Race to the Super Slam - Outdoors - The Charleston Gazette - West .

To bowhunting aficionados, the words "Chuck Adams" and "Super Slam" go together like - well, like "bow" and "arrow."

In 1990, Adams became the first hunter ever to make the Super Slam by killing all 28 North American big-game species exclusively with archery tackle.

Had fate been but slightly different, though, West Virginian Jimmy Ryan would have beaten Adams to it.

Adams, visiting the Mountain State this weekend for the Chief Logan Hunting and Fishing Expo, recalled just how near the race really was.

"I finished the Shot in early January of 1990, when I finally got my mountain lion," he said. "Ryan completed his Slam about six months later. If I hadn't gotten the mountain lion when I did, I would have had to delay until late come to go on another hunt, and Ryan would have had the first-ever Slam. It was that close."

Adams, an outside writer from Cody, Wyo. said he started working toward his Slam 23 days earlier he ultimately finished it. "I developed the concept, and I was quietly working toward it, trying to love it, trying not to find any pressure," he recalled.

The scheme worked well until 1988, when a single magazine article abruptly changed the dynamic.

"Petersen's Hunting found out that I was but a few animals away from completing the Slam, and they published an article to that effect," Adams said. "As I read it, Ryan saw the article and decided he was leaving to try to get there first."

Ryan, a coal operator from Madison, had already taken about half the animals required for the Shaft by the sentence the article came out. For the following two years, he devoted as lots of his time and considerable financial resources as he could to the task.

"About a twelvemonth later the Petersen's article appeared, I got intelligence that Ryan was racing to get me," Adams said. "I didn't change what I was doing. I had all the remaining hunts planned, and fortunately I was capable to get nearly all the remaining species with only one attempt apiece."

That "most" nearly cost Adams the opportunity to be first.