The last decade was not our finest hour. Professional sports and ethics under scrutiny, press conferences featuring unrepentant athletes apologizing for dog fighting, bruised spouses, gunplay, infidelity, and their entourage – orchestrated carefully by agents and handlers hoping to mitigate the discomfort of sponsors.
Plenty bled into our sport, the dawn of the “sporting professional” whose intensity and divine calling permits them to leapfrog both “sportsmen” and antiquated ethics, and focus on watershed domination, while ignoring vacationers and us relaxed hobbyists alike.
Internet forums and interactive media were abuzz with tales of those used cruelly. Threads narrate the actions of insensitive fellows who’ve low holed someone’s riffle, wading where they should have been fishing, then sprayed half the cars in the parking lot with dirt and gravel in a rush to repeat the scene elsewhere.
Fueled by catalogs and questionable ethics, they’ve somehow skipped over Poppa’s quaint little “Quiet Sport” and the old notions, to clad themselves as guides and outfitters. Guides somehow earning the “Bad Boy professional” label for want of something truly sinister. The combination of battered truck, weathered brow, and not shaving synonymous with grit, pain, and performance enhancing drugs.
At times it seemed that Trout season was reduced to sixteen weekends plus a bye week, with smiling lawyers leading the way through the flashbulbs and throng of Paparazzi.
The signs of this evolution were everywhere, and not limited to fishing.
The weekend bike ride morphed into grim adults on multi-thousand dollar road bikes wearing European racing livery. Colorful spandex replacing street clothes and gadgets jingle from everywhere; digital devices that measure wind shear, heart rate, and caloric burn, ensuring we’re connected to the bustle of civilization, that which the bike was meant to flee.
Fishing was no different. Our periodicals fawned over unsmiling anglers with a yard of silvery phallus slung purposefully at their crotch. It’s the neo-traditional “look at my Junk” pose. Grim, unsmiling angler with the fish of a lifetime, resentful that he has to pause for the rest of us.
All fish giants, all waters exotic, but only if you’re a professional.
Vendors were falling all over themselves to accommodate this “driven warrior” mentality, how those few hours each weekend are validated by wearing the livery of professional angling. What started as youthful fun is pushed towards “Pro” sport, evidence of sacrifice and deprivation.
Catalogs boast of the new camouflage, Puce and Mauve, along with G3 Guide vests, Battenkill Pro Guide, and Pro Stocking foot waders. Shirts have become guide shirts, and ball caps rechristened as “Pro fishing hats.” We wear our labels on the outside, evidence of our loyalties on breast and hat brim, like NASCAR sponsorships; Sage, Simm’s, Scott, and Loomis, yet conspicuously absent the salty stain of real usage.
Tackle and outerwear prices climbed with every decal. Clothing became “tactical” rather than functional, and the uniform ensures we’re not lumped into the hobbyist cadre, and can crowd your riffle as we deem fit.
The stern professional, wearing racing livery, knowing he could have taken Lance Armstrong if only that silly pedestrian hadn’t spoiled his “line” through the red light.
Perhaps it’s the dawn of the new Hunter-Gatherer with roots in the workplace mating ritual. Our increasingly domesticated lifestyle doesn’t leave much to kill but time. Each weekend we embrace hardship and its retelling around the water cooler – drawing gasps from our coworkers, while we search the crowd for a suitably impressed mate.
” .. we hadn’t had a Starbucks in two entire days, but we didn’t flinch from the cold water. We laughed as it began to rain and the lesser woodsmen fled for shelter and home, then we seen the Bear …”
Real guides are left scratching their head wondering, “who in their right mind would want to be us?” Most are on sabbatical from similar jobs, the luxury of an outdoors career possible only until the snow flies, when they’ll return to grocery stores, local schools, and county jail.
They know there’s no professional class, as most are pressed into service by a combination of geography and availability. Talented locals that leap at the chance of big city wages in depressed areas without much industry.
Many warm their homes with real firewood, know one end of an axe from another, and are happy to supplement their income with the influx of “Pro Guides” and their starched, clean linen. Clients admire the simplicity of the outdoor experience, contrasted with their urban morass, and ignore the sweat and toil of boats, oars, torn flesh, packed lunches, and drooping backcasts.
Angling literature has always used great license portraying both guides and their sporting clientele. The guide as woodsy-character; gruff, often unforgiving, steeped in outdoors lore, hard drinking, occasionally foul mouthed, with a penchant for closing bars, eating raw meat, and winking at daughters, wives, or whatever’s closest …
… female, hopefully human this time.
Guides are enchanted by their larger than life literary depiction yet dismiss it with a chuckle, knowing it’s largely folklore.
“Sports” have endured the foppish Big City label for the last hundred years, and armed with the latest gear from giggling vendors appear hell-bent on continuing that tradition. Complaints about the room, complaints about the food, and petulant because the fish refuse to bite. Their sport neither quaint nor old, never practiced by their Father, extremist really – requiring personal sacrifice and a hefty annual income.
With all eyes focused on the personal celebration in the end zone, the tearful retirement ceremonies and new emphasis on self, we’ve forgotten that the Poor Sport and starched outdoor livery is nothing new, we’ve only added a certain selfishness to an already boorish element.
A combination of glitzy marketing aided by misguided sense of self worth, fostered by twits twittering GPS coordinates for every fish they imagined caught.
Leaving only the faded plaid wool shirt to distinguish “them as do” from “them as wished they did.”
We know better. Fishing has always been about respect. It’s the passing of skills and reverence for the out-of-doors to the next generation, so they won’t see the tall pines and unfettered river as something to drown out with an iPod … so they know not to pave the last pure trickle to please Wendy’s.
It’s always been patched waders and mosquitoes, hardship and inclement weather. It’s cold water down the pants leg, and requires a hardy breed of fellow already – there’s no need for additional pain or glamour, and no cause not to respect others in similar predicament.
… and vendors have always preyed on the weak-minded. The more tactical they can convince you to wear, the less strategic you’ll be about your budget.
While those starched creases may imbue the wearer with unnatural powers, making practice unnecessary and study optional, swathing yourself in Pro Guide isn’t like big city parks, where proximity and insensitive dog walkers guarantee you’ll get some on you.
Tags: Simm’s, Scott, Loomis, Sage, Battenkill Pro Guide, G3 Guide vest, tactical clothing, Bad Boys of Sport, the Quiet Sport, sporting ethics, guides
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