Category: Sports

Catching Nemo

A “relatively” True Story

My cousin, Wayne, is an avid fisherman. He had fished all the rivers and lakes around his home in East Tennessee by the time he was fifteen. But real life sometimes distracts us from what we love to do most, and life after graduation from college is no exception. He got a job, and it took him away from the land of rivers and lakes. He moved to Boston, Massachusetts, but his desire to be out on the lake with a rod and a tackle box never subsided.

That’s a Keeper… not

After relentless bragging of his great fishing exploits to his Bostonian workmates through the years, he finally had the chance to show them exactly what he was talking about. He and two co-workers were scheduled for a conference in Knoxville, Tennessee, and he made sure to build some “leisure time” into their itinerary.

  His excitement grew as he took his co-workers to the home of his childhood, where trophy-sized mounted fish still hung in his bedroom, and a well-used bass boat sat waiting in the garage.

  So Wayne got the boat, his two friends, and all the bait they could muster, and headed out to the lake. They had been out in the boat about fifteen minutes when Wayne’s rod bowed over to the point it looked like it would break. “That’s how you do it boys!” Wayne hollered. He pulled, and rested as the fish would come in toward the boat, then turn and make a run, spinning the line back off the reel.

  After fighting for two or three minutes solid, Wayne finally pulled in the biggest, heaviest, monster bass he had ever caught in his life. He was already thinking about how grand it would look mounted next to the others at his parent’s house. “What do you think of that boys?” Wayne asked his two guests with obvious pride.

“We thought you said you caught big fish here in Tennessee. Back home, we just throw those small ones back.”

Disheartened, Wayne said, “We do too.” and tossed the behemoth back into the water – to which his two guests immediately confessed, “Are you kidding us? You threw it back? That was the biggest fish we ever saw caught in our lives!”

photo: http://photo.accuweather.com/photogallery/details/photo/22703/His+big+catch+for+the+day

border

The Autographed Baseball

John Rocker, controversial pitcher
for the Atlanta Braves

When we lived in Florida, we lived near the Brevard County Manatees’ stadium. Several professional teams used the stadium for Spring training. On this occasion, the Atlanta Braves were having an exposition game. My neighbor, Gene, asked if he could take my seven-year-old son along with his sons to watch the game.

I said, “Sure.”

After the game, my son came home and told me what a good time he had. He showed me a baseball he had bought, and told me about eating hot dogs and peanuts. Then he went to bed.

The next day, Gene was over.

“Did you see the baseball your son bought?” Gene asked.

“I did.” I answered.

“We stood in line over an hour to get John Rocker’s autograph,” Gene said.

   The pitcher for Atlanta at the time was John Rocker. He was quite a controversial figure. In a January 2000 Sports Illustrated interview, Rocker had made some disparaging comments about New Yorkers. When asked whether he would ever play for the New York Yankees or the New York Mets, Rocker’s response was:

“I’d retire first… Imagine… you’re riding through [a city like] Beirut next to some kid with purple hair, next to some queer with AIDS, right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time, right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It’s depressing.” Later he said, “Nowhere else in the country do people spit at you, throw bottles at you, throw quarters at you… I talked about what degenerates they were and they proved me right.”

“What?” I asked. “You all stood in line over an hour for John Rocker’s autograph? There was no autograph on the ball.”

“Oh yeah,” said Gene. “We got John Rocker’s autograph on your son’s baseball,” he repeated.

“I don’t think so,” I told him, and went to get the ball.

Turning the ball over and over, I saw no evidence of a signature. I handed it to Gene.

“That’s the ball,” he said, “but there’s no signature!”

So I called my son over. “Son, did John Rocker sign his autograph on your baseball the other night?”

“Yeah, Dad, some guy wrote his name on it.” he replied.

“Well, where’s the signature?”

“I didn’t like it,” he said. “It just looked like a bunch of scribble-scrabble to me so I wiped it off.”

border

I Like Baseball

When my son was about six or seven, I took him to his first baseball game, a Brevard Manatees exhibition game. Along about the sixth inning, we were getting fairly hungry and headed down to the concessions booths. We were about fourth or fifth in line when my son announced, “Hey dad, somebody dropped a dollar.”

Space Coast Stadium, Melbourne, Florida

   I looked down, and between our feet was a dollar bill, folded twice. I told him, “Go ahead and pick it up.” So he bent down and picked up the bill.

  “Dad, should I ask the man in front of us if he dropped it?” he asked. I admired his desire for honesty, but I explained to him a micro-lesson in human behavior: If you offer a person something of value, and ask, ‘Is this yours?’ an unscrupulous person will always say ‘yes’ and take your offering, even if it’s not honestly theirs. I told him a better way would be to wait and see what happens when the man pulls his money out to pay. If he notices he is missing money, he will start looking around for it. Then is a good time to offer the money you found to him.

  We waited through several customers, and none seemed to be missing money, so after about five minutes or so, I told my son he could keep the dollar.    We returned to our seats. We sat down and he unfolded the bill and said, “Dad, it’s not a dollar — it’s twenty dollars!” Then he quickly added, “I think I’m gonna like baseball.”

border

Uncle Ezra goes Fishing

Uncle Ezra and his friend, Roosevelt, decided to go fishing one Saturday morning. They didn’t own a boat, so they were always restricted to casting from the water’s edge. But this day, as they pulled up to the boat dock, they saw a man was renting little john boats for $2.00 an hour.

“Hey,” said Roosevelt, “if we pool all our money, we could take a boat out for an hour or two.” Uncle Ezra thought that to be a fine idea. So they pooled the money from their pockets, looked in the dash of their truck, in the ashtrays, in the floorboards and between the seats. They came up with two dollars and fourteen cents – and they rented a boat.

 The first forty-five minutes of fishing were atrocious. They had to sit extremely still, the little boat threatened to capsize. Their lines got twisted, they hooked the weeds, dropped a rod in the water, and the only bites they got were from the mosquitoes. With less than ten minutes remaining of their hour, they paddled to the center of the lake, and found a nice dark hole.

They cast out out a worm. BAM! A strike. BAM! another one, and another! As fast as they could take them off the hook and put on another worm, another line would have a fish on. Now they couldn’t keep up with the rate at which they were pulling fish in.

  Roosevelt grabbed a wide black marker out of his fishing kit and drew a big black “X” on the side of the boat. “What ‘r you doin’?” asked Uncle Ezra. “I’m marking our spot,” said Roosevelt, “so’s next time we come back out here we ‘kin find ‘hit again.”

“You dumb old man, you”, said Ezra, “ ‘At ain’t gonna’ work. Don’t you know the odds are agin us gettin’ the same boat next time?”

border