Selling sports stuff

After all these years, it has finally become financially safe for me to watch a professional golf match like the Pebble Beach Classic this last weekend. There is an insidious side to several popular sports which can be rather costly. Example: During last Saturday’s broadcast there were repeated ads for a new gizmo that attaches to “your current driver” and it calculates several aspects of your personal stance, compensates for it and will add up to 25 yards to the length of your drive off the tee.

Just a few years ago I’d have probably rushed up to the local course and bought one of those. Sometimes I think there is not a day goes by that some smooth talkin’ son of a gun doesn’t come up with something like that to hook nice innocent guys like I used to be.

There isn’t a real dedicated veteran fly fisherman who hasn’t got several hundreds of dollars worth of the latest artificial lures in his vest. I recall going into a famous fly fishing shop in Livingston, Montana years ago to pick up a half dozen “grizzly wolfs.” Ended up buying 40 dollars worth of little teeny orange things with one eye which the clerk convinced me were catching 90 percent of the big rainbows on the Yellowstone that year.

Spinning lures are the same. In the back of my car are two tackle boxes full of rusty ragged looking junk thinga-ma-jigs some “pro” in a store sold to me. At least two of these things were “so good” at luring big trout, the clerk suggested I should hide behind a tree when tying one on my line.

Surprisingly enough, there are a few folks out there who do not fall for every new “improvement” or “scientific discovery” that comes along. A prize example was high school friend and super-coordinated athlete, Bumps Winters. Didn’t matter, shootin’ marbles or shootin’ baskets, Bumps was unbeatable. Montana’s entire high school athletic world was shaken up when he took a five iron, three wood, and putter, put ‘em in a gunny sack and won the state golf tournament.

In the fishing word, a grey-haired and kindly lady named Joy Paulson looked after Art and Billy Burch’s kids each summer in Glacier Park. Stationed at Many Glacier, several evenings a week Joy would catch the Burch’s doggie and snip off a bit of hair, tie it on a bare hook then catch enough nice brook trout for breakfast.

The only thing that bothers me about folks like Bumps and Joy is, if there were too many of their kind around, they would seriously damage the sporting world’s economy.

G. George Ostrom is a national award-winning columnist for Hungry Horse News. He lives in Kalispell.