t make things go boom anymore,” Stone said. “Life became all about me instead of about my family and my community. Poor me.”
Stone spent a year in a life- and-death struggle inside a military hospital in San Francisco and several more years in a Veterans Affairs hospital in Ann Arbor, Mich., near his home.
Aiming for a new target
In 1995, a decade after the accident, he was persuaded to compete in the National Veterans Wheelchair Games. A marksman-level rifle shot during his 3 1/2 active years as a soldier, Stone found that a shattered spinal cord and traumatic brain injuries had not robbed him of his ability to hold steady on a target.
He excelled on the rifle range and did even better with a bow. In addition to being a member of the bronze medal archery team at the 2004 Paralympics, Stone was the 2004 U.S. Indoor Target Champion.
“Archery,” he said, “gave me my life back. And it allows me to wear a United States uniform again and go overseas and represent my country again. It brings closure to my service to my country. This time, I get to choose when I retire. I didn’t get to do that the first time.
At the Paralympics, Stone and Fabry sat wheelchair to wheelchair for the United States. And shot the living daylights out of targets.
Today, they shoot and train with an eye toward the 2008 Paralympics in Beijing.
In 2003, Fabry took second in the open division – meaning open to all archers – at the National Archery Association’s Outdoor Nationals. He won individual and team bronze medals at last year’s Paralympics.
He is 6 feet 2 and carries about 185 pounds of muscle on his frame. Or what’s left of it.
Bowhunting challenge
Fabry was 15, living an outdoor life around his home in Tulare, Calif., halfway between Fresno and Bakersfield and close to the majestic Sequoia National Forest. He and his buddies had just started bowhunting, mostly for deer, when his life took a horrible turn.
He was riding a motorcycle on a country road. He crashed.
“I knew right away that I’d lose my leg,” he said. “It was sticking through my pants leg. Four weeks later, they took my arm. That came as a surprise. I didn’t know that would happen.”
Fabry’s long climb back began, he says, because of hunting.
“I’d bowhunted for deer with my friends before the accident, but after I got hurt, they stopped, well, asking me,” he said. “One year, nine years after I lost my arm and leg, they went off hunting and I was left sitting there again. I still had my bow in the closet, so I got it out, ripped a strip of my old bluejeans to make a string, found a way to string the bow and went outside and started shooting arrows with my teeth. Man, it was ugly.
“But right then, I knew it was possible.”
The next year, he went deer hunting again. Didn’t get anything. Although maybe he did.
“I was there again,” he said. “That’s all that mattered. I was there in the woods with my buddies. I was back.”
Four years shooting and refining his new style led him back to competitive archery.
And it is possible that archery, the sport he loved before the motorcycle crash, the sport of his childhood, saved his life as a man. Literally.
“A few years ago, Sports Illustrated ran a picture of me competing in an archery tournament,” he said. “I’d had this mole on my neck for about 10 years, and after the photo ran, I had several doctors call me, dermatologists, and say they’d seen the picture. They said, ‘You better have that thing checked.’ So I did. It was melanoma.
“They got all of it.”
Fabry runs a finger along the 3- inch scar just below his right ear.
“The only bad part was that after the surgery my neck hurt and I couldn’t shoot for three or four months,” he said. “You know, because I use my neck muscles to hold the arrow.”
And then he smiled and the rain began to ease up and he said he had to go. It was time once again to send a volley of arrows hard and straight and true at a target.
Staff writer Rich Tosches can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
