‘SLINGSHOT KING’ AGAIN TARGETS CHAMPIONSHIP

Nov 21, 2023

They call Richard "Blue" Skeen the Slingshot King, and when you see him shoot, you know why.

He pulls the rubber band back until the leather sling holding the ball bearing rests just under his cheekbone. When he lets go, the band snaps forward with a rubbery "thwap." A split second later, the steel ball smacks the tin-can target with a loud "ping."

A sunny afternoon spent with Skeen on his farm in Wise County is a sing-song of snapping rubber and wincing metal: thwap ping, thwap ping, thwap ping. The man rarely misses a shot. Almost never.

Skeen was recently trying to show a visitor how to handle a slingshot the other day.

"Like this?" the visitor asked, pulling the band back awkwardly.

"No," Skeen said. "Keep your head up."

"Is this right?" the visitor asked, adjusting his stance.

"No."

"Is this better?"

"No, no, no," Skeen said, loading his slingshot. "Like this."

Thwap ping, thwap ping, thwap ping.

Skeen, 68 and retired, is a native of Pound and a national champion slingshooter. He owns 400 slingshots, many of which he made himself from ash and oak, mulberry and mountain laurel.

He drives to Illinois to buy the rubber to make the slingshot bands.

He drives to Kentucky to buy ammo – ball bearings 7/16-inch in diameter. He buys the steel balls by the ton. Fifty cents will get you a pound of them.

"Making slingshots and shooting them is just something I love to do," Skeen said recently, staring down at a kitchen table covered with slingshots.

In 1985 and again in 1987, Skeen won the national slingshot championship. The group that sponsored the tournament hasn't held one since, making Skeen a reigning champ.

In August, Kent Shepard, former head of the National Catapultry Association based in Illinois, is reviving the national championship tournament, playing host for the first one in 13 years. Skeen, despite suffering from arthritis and having a replacement hip, is coming out of slingshot retirement to compete in the Chambersburg, Ill., event.

"Blue Skeen's the guy to beat," said Shepard, who anticipates at least 50 competitors will show up.

John Cryderman, who owns a slingshot-making company in Canada, agrees. "There are a lot of good shooters, but Blue Skeen is the best in the world."

Skeen, who attributes his skill to practice and gut instinct, said this of the tournament and the possibility that he could lose his title: "I’m going to enjoy myself. If they beat me, they deserve it."

Though he has come to be called the Slingshot King only recently, Skeen's love affair with the weapon goes back to his boyhood in the hollows of Appalachia.

Skeen said he and his childhood buddies used to saunter around with slingshots around their necks and use them to fire pebbles at squirrels and rabbits. A boy and a slingshot spell trouble, of course.

"One time my brother and his friend told me I couldn't hit the school window," Skeen recalled. "I knocked it out, and they ran off."

Skeen is a retired auto-plant assembly line worker. After leaving Pound as a teen-ager, he pulled a stint in the U.S. Air Force and then went to Detroit and found work at General Motors.

In the late 1970s, after going years without picking up a slingshot, a workmate persuaded him to try his hand with the weapon. He did and quickly renewed his love for it.

"I went out hunting squirrels," Skeen recalled. "It took me three weeks to hit my first squirrel. It doesn't take me that long anymore."

Skeen soon joined the Multi-Lakes Conservation Association's Slingshot League, a Michigan group that was host to the national championships. He won the speed-shooting championship several years running and the national championships in 1985 and 1987.

In 1988, after returning to Pound to the farm where he grew up, he stopped shooting competitively. But he has been a regular visitor to elementary schools in Wise County, appearing as the Slingshot King and wowing kids with his shooting prowess.

To prepare for the national tournament, Skeen is shooting 100 steel balls a day at tin cans 10 meters away, or about 33 feet. That's the standard distance in competitions; the regulation target is about four inches wide, the bull's-eye an inch in diameter.

To practice, Skeen shoots at small tin cans dangling on strings in the yard beside his two-story wooden house. For fun, he throws a ball bearing on the ground and, from a distance of 10 feet, shoots it so that it pops up into the air.

Everyone in the area around Pound knows Skeen as the Slingshot King. Many have seen him shoot, and he's given dozens of slingshots away, along with a quick lesson. Most of the people along the road where he lives have one of his slingshots, he said. And that's not always a good thing.

"Some time ago, one of my neighbors came home and found a window broken and two ball bearings inside her house," Skeen said. "They blamed me."

Sign up for email newsletters