#sowbelly

Boxelder on Sowbelly Creek, Nebraska 08.27.16

My dreams were shattered. There was no chance I could play baseball for Mississippi State. It didn’t matter that I had great plate discipline and I batted nearly .500. My 155 pound, 5’ 11” frame boasted no power, had average speed, and couldn’t pitch anywhere around 95 mph. It didn’t matter that I’d outwork anyone: running three miles a day, lifting weights, hitting in the cage all off-season.  I learned the hard way that the numbers were against me from the start, that out of the 150,000 high school baseball seniors, 94% couldn’t play in college.

            Despite the odds, many parents are still obsessed, some spending all their kid’s college savings on trainers, coaches, elite travel teams, and camps because they believe that out of the millions of kids that play sports in America (11.5 million baseball players alone), theirs has what it takes to make it big.  And so many drive their kids to the breaking point, blinded by obsession, hoping for greatness but receiving misery.

A nearby high school baseball coach told me once of a kid they had that was a phenomenal hitter, had all the right stuff—power, bat speed, great eye—he led the team in nearly every category. But, the kid couldn’t pass math. He worked hard in class, but he just had a block when it came to numbers. So the parents approach the coach at the end of the season and ask for the names of some batting coaches that they could hire to get their son to the next level. The coach answered, “How about hiring a math tutor? That is what he needs. It won’t matter how good he is if he can’t pass math.” He said the parents were oblivious, like a deer in headlights, they’d never thought about him needing help in school. They were obsessed, drunk on sports dreams, missing the reality that only a select few have any chance for sports greatness.

            But in largemouth bass fishing, greatness awaits anyone, the world record holder for nearly 60 years, George Washington Perry, was an unsuspecting farmer who happened to go fishing one day because his fields were too wet for plowing (his 22lb 4 oz bass has since been tied with a largemouth from Japan). The obsession to beat his record, and the possibility that it could be anyone, is one of the themes in Monte Burke’s Sowbelly.

            The book is the Friday Night Lights of big bass fishing, as Burke shares stories of the quirkiest people who have given their lives to the pursuit; some quite literally, destroying their family in the process. From a bitter Californian motorcycle cop who’d sit and stare at his still lines for nearly 12 hours every day to the Texas boys sitting in their fishery labs, tweaking the genes, hoping to grow the next great lunker, Burke shows the fanatic obsession of these anglers, simultaneously casting light on so many American idiosyncrasies. It is a fascinating and entertaining read and before you know it, you’ve learned a ton about the largemouth and the sport’s rise of into big money tournaments and television shows.