Brady Ellison bow fishes at Lake Pleasant, Ariz. He is the No. 2 ranked archer in the world.
PEORIA, Ariz. — Brady Ellison stood poised on a boat for three hours, arrow drawn, scanning the shoreline waters of
Lake Pleasant.
When the No. 2-ranked archer in the world, used to hitting DVD-sized bull's-eyes from 230 feet, decides to spend some free time bowfishing, it would seem to be a bad day for the carp.
But the fish were scarce on this April morning. Ellison took several shots, reeling in an empty arrow every time.
Finally his stepfather, Mel Nichols, manning the boat's controls, turned on the motor to head home.
"I hate when the fish win," said Nichols, an archer who has coached Ellison for more than a decade. "It's like winning a silver."
It was a rare 0-fer for Ellison.
Butch Johnson, a five-time U.S. Olympian in archery, calls him "just about the best archer the U.S. has ever had."
As the summer sports season begins, with every result a marker for athletes trying to qualify for the 2012
London Olympics, Ellison has shot his way into the center of the U.S. gold medal conversation.
Ellison, 22, who has the heads of a bighorn sheep and a deer he felled on his bedroom wall, would give America a new variety of hero if he were to win Olympic gold.
He celebrated qualifying for the 2008 Olympics by going hunting in Texas. He still gets animated when he talks about the 300-pound bear he shot with a rifle on his grandfather's Arizona ranch at age 11.
"My dad said, 'Just squeeze the trigger and aim right at the top of his back,' and my first shot cut off the bottom of his heart," Ellison says. "That was a lot of fun."
Hitting his target in London would help return the U.S. team, which has gone two consecutive Games without winning a medal in the sport, to archery prominence.
A U.S. man won every individual Olympic gold from 1972 to 1988, except for the U.S.-boycotted 1980 Games.
"(South) Korea is the country to beat," says Johnson, who won 1996 gold and 2000 bronze in the team event. "There are several countries out there that have very, very good archers. So it's much harder now to dominate."
Ellison embraces the expectations. After making the 2008 Olympic team, he got a tattoo of the Olympic rings on his right forearm "so when I shoot, people can see it."
Ellison finished 27th in the individual archery event at the Beijing Games. He was 20th at the 2009 world championships.
He got into the Olympic gold medal hunt last season, winning six
World Cup medals (two individual, four team) and the World Cup final, where he beat top-ranked Dong-Hyun Im of South Korea.
"Outside of Korea," says U.S. national team head coach Kisik Lee, "not many archers in the world could shoot what he's maintaining with every score right now."
Ellison altered his approach last season, trying to beat his personal bests rather than focusing on his competitors or overall average scores at specific events. A change in the scoring system — from highest overall score to a set system, similar to tennis — also helped, he says.
"The pressure is completely different," says Ellison, competing in his first World Cup of the 2011 season this week in Croatia. "I love the set system. For me it was a lot easier."
Archery is way of life
Ellison's is a talent nudged early (he shot at grasshoppers with a plastic bow and suction-cup arrows while still in diapers) and encouraged often.
Growing up, he spent weeks every summer working and hunting on his grandfather's ranch. His grandfather and father worked as hunting guides, and he sometimes would join them.
Ellison had his own compound bow by age 7. By 11, he was competing in 3D archery, shooting at animal-shaped foam targets at varying distances. By 15, he was shooting at traditional targets and traveling to competitions. He made the junior world championships team in 2004.
Along the way, he met Nichols, a professional archer who coaches in his backyard archer's paradise in Glendale, Ariz. The yard is filled with 3D animals. A 50-meter target practice range spans the space diagonally.
At first, Ellison's mom, Julie, was shuttling her son more than 60 miles each way to Nichols' home from theirs in Payson, Ariz. It turned out Ellison had found more than a coach.
"We spent lots of time together," Julie says of she and Nichols, whom she married in 2005, "and at one point we went, 'Well, hey, you know, I kind of like you a lot.' We have a really good life. Everything we do is kind of wrapped around archery."
Nichols' backyard became Ellison's everyday training ground. Ellison joined Nichols on bowhunting and bowfishing outings. He shot against Nichols' peers on the backyard range.
"It re
Coping with hip issue
Ellison also tried soccer, basketball and
BMX racing, even though he was somewhat limited by a childhood bout with Perthes disease, a hip condition that required him to wear leg braces for more than a year.
He lives with chronic hip pain. He readily dismisses any effect a February 2008 hip dislocation might have had on him at the Beijing Games. Doctors found tears in his labrum and cartilage when he had surgery two months after the Olympics.
"I lived with hip pain my whole life, so I don't think it really bothered me too much," he says.
His faulty hips certainly did not slow his archery ascent. By summer 2005, Ellison was a top national competitor in compound shooting. He was invited to a camp at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, Calif., even though compound bows are not used in Olympic competition.
During the camp, a string on Ellison's bow broke. He borrowed a friend's recurve (Olympic-style) bow.
"I hated it," Ellison says. "It was the most awful thing I'd ever done. But coaches said that I might be able to make an Olympic team or national team, that I might make a good recurve shooter. So they put this little bug in the back of my head."
Compound bows are much more mechanical; they have pulleys at the top and bottom of the bow that displace the weight (typically 60 pounds) when an archer draws and a trigger to release the arrow. The recurve is essentially just a bow and a string — relying more on the archer's strength, steady stance and finger release.
"When I was first starting off with the recurve, what felt like a good shot to me could hit nowhere close," Ellison says. "Learning that patience and discipline was what's been hardest for me."
Ellison moved to Chula Vista in January 2006 to live and train at the OTC. He was halfway through his junior year of high school (he eventually earned his GED).
His arrival coincided with that of Lee, who formerly coached the
South Korean and Australian national teams. While Ellison considers that pairing fortuitous, Lee says Ellison's "natural talent has made him a champion."
Less than two years later, at 19, Ellison was the USA's top male qualifier for the 2008 Olympics.
"There's a lot of people I've seen that are very good shooters, but when the pressure was on and it counted, they kind of folded," Johnson says. "He handles the pressure well."
Ellison says he kept his composure at the Beijing Games but learned he needed to do more homework on the stadium — the wind patterns, the noise, the overall atmosphere. That's exactly what he and Nichols intend to do at the Olympic test event in London in early October. Nichols says he will take video and "thousands of pictures at every angle."
Then he will reconstruct
Lord's Cricket Ground in the backyard, using sheets of fabric draped over the fences to create the scene and stereos to mimic the sounds.
"If I have him shoot the Olympics 10,000 times here," Nichols says, "he'll be ready for London."
And he won't be there for silver.ally immersed me in the sport," Ellison says.
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Archer Brady Ellison Targets Gold at 2012 London Olympics
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