His name was Ian.
I know this because his father said it. Many, many times. As did his mother. They used it in sentences like, "Ian, don't touch that" and "Ian, don't put that in your mouth." It would echo through the trees when Ian ran off to chase a frog or a bug or an imaginary frog that was trying to eat an imaginary bug.
Sometimes his father — one of those middle-aged guys from New York who has more hair on his shoulder blades than his head, yet continues to defiantly wear a tank top in the summer — would substitute another word for "Ian." Especially when he was trying to humor Ian's antic little urges while trying to sneak down to the lake for some lounging in the sun. He'd say, "That's a great looking puzzle, champ" or "That's a really funny story, buddy," while juggling two towels, a Sports Illustrated, a six-pack of Bud Lite, and a tub of pretzels down to his beach chair.
Ian and his family were staying in the cabin next to mine, and we were all living next to a large lake in eastern Maine for a week. I was there for vacation. So was Ian. So were his parents, although I can't imagine a level of relaxation could be attained when the majority of your time is spent trying to prevent a precocious 6-year old from eating broken seashells.
(I assumed Ian was 6 because he looked exactly like the little blonde moppet from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," who I always figured was about 6.)
(Then again, I wore blue jammies and thought aliens controlled the vacuum cleaner until I was about 23.)
Without sports for a week — the cabin didn't have a TV, radio, the Internet, a newspaper, phone, carrier pigeon, or an old copy of Golf Digest near the crapper — I was reduced to sucking down several beers on a screened-in porch every afternoon and living vicariously through the "athletes" around me, which, in this case, were amateur fishermen and women.
There was the guy who'd take out the powerboat every morning, using rods that probably cost more than my car to snag several bass each day. There were the knucklehead teenagers with the equipment from the local Wal-Mart, whose bright idea was to try and catch fish while sitting in a paddleboat. (Sample Bass Thought: "Wow, that's one good-looking worm. But I sure as hell ain't risking my gills swimmin' up to that spinning death machine to get it!")
And then there was Ian's family. He had two older brothers who had gone out a few times in the smaller motor boats docked on the lake. I don't want to say these gentlemen weren't the most effective fishermen, but Ray Charles could have caught more armed only with a bo staff.
True story: one morning, they went out on the lake and came back having only caught a rod some other poor bastard had lost in the water on a previous trip.
Perhaps inspired by his siblings, Ian decided to create his own fishing rod. He found a twig, maybe about 18 inches long and about as straight as Freddie Couples's vertebrae. He tied a string to one end of it, and took it down to the dock where his brothers were. They provided a hook and some bait, and Ian joined the millions of recreational anglers who populate America's streams, lakes, and parkway overpasses each summer.
Ian's father was also near the lake, peering through a large telescope. I can only assume that, based on his age and the fact that this was a solitary activity, he was looking at a naked lady in a nearby cabin. Or perhaps the moon at dusk. One of the two.
Suddenly, there was a commotion coming from down the shoreline, at the dock. Ian's father spun the telescope and sprinted over, no doubt expecting to find that his child had mistaken the fishhook as a cracker and, as a result, had caught his own esophagus.
The sounds gained clarity: it wasn't panic, it was jubilation. I left the porch to get a better look for myself. Ian's family had crowded around him. In his hand was the twisted little rod he made.
Dangling from it was a bass the size of small skateboard.
"My kid brudduh caught dis fish!" one of his siblings called over to me.
I've seen rod-and-reel sets retail for over $900. I've seen grown men browse the bait and tackle section of the local sporting goods store, actually holding an argument over whether a light green or dark green plastic nightcrawler would be more effective on a cloudy day.
And here was a 6-year-old kid, a stick, a string, a hook, some bait ... and a fish large enough to have earned Captain Ahab's ire.
What I'll most remember from this moment was the look on the face of Ian's father as he went back to the telescope a few minutes later. It's that look of pride that only sweeps over a father after a sporting accomplishment by his son. The satisfaction that the athletic prowess he had witnessed must have originated on his side of the DNA spiral. That glow of potential, only instead of dreaming about his boy winning the Super Bowl, he's thinking about cashing that check when Ian wins the Bassmaster Challenge on ESPN2. ("He'll be the Freddy Adu of the bass fishing world! Whoever the hell Freddy Adu is...")
Ian, I'm guessing, had a different reaction. He's a kid, and there are three different reactions by kids to animals, based on their size:
Small — an unwavering desire to kill them.
Large — a formidable fear of them.
Medium — a new best friend, like a puppy or a rabbit.
I figure this bass fell into the "medium" category, based on its size and the time that it would take to murder it with the sun and a magnifying glass. So when his brothers dropped that fish into a bucket, Ian probably thought they were going to carry his new friend Freddy the Fish back to the cabin so they could do a puzzle together or play hide-and-go-seek.
"Fweddy da fish is my new best fwend!" Ian would exclaim in that Fudd-ish accent every six-year old has. "Fweddy and I are going to wun and pway and gwow old together!"
I'm sure reality set in when that little tyke came back from the dock, looked around the cabin, and couldn't locate Freddy anywhere. I'm sure he had more questions than answers when his brothers kept exclaiming that Ian "caught dinner" earlier in the day. Later on that evening:
"Daddy, where's Fweddy?
"Yeah, that's great, champ. Honey, could you pass the tartar sauce?"
Thirty years from now, I'm sure Ian will be the one celebrating the fish his son caught.
Of course, depending on what we've been pouring into these lakes, the fish might be catching us by then.
The NHL on OLN
I've said for years that ESPN has poisoned the National Hockey League with lackluster production, poor choice of games, and a menagerie of announcers that made even the most ardent fan want to change the station. Not to mention giving the sport the kind of respect usually reserved for a red-headed stepchild that had recently been busted in a kiddie porn ring. (In other words, not much respect.)
The NHL signed on with the Outdoor Life Network this week, and has suffered the expected ridicule from the usual media critics, claiming the league might as well play in Siberia or that hockey is now completely on the fringe. Tony Kornheiser basically said hockey is dead as a sport on his radio show. (Perhaps not as dead as "Listen Up," but pretty darn dead I'm sure.)
I wouldn't expect anyone predisposed to hate hockey to like this deal, but I'm shocked how shortsighted some of these critics are being.
The NHL is now the centerpiece in a budding sports media empire. This isn't going to be some trainwreck like SportsChannel, because Comcast isn't a network — it's a cable provider, looking to turn OLN into a legitimate competitor to ESPN. And unlike the boys in Bristol, it's not going to shove hockey into the closet if the ratings aren't there — it's going to keep working until the ratings grow, until the broadcasts are exciting, until hockey is event programming.
That's the difference between someone who owns the Flyers, like Comcast, and someone who owned the Ducks, like ESPN — it's one thing to have your toe in the water, but another to want the pool to be perfect.
Besides HDTV technology, OLN is going to offer more than ESPN ever would have in extended content for fans. On Demand game highlights and a library of hockey's greatest moments. Online streaming of two games per night. And, perhaps best of all, the NHL Network is coming soon to Comcast cable. One look at that, and you'll wonder how we ever considered ESPN as having provided "hockey coverage."
This is what we, the fans, wanted. This is a network, and its media parent, taking an active interest in hockey and making the NHL work on television. I'm excited, and I just hope they don't screw it up by polluting the broadcast with the same gaggle of hacks we had broadcasting the games for the last decade.
As much as I'd like to give the NHL credit for this one, the OLN deal happened despite the league's efforts to bungle it. If ESPN had bitten, we'd be right back at square one.
The only credit that goes to Gary Bettman and the NHL is for sinking this league so far into the abyss, ESPN wouldn't touch it again.
Greg Wyshynski is the Features Editor for SportsFan Magazine in Washington, DC, and the Senior Sports Editor for The Connection Newspapers of Northern Virginia. His book “Glow Pucks and 10-Cent Beer: The 101 Worst Ideas in Sports History" will be published in Spring 2006. His columns appear every Saturday on Sports Central. You can e-mail Greg at [email protected].
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