She was 41 years old. She had an Academy Award on the shelf. And she had never once held a bow.
Most people, at 41, have quietly filed away the question of what else they might have been. Geena Davis pulled the question back out and put an arrow through it.
It started with a television.
In the summer of 1996 the Olympics were in Atlanta, and American archers were winning. A 21-year-old Californian named Justin Huish, ponytail and backwards cap, took two gold medals, and the networks kept cutting back to the archery range because that was where the medals were. Davis was watching from home, the way half the country was watching.
“They had a lot of coverage of archery because America was winning all the gold medals,” she said. “And I was like, ‘Wow!'”
That was it. That was the whole origin story. No childhood dream, no family tradition, no dead relative’s bow in the attic. A woman on a couch watched strangers shoot at a target and thought: I want to try that.
She met Huish in early 1997. What stuck with her wasn’t the gold. It was how ordinary he made the whole thing sound. He shot arrows across the street at his house, right through his garage. Davis said she was fascinated by that. It sounded like fun. So she found a coach and booked a lesson.
Then the lesson took her.
“I found a coach and became utterly obsessed,” Davis said years later. “Yeah, I took it up at 41 and it became my life for a couple of years.”
Obsessed is doing a lot of work in that sentence, so here is what it meant on the ground. Five hours a day. Six days a week. Not a phase. Not a nice bow gathering dust in a closet next to the tennis racket. A working actress with a career in one of the most demanding industries on earth drove out to a field, shot arrows for five hours, went home, and got up the next morning and did it again.
Her coach was Don Rabska, one of the most respected minds in American archery.
About six months in, something strange started happening. She began winning. Local tournaments first. Then national ones. Then international ones. A woman who had been shooting since spring was walking into competitions and beating people who had been drawing a bow since they were nine.
By 1999 she had a target of her own, and it was a long way past the local club. Sydney. The 2000 Summer Olympics.
The road there ran through Oxford, Ohio, in the middle of July. Three hundred women turned up to shoot for a place on the U.S. Olympic archery team. Three hundred. Davis, two years into the sport, finished 29th and made the cut to the top 32.
That put her name on the list headed to Bloomfield, New Jersey, on August 21, 1999. Twenty-eight women left. The top sixteen would advance. From there the field would shrink to eight, and those eight would travel to California to fight over three team spots and one alternate slot for Sydney.
She was 43 years old. She had been shooting a bow for two years. And she was standing on a line in New Jersey with a real, live chance of going to the Olympics.
Then it started to rain.
Rain wrecks archery in a hundred small ways. The string, the fletching, the sight picture, the footing, the grip, the wind that comes with it. And Davis had done all of her training in Southern California, where rain is mostly a rumor.
“It’s tough for us because we never get to practice in the rain in California,” Rabska said.
She finished 24th out of 28. The top 16 moved on. She wasn’t one of them.
You can read that as a sad ending if you want to. She didn’t.
“I think I did well,” Davis said. “I was very happy.”
She was also tickled by the circus that had followed her onto a wet field. Photographers had come out to cover an archery trial in New Jersey, which almost never happens in this country, because an Oscar winner was on the shooting line. “It was like being at a premier,” she said.
And she wasn’t done. She said she wanted to stay with the sport “to see how good I can get,” and talked about taking another run at it in four years. That same year she picked up a wild card berth at the Sydney International Golden Arrow competition, so she made it to Sydney after all. Just not the way she had drawn it up.
The numbers are the whole point here, so sit with them a second.
At 41, she had never held a bow. At 43, she was one of 28 women in the entire United States still standing in an Olympic archery trial, out of the 300 who had shown up in Ohio to try. Between those two facts there is nothing at all except five hours a day, six days a week, and a woman who decided the question of what else she might be was still open.
Most of us watch the Olympics and think, that’s incredible, those people are built different. Then we get up and make coffee.
She got up and found a coach.
