Dan Washburn’s Sporting Life

July 18, 2002 — When I stepped out of my air-conditioned car, the heat hit me like a right hook. The sun was searing and inescapable. Everything, everyone seemed to be surrounded by an abstract haze, kind of like the watercolor paintings that rise from hot highways in the summertime.
I was standing in a crowded [...]

July 4, 2002 — As a kookaburra cackled in the distance, a wallaby wallowed in the shade of a tall tree. Nearby, a red kangaroo hopped, then stopped. She stared at me quizzically. Her baby joey — face, feet and tail all peering out of her pouch — stared, too.
Ah, the sights and sounds of [...]

Hands are bait when grabbing giant catfish
June 20, 2002 — Forget about forethought — or any other type of thought, really — when you stick your hand in front of a 40-pound catfish, hoping that the monster mistakes your fingers for food. Thinking can only cause problems. It’s best to do such things with your [...]

Mississippi ‘masters’ lure lunkers … using only their hands as bait

Mike Willoughby emerged from the mud-brown Mississippi water as if he were part of a river baptism, as if the very spirit of the Holy Ghost had taken possession of his being.

But Willoughby didn’t come up from the Big Black River singing. He didn’t say, “Hallelujah.”

Instead, Willoughby grimaced and grunted. He appeared to be in pain.

“He come up and bit me and twisted off,” the 33-year-old paint contractor from Jackson, Miss., said before groaning again. “Felt like a good fish.”

Then, Willoughby took a deep breath and disappeared into the water again. He was trying to coax a giant flathead catfish into biting his hand.

After his third dunk into the drink, Willoughby spit water, gasped for air and warned us again that the fish was “a good ‘un.”

“Alright, I’m fixin’ to come out with him,” Willoughby announced before going under a final time.

I suppose I shouldn’t have reacted with so much shock when Willoughby struggled to the surface with a 53-pound creature in his arms. I mean, I had seen photos and read accounts of men fishing for colossal catfish using only their bare hands. But I always remained skeptical.

Even after Willoughby lugged his leviathan to the boat and placed its still spasmodic body into a cooler, part of me — the logical and rational part — questioned the validity of the whole venture. To the uninitiated onlooker, what goes on under the cover of muddy water is a mystery.

June 6, 2002 — He is a predator of the sea, lurking deep beneath the surface, hiding inside cracks in the coral reef, waiting for dinner to swim by.
But Wendell Ko does not have gills. He cannot breath underwater. Although, at times it seems like he can.
Ko is a Hawaiian spearfisherman. He is also a [...]

May 30, 2002 — “Turn left at the only red light in town.”
When you are given those directions, you know you are headed for a countrified corner of the world. And when you turn onto Holloway Road in Danielsville, you know you have arrived.
It’s a graveyard for anything with gears. Tractors, backhoes and school buses [...]

April 25, 2002 — Keith Brady’s feet went off like firecrackers. His knees were loose hinges — swinging back and forth, up and around. Everything below was a blur.
Perhaps Brady was a marionette, I thought. Perhaps someone, or something, was pulling at the strings from up above.
He made the unnatural appear natural. He made music [...]

April 21, 2002 — When Gainesville solid waste superintendent Adrian Niles explained it, the job description seemed simple enough. Get garbage out of can. Put lid back on can. Carry garbage to truck and throw it in the back.
Repeat, again and again.
So that’s what I did. For one day, I was a Gainesville garbage collector. [...]

April 4, 2002 — It is a movable throne. In it sits the king of the common man. He is the Zamboni driver.
The Atlanta Thrashers won only 19 of their first 76 games this season. That’s the worst record in the National Hockey League.
But the Zamboni drivers at Philips Arena can do no wrong. They [...]

February 21, 2002 — Robert Webb told me to meet him at the planet Earth. So I did. It was cold and windy there.
Turns out Earth is on the corner of Washington and Main.
You’ll find the moon there, too. Look toward the courthouse, and you’ll see the sun. It’s a stainless steel ball 27.5 inches [...]

January 31, 2002 — “GOT BEER??”
That was the question posed by Dennis Brown’s baseball cap. I’m assuming it was meant to be rhetorical. I was spending the day with the Chicken City Ale Raisers — Gainesville’s home brewing club — and they always “got beer.”
If they run out, they just make some more. But I [...]

December 6, 2001 — It didn’t look like a tunnel.
It looked more like a common hill, covered with rocks and leaves and moss. But Rutherford Ellis, who is known as “Ruddy” to other members of the National Railway Historical Society’s Atlanta Chapter, stared at the embankment like a prisoner staring at the cell walls that [...]

November 6, 2001 — When my beloved New York Yankees lost in Game 7 of the World Series on Sunday, two streaks came an abrupt end. The Yankees’ three-year championship run is done. Finished. Kaput.
So is my reign of baseball bragging rights in The Times newsroom, where tomahawk chops are preferred to pinstripes.
I started writing [...]

October 30, 2001 — If the madness that surrounds the annual meeting between the college football teams from Georgia and Florida is indeed the “World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party,” then the game itself is simply the excuse for throwing it.
It’s the wedding, the graduation, the reunion, the New Year’s Eve. Just another justification for getting [...]

October 16, 2001 — I suppose the skeptical Northerner in me was expecting something different.
I was stranded in a small town in the Deep South. Bad things were bound to happen.
For every act of kindness, I expected a catch. Sure, someone would patch up our broken-down pickup truck. We’d eventually leave Mississippi, and again be [...]

October 9, 2001 — Richmond Eustis didn’t know what he was getting himself into.
Back in August, I e-mailed him the following question: “How long of a road trip would you be willing to make for a bumper pool table?”
Richmond had just returned from a long vacation in Turkey. Perhaps he was still jetlagged, his mind [...]

September 18, 2001 — “I just can’t believe that anybody would do that to anybody,” Jim Collins said to me, staring at the road in pained puzzlement. “I don’t care who they are. That’s just beyond my comprehension.”
The same conversation, I’m sure, was likely going on in pickup trucks across the country last Thursday. America [...]

August 28, 2001 — I’m still not sure if I really grasp the whole concept of the Poker Run on Lake Lanier — which, for what it’s worth, is touted as the largest event of its kind in the world.
On Aug. 18, more than 300 boats participated in this year’s Poker Run, sponsored for the [...]

July 10, 2001 — When I walked into Moose’s Poolside Cafe it was lunchtime. Customers sat on stools and enjoyed veggie burgers, cheesesteak sandwiches and waffle-cut french [...]

May 22, 2001 — Forgive me. I’m having trouble concentrating.
I keep looking out the window instead of at my computer screen. I’d rather be out on the Chattahoochee [...]