Matt Stutzman’s time in Kansas City was brief, but he’s always had an appreciation for it.
Now a three-time Paralympic archer who qualified for the Tokyo Olympics at last month’s U.S. Paralympic Team Trials, Stutzman was born with no arms in Kansas City, Kansas, in 1982.
Adopted just over a year later by a family in Iowa, he somewhat sheepishly admitted that his football loyalties lie with the Green Bay Packers. But he said the Chiefs are his “second favorite” team.
“Hear me out: I’m a Packers fan, but I think (Patrick) Mahomes is awesome,” Stutzman said. “I still have that little bit of tie (to the KC area). But when they face each other, of course, I have to go with the Packers.”
Like superstar Chiefs quarterback Mahomes, Stutzman will be tested at the elite level of his sport very soon. And much like Mahomes, Stutzman already has some precious metal in his trophy cabinet as a star of his sport.
Stutzman won the silver medal at the 2012 London Paralympics in the individual compound open category, a notable achievement in a career full of great heights: He holds the Guinness World Record for farthest archery target hit — with arms or not — and crushed the previous world record for a double 50-meter round at the Paralympic Trials with scores of 1398/1440, beating the previous record by 20 points.
Now living in Iowa, Stutzman trains mainly by himself, apart from Team USA functions. He shoots his compound bow by raising it by his foot and pulling it back with his shoulder, resting the slack on his chin and aiming before he fires.
“For me, it’s a mindset,” Stutzman said. “I started archery to provide for my family and made sure that they had food on the table and shoes on their feet and stuff. And so for me, my mindset was: ‘This is my job. This is how I’m going to figure it out.’”
The sport has provided a fruitful career for Stutzman, a rarity in the world of archery as few make a living solely on pulling back a bow. But he’s made it work as both that and a motivational speaker, options that initially seemed to be out of the equation when he was struggling to find employment.
Relying upon Social Security for income, he hunted deer to ensure his family had food to eat. With nothing to lose, Stutzman turned pro, and it’s worked pretty well since. Now a single father to three boys, he spends his down-time at home working on cars with his sons.
He spent Father’s Day weekend drag and rally racing with an engine he built himself.
“For me, it was kind of my last swing for the home run-type thing,” he said of archery. “So for me, mentally, it wasn’t like it was going to be impossible to do. If you look at a bow, you don’t think of an armless man shooting it, right? But for me, it wasn’t one of those things where I looked at it that way. I’m going to figure this out no matter what it takes.”
The Paralympics, which take place in Japan after the Olympics end, will begin Aug. 24 and continue through Sept. 5. Stutzman will fly out to Japan about a week before the Paralympics begin with redemption top of mind.
After winning the silver medal in London in 2012, Stutzman didn’t make it out of the Round of 16 at the 2016 Rio Olympics. The pandemic-prompted year-long delay of the Tokyo Olympics allowed him time to improve. He said he’s never shot better.
“I was able to take advantage of the extra year for training,” Stutzman said. “I feel I’m better right now than I would have been a year ago going into the Games. … I’m just more mentally ready, to be honest, more mentally prepared into trials and a lot of the stuff that I had worked on, I put to use at trials. And it worked extremely well, to the point where it just gave me a bunch of confidence for this Games.”
If Stutzman is indeed the strongest he’s been — and his record-breaking performance at the trials would seem to validate that claim — he could be in for special Olympic Games.
For a guy who found his career on a whim, he’s done quite well for himself.
“I’m lucky,” Stutzman said. “I’m lucky that this has worked out for me. It’s a very small percentage — I don’t even know if it’s 1% — of all archers in the world make a living doing it.
“So I’m just happy that I can make a living doing it because I don’t know what I’d be doing if I couldn’t be doing this.”