Howard Hill

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Howard Hill

Howard Hill in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
Born (1899-11-13)November 13, 1899
Wilsonville, Alabama,
United States
Died February 4, 1975(1975-02-04) (aged 75)
Birmingham, Alabama,
United States
Resting place
 New Ashville Cemetery in Ashville, Alabama
Occupation Professional Archer, Actor

Howard Hill (November 13, 1899 - February 4, 1975) was an archer who was unofficially referred to as the "World's Greatest Archer". He is the only person to win 196 archery field tournaments in succession.[1] He was also a football, baseball, and basketball player at Auburn University.[2] He was inducted into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame in 1971 for his skill in archery.[3]

Early life

Howard Hill played baseball, basketball, football, and golf as a home town hero at his high school in Wilsonville Alabama. He later went on to marry his former English teacher from high school in 1922. Hill attended Auburn University, where he played football and basketball[4] While maintaining his job at Hughes Tool in Miami, Florida, he continued to play semi-pro baseball on the side. While his baseball career progressed, he decided to take up golf again, if it were not for his less than perfect putting ability[citation needed], he would have excelled to be a professional golfer. Subsequently, he decided to revert to the old stand-by long bow to take up field shooting competitions. [5]

Dedication to archery

Once Howard had read the book The Witchery of Archery by Maurice Thompson, he was hooked. This book was the inspiration for his career as a professional archer, a craftsman, an author, and an actor. Howard Hill has been a major promoter of archery from the beginning, especially that which involved the use of a long bow. Being so dedicated to the sport, he decided to make his own equipment as a master craftsman.[6] Many people have heard that Howard Hill is the best Archer that ever lived, but they don't know how seriously he took that. [7]

Achievements

Howard Hill is one of the most decorated archers in target shooting, hunting, and flight archery competitions, he is also a celebrated writer and producer. During his career, he produced 23 films about archery for Warner Brothers. He also shot 10 different movies of his own, and was a technical adviser in far more movies to provide advice in the archery field of the movies. He killed over 2,000 animals with his long bow, including an elephant, becoming the first white man to kill an elephant with a bow and arrow. He used four foot arrows, while pulling a 172 pound bow to take the mighty beast. In 1928, he set the new world record for the furthest flight shot in archery, at 391 yards. That same year, he won his 196th field archery competition in a row. Later in his life, in 1959 he was awarded a plaque for his outstanding achievements in archery. Later in 1971, he was inducted into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame, later being inducted into the Bow Hunters Hall of Fame in 1975, in the year of his death.[8]

Performing

He liked to make difficult trick shots, like shooting an apple or prune off someone's head from sixty feet away. He would then perform the same stunt with an even smaller item from a greater distance.[9]

He produced several short documentaries on archery, often performing difficult trick shots like shooting a flipping coin or splitting a wooden ball in half while it is rolling on the ground. He would shoot difficult trick shots from the alternate position of lying on the ground, holding the bow with his feet.

To go with his great ability in trick shooting, he showed amazing talent in hunting. Altogether, he took some 2,000 animals with his traditional long bow style. Some of his great trips have been filmed or documented, one of these is Howard Hill vs. Lion, another one of these short documentaries is Howard Hill vs. Elephant. These two videos, of the very many, show just a couple of examples of his great hunting ability, and perhaps one of the reasons he is considered the greatest hunter of all time.[10]

Filmography

Acting

Howard Hill in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

Technical adviser and archery instructor

While performing as the stunt archer for the film The Adventures of Robin Hood (starring Errol Flynn), Hill made the most iconic archery shot in literature: Robin Hood splitting a target-embedded arrow with his own. The MythBusters cast were unable to replicate the end to end splitting of an arrow, and concluded Hill used a shaft made of bamboo, not wood, for the famous shot.

Split arrow from The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

Byron Ferguson, traditional bow hunter and trick-shot expert, was able to perfectly split an arrow lengthwise using a modern laminated longbow for the History Channel special "Extreme Marksmen". The average archer has a chance to shoot the "Robin Hood" stunt every 1 in 10,000 shots.[citation needed] Byron Ferguson, however, did not split a wooden arrow but telescoped a modern aluminum arrow into another. The aluminum and carbon fiber arrow shafts used by modern archers are more consistent and straighter than wood arrows, making for more consistent shots. This makes Hill's feat truly unique since he used only cedar wood arrows. Hill had designed and used specially made aluminum shafts to hunt African elephants for his full length color film Tembo.

The splitting of the arrow story is refuted by Hollywood stuntman Buster Wiles, in his book My Days With Errol Flynn. In the book, Wiles revealed that although Hill had split the end off of several arrows, he had been unable to split the arrow exactly as scripted (from end to end), and finally a specially constructed arrow with a large bladed head had been used, shot along a concealed wire. Nevertheless, Hill's accuracy was so great, he regularly hit tiny targets in live performances and on film.

Both Wiles and Hill were long time friends of Errol Flynn and frequent guests at his house and on his yacht.

Fictional representations

In Book One of DC Comics' Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters by Mike Grell, Howard Hill is mentioned by Oliver Queen as having been his childhood idol. It is this series that depicts Ollie's meeting with Hill during a cruise that led to Queen's becoming the Emerald Archer. It is later mentioned in Grell's Green Arrow ongoing series that Oliver Queen met Howard Hill on a cruise ship shortly before falling overboard. Hill is shown shooting a quarter out of the air with the bow he used on the film The Adventures of Robin Hood. He then gives this bow to Queen, who later finds himself on a tropical island using that very bow to survive. The bow makes a reappearance in the world of Oliver Queen when he begins to seek "spiritual guidance". It then becomes the bow he regularly uses in his crime fighting escapades. When Oliver dies in Green Arrow #101 his son Connor Hawke starts to use the Hill Bow to fight crime.

In the first issue of Green Arrow: Year One, Oliver Queen (Green Arrow) buys the bow Hill used during the filming of The Adventures of Robin Hood.

References

  1. ↑ http://www.howardhillarchery.com/the-legends-story.html
  2. ↑ http://www.thewareaglereader.com/2010/06/the-legend-of-howard-hill/
  3. ↑ http://www.ashof.org/index.php?src=directory&srctype=display&id=104&submenu=Inductees&view=company_detail Alabama Sports Hall of Fame
  4. ↑ http://www.thewareaglereader.com/2010/06/the-legend-of-howard-hill/
  5. ↑ Huntington, C. (2002). L' One- shot! Retrieved December 10, 2012, from Stickbow.com website: http://www.stickbow.com/stickbow/history/Hill.html
  6. ↑ Atwill, L. (2008, June). The world's greatest archer. Field & Stream, 1-4. Retrieved from http://ic.galegroup.com/ic/suic/MagazinesDetailsPage/ MagazinesDetailsWindow?failOverType=&query=&prodId=SUIC&windowstate=normal&conten tModules=&mode=view&displayGroupName=Magazines&limiter=&currPage=&disableHighligh ting=false&source=&sortBy=&displayGroups=&search_within_results=&action=e&catId=& activityType=&scanId=&documentId=GALE%7CA20629938
  7. ↑ Huntington, C. (2002). L' One- shot! Retrieved December 10, 2012, from Stickbow.com website: http://www.stickbow.com/stickbow/history/Hill.html
  8. ↑ Ekin, C. (2008, July 15). The Legend's Story. Retrieved December 10, 2012, from Howard Hill Archery website: http://www.howardhillarchery.com/ the-legends-story.html
  9. ↑ Wiles, Buster (February 1989). My Days With Errol Flynn: The Autobiography of Stuntman Buster Wiles. Roundtable Publishing. ISBN 0-915677-36-9. 
  10. ↑ Huntington, C. (2002). L' One- shot! Retrieved December 10, 2012, from Stickbow.com website: http://www.stickbow.com/stickbow/history/Hill.html

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