This is an essay about fishing. Well, no, it's about guilt. No, actually it's about a confession. Okay, it's about all three, but mostly, it's a confession, and it begins like this:
About 35 summers ago, Sports Illustrated, my then employer, sent my family around the country and asked me to write about our vacation in a series they called "American Summer." It was the trip of a lifetime. Imagine your employer telling you, "Hey, goof off for eight weeks and we'll pay for it."
One of our stops was in Hastings, a beautiful Minnesota town on the banks of the Mississippi. One of the events during their River Day celebration was a fishing contest. This is the guilt part of the essay. One of my weaknesses as a father and now as a grandfather is that I don't like fishing. I've never been the wisened old river rat dad or grandpop who takes the lads fishing and imparts knowledge based on the tides or information gained from creatures with tiny, water soaked brains.
But at the Hastings River Day celebration, oldest son Jamie, who had just turned 12, wanted to do the fishing contest and was put under the charge of a local named Bruce, who apparently was the ace fisherman of Hastings, Minnesota. Now, given my interest in actually fishing, you can imagine my interest in watching fishing, so I stayed only for a few minutes. And I remember guide Bruce and son Jamie taking off in the exact opposite direction as most of the other boats.
The rules were, an adult could be in the boat and assist the youngster in pulling the fish into the boat, but that the fish had to be caught by the youngster.
I returned a couple hours later to the fishing contest to find that Jamie had pulled in the biggest fish. What? 75 other boats and my son had won, with a 17 1/2 inch, 3 lb. bass; not a monster, but enough to win. Jamie was happy, of course, but not as happy as I was, having escaped two hours of fishing and still seeing my son come in happy. I wrote the story, filed it the next day, and a Sports Illustrated editor said to me, "Jack, are you sure they didn't rig this thing so your son would win?" "No way," I said.
Now, a slight backdrop. You cannot believe what a big deal it was for Hastings, Minnesota back then to have Sports Illustrated cover its River Days. Jamie had turned 12 during our visit and they put a "Happy birthday" message up on the damn bank marquee in town. We were mini celebrities — nothing to do with me, it was the power of the magazine.
So, over the years, I've come to believe... I think it was a set up. You can't completely rig a fishing contest, of course. You still gotta pull the wriggly thing into the boat, and the main way people cheat in fishing contests is by adding weights inside of the fish. That's not what happened here. But my belief is that they planted a good sized bass or a few of them into a certain section of water and guide Bruce, a skilled angler anyway, headed off in that direction. He knew where to go, significantly increasing the odds.
Now, son Jamie, no 47 years old and an avid fisherman in Vermont, disagrees strongly. "I still remember how we got it," Jamie told me in a phone call, "The guy told me to cast toward a shadowed area under an old tree. Fish hang out in that kind of water. It was a legit catch, dad."
Well, Jamie knows fishing and I don't, so I'll try to believe him. But given the odds of catching even one fish, the fact that the Sports Illustrated writer's son pulls in the biggest one? Dubious. But, look, I can't say for sure. I do know it was my personal fishing highlight, especially since I didn't have to hold a rod in my hands.
