A couple of weeks ago, Matt Emmons was sitting in a coffee shop in downtown Colorado Springs, just a 20-minute walk from his home. Everything seemed serene in Emmons’ world — as serene as it can be for a man who shoots guns for a living.
He was readying for his return to his third Olympics, again with his Czech wife who shot Saturday in her third Olympiad. They have a happy, healthy daughter who speaks two languages. He has an Olympic gold medal and silver on his résumé.
The happiness Emmons carries to London, however, has come at a heavy cost. The lessons he learned and the hardships he’s overcome would send normal people into the deepest sanctums of serious therapy.
In summary, he lost Olympic gold in 2004 and 2008 in the same event as a result of huge mistakes on his last shot. He survived thyroid cancer. He went far into this year struggling to find a gun that shoots straight, which is somewhat inconvenient in his sport. Oh, did we mention his recent back problems?
“There’s no one on that firing line who’s gone through half the things or dealt with half the (stuff) I’ve had to deal with,” Emmons said. “So I have that on everybody.”
In international shooting circles, Emmons, 31, is known as the sport’s poster boy for sportsmanship. A five-time World Cup Final gold medalist, he handled the Olympic gold medals that slipped away with such class that it helped him meet and marry his wife.
It was 2004 in Athens. He had already won gold in the 50-meter rifle prone and had a comfortable lead going into the final shot in small-bore rifle three position. Then came the shooter’s living nightmare: He fired at the wrong target and dropped to eighth.
Afterward, Emmons was commiserating with teammates and opponents at the shooting grounds’ beer garden when he felt a tap on his shoulder.
It was Czech shooting star Katerina Kurkhova and her father, Czech shooting coach Peter Kurkhova.
“They both said, ‘We really admire how you handled the situation today,’ ” Emmons recalled. ” ‘We really thought you performed so well. We want to wish you the best of luck.’ “
Then they handed him a four-leaf clover keychain he still keeps in his wallet. Little did she know she was part of that future. They married three years later.
In 2008 in Beijing, his wife had won gold in air rifle and was about to watch her husband win gold in the 50-meter rifle three position. Two days after winning silver in the 50-meter rifle prone, he only needed a relatively easy 6.7 score out of 10.9 on his final shot to win gold.
“The Chinese take their shooting very seriously,” Emmons said. “Having shot the World Cup there earlier in the year, there were a lot of people in the stands and they were reacting to the shots. If someone made a great shot or made a move … they fire on everything. You can be in the middle of holding your gun and shooting your shot and the crowd will go, ‘Ohhh!’ “
Emmons and his wife are notoriously slow shooters. To prevent the Chinese crowd from jostling him, he trained to speed up his rhythm. It worked great — until that last fateful shot.
“I took a couple less breaths than I normally do,” Emmons said. “I get on the sight, I start above the target and relaxed down into it. I just had this calm feeling in my body that, ‘You got this.’ As I was coming down, I start to put my finger on the trigger and …”
Boom! The light, 100-gram trigger went off to his touch, way too early. He scored a 4.4 and wound up fourth.
Two years later, none of that mattered. That’s when he learned he had thyroid cancer.
“Oh, yeah, that whole thing,” said Emmons, as if cancer were just part of his laundry list of hurdles. “That was nuts.”
He had felt sluggish for a while. People starting joking about his daily naps. He sensed a sinus infection.
It wasn’t a cold. Doctors found a lump on the side of his thyroid and told him it could be cancerous. Sure enough.
They recommended surgery to remove half his thyroid.
“Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! What does this mean?” Emmons said. “No. 1, how bad is thyroid cancer? Am I going to live? Am I going to die? Am I going to see my kid grow up? Am I going to be able to spend time with my wife? Who cares if I’m going to shoot?”
He returned to get treated in New York, only two hours from his hometown of Browns Mills, N.J., and emerged with more energy. Now he’s ready to shoot for gold, starting Monday.
Funny how overcoming cancer can make the loss of a medal seem like the loss of a to-do list.
“There are things that are so far more important than sport ever will be,” he said.
John Henderson: 303-954-1299, jhenderson@denverpost.com or twitter.com/johnhendersondp
