ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, July 28, 1996 TAG: 9607300115
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-16 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: NARROWS
SOURCE: RAY COX STAFF WRITER
Tony Thorn, who aspires to be the best in the world at shooting arrows at a target formed by a counterfeit deer or fox, is nervous about discussing his quest.
He fears that people may be deceived by his intentions.
``I don't want to make it sound like I'm better than anybody else,'' said the freckled and redheaded 37-year-old concrete plant employee.
Thorn may not be better than the average Sam Salary or Tina Timecard, but he is better than the average competitive bowhunter. In truth, he is substantially better, which is easily proved.
The most recent time he drew a bowstring in competition, earlier this month at a shoot in Hinton, near Harrisonburg, he won his division and scored 256 out of a possible 300 using a recurve bow.
Recurves are the modern equivalent of bows that have been in use since a hungry guy dressed in fur shorts figured out they were useful in felling game from a greater distance than a thrown rock.
Recurves have no sights on them. Thorn uses his bare fingers on the string, a method that goes back the earliest archers.
To put the 256 out of 300 into perspective: only one other archer that day had a better score, and he was using a modern compound bow with sights. The tournament was sponsored by the Singers' Bend Bow Benders club.
``[Thorn] had it smoking that day,'' said Reva Morton of the International Bowhunting Organization, the Ohio-based sanctioning body for the shoot in Hinton. ``And he's doing it the hard way. I couldn't even see what I was shooting at if I didn't have a sight.''
The bowhunting organization also sanctions the World Championships, which will be held Aug. 8-11 in Flatwoods, W.Va. Thorn plans to be there.
``I want to be a world champion,'' he said in a way that indicated he enjoyed the sound of those words very much.
What Thorn wants, he very well may get. Thorn shot against the 1995 world champion recurve bowman, Tom Hicks, at a tournament in Union Grove, N.C., earlier this year and whupped him like an insubordinate stepchild.
Just how it was that Thorn came to be such a bodacious bowman goes all the way back to his childhood in the mountains overlooking Narrows. Then and now, the place was called Hungry Hollow.
``It got that name because I guess a lot of people up there
were that way back in those days,'' said Freddie Thorn, Tony's father.
Money was hard to come by in the Thorn household, too, and Freddie taught all three sons, Gene the eldest, Ricky the middle son, and Tony the youngest, the rudiments of hunting for dinner. Susan Thorn Leonard, the only girl in the family, was not to be trifled with either.
``Everybody up this way hunted,'' Freddie Thorn said. ``I guess our boys couldn't help but learn something about it.''
Tony Thorn made his first bow from a green locust branch sometime around the age of 8 or 10. The arrows he fashioned from what he called ''stickweed,'' notching them with a knife and gluing pieces of cardboard or chicken feathers to them.
Thorn claims that he's no better shot with a bow than either of his brothers, Gene, nicknamed ``Mop,'' and Ricky, dubbed ''Fox.'' The other two call Tony ``Everett.'' All three brothers have filled their houses with shooting trophies earned with both bow and gun. Tony said he once saw Ricky shoot a deer in the head from 400 yards with a rifle.
``All I could see of him was his ear,'' Tony said. ``We walked and walked and walked before we got to that deer after Fox had shot him.''
Ricky has stories about his youngest brother, too.
``He's about the best I've ever seen with a bow,'' he said. ``He'll do all right with it if he doesn't get to bragging too much.''
The way Tony tells things, it doesn't come off as much like bragging as it does oral history.
``I tell the guys I work with, 'You ain't looking at an ordinary man, here,''' said Tony, who has just the right amount of charm and twinkle in his eye to keep such assertions from coming off as obnoxious.
The house up in Hungry Hollow that he shares with his wife, Robin, and 7-year-old son Casey, is so full of trophies that Thorn is talking about trashing most of them and just keeping the brass plaques that are affixed to the pedestals so he'll remember what he's won. Archery, softball, basketball, even swimming and diving trophies when he was a kid competing at the public swimming hole at Wolf Creek fill most surfaces and spill over onto the floor.
Robin's interest in archery is limited to watching her husband.
``I can't see like he can,'' she said. ``But Casey will do it. He's been shooting since he was 3 and he's already won some little tournaments when he goes with Tony when he shoots. Casey is his daddy made over.''
It was said that Tony was his mother, Clara, made over. When she started dating Freddie Thorn, he taught her to shoot a .22 rifle. She was a quick study. One day, the two of them went up on the mountain and carved out their initials on a tree, one shot at a time, alternating turns at the trigger.
That was during prosperous times. Tony Thorn recounted a story in which his father, too broke to afford ammunition, went to the woods with six bullets and came back with six squirrels, each one neatly shot in the head.
``You didn't want to be wasting no shots,'' Freddie Thorn said.
Clara Thorn did her share in her youngest son's primitive-weapons education.
``He asked me to make him a slingshot one time and I cut one out of a stick and used a thin piece of rubber and a little piece of rawhide,'' she said.
''I was deadly with that thing,'' Tony said. ``I could shoot a BB with a BB from 15 paces.''
Thorn taught himself to shoot a bow and his methods are unique, as far as he knows. He's grown so used to drawing a bead on a target that he can tell you exactly how far away it is by just looking.
Observers notice from his explanation that somehow he uses the laws that apply to isosceles triangles to gauge his distances. To an ordinary man, what Thorn does with a bow is as wonderful as it is baffling.
It just goes to show. As far as Tony Thorn is concerned, you aren't dealing with an ordinary man.
LENGTH: Long : 116 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Lora Gordon. 1. Tony Thorn takes aim at a target usingby CNBhis own system for sighting. Thorn, a Narrows area resident, will be
competing in an upcoming national competition (ran on NRV-1). 2.
(same caption, again. 3. Thorn at his own home range in Narrows.
Behind him are some of his three-dimensional targets. 4. A likeness
of an archer (above) adorns one of the many trophie won by Thorn. 5.
Thorn keeps this photo of his son, Casey Thorn (age 7), on his bow
as a personal good luck charm (right). color.