It’s Sportsman’s Ideal Notion of Nothing to Do

It is a fact of life in this country that most sports, when you take part in them, send your blood pressure soaring, your heart pounding, your lungs bursting and your senses racing. Even running a leisurely long distance can be counted on to send your blood pressure 100 points over normal and raise your pulse rate 50.

But if you’re looking for the sport that will slake the competitive urge and refresh the inner juices but calm the blood pressure down to a snooze and still the racing pulse, Cotton Cordell of the Ouachita River Cordells advises you to throw away your running shoes and rackets and get a pair of hip boots and a pole.

If you want a short exciting life, get a race car or boxing gloves. If you want a long, tranquil one, get a fishing reel.

Cordell, who has been fishing the waters of the world since he was able to walk, which makes that 55 years, wants to know what other sport can boast of a President of the United States and the head of the New York Mafia as enthusiasts?

Calvin Coolidge gave up the presidency to go fishing, and Cotton remembers growing up as a boy in Hot Springs, Ark., and seeing Frank Costello, no less, sitting in a boat tying to coax a bite out of the bass on a man-made lake there. Owney Madden used to buy bait from him at a time when a hundred FBI agents were looking for Madden.

God is a fisherman, in the view of Cordell, and man is never happier than when he is wading up a trout stream with a new fly rod or tossing a hook into a boil of yellowtail off the fantail of a party boat.

As a fisherman, I have wet a line now and again but, believe me, Hemingway was never going to write any books about me. The trouble with it as a sport is that, in any given situation, there always seem to be more fishermen than fish. And although man may be the more intelligent creature on land, the reverse is true on water. The fish has the home-court advantage.

Man has been tying to out-think fish since Biblical times. It is a sad commentary on our civilization that pollution has killed more fish than hooks.

Cordell who is making an appearance at Fred Hall’s Western Fishing Tackle and Boat Show at the Long Beach Convention Center this week, has made a career out of evening the odds. He was once described by a press agent as “the man who thinks like fish.” Not in a poker game, but in a boat. In your boat.

The trick in fishing, Cordell says, is to put something in the water that looks to the fish like the main course at a four-star restaurant. This is done by an artful combination of movement and color that makes the fish thing he’s onto a pizza with everything, to go. This is Cotton’s specialty, make an eggshell look like an omelet.

He did this initially by snatching dog hair from the tail of his English setter and fastening it to a jig. The fish did everything but follow him home.

Cotton turned his discovery into an enterprise that now has factories in Taiwan, El Salvador and Arkansas. They use deer tails now, instead of dog hair, but Cordell, who sold his business to an Alabama conglomerate, thinks the fish are still overmatched.

The real great plus in fishing is, it breeds optimism in a man, Cordell says. There are no pessimists on the ends of fishing poles. A lunker is just around the next corner. And optimism is the secret of long life.

That may all be so. But I can’t help remembering the fisherman I once encountered who had left his writings on the bulkhead of a fishing boat. If not a pessimist, he was at least a realist. It was his version of “The Old Man and the Sea.” Under the heading of “Alibis,” this lavatory poet had listed:

--You should have been here yesterday.

--It will pick up tomorrow.

--It’s too cloudy today.

--The sun is too bright today.

--They ain’t hitting sardines today.

--Boy, if we only had sardines today!

--The sea is too choppy.

--I wish we had a little chop today.

--They’re too deep today.

--They’re too near the surface.

He concluded with “the world’s greatest lie” which he identified as “I really didn’t mind not catching any fish today because the fresh air, sunshine and boat ride was wonderful.”

Maybe that’s the secret: When nothing’s going on, neither is time.