Everything They Had (48 page)

Added to George Lee and Jock Miller, that made eight, and add the Howertons, that made ten. The two outsiders were patent lawyers from the Bay Area, Gary Aka and Charlie Krueger. They are both relatively quiet by temperament, and given the rather noisy nature of our group, one where everyone else seemed connected, they were for the first few days quieter still.

It soon became obvious that we had hit a great river with giant fish at an almost perfect moment. Even fishermen of no demonstrable distinction, like Steadman and me, caught five or six fish a day. The average size was fifteen pounds. We considered a nine-pound fish to be small. Over twenty-two pounds was large. More important, it was not just the catching, it was the ongoing pleasure of it all. The fish were so big and strong, and we were obviously going to land enough that we took as much pleasure from the big ones that broke us off as we did from the ones we brought in. On my third day, I hooked up an enormous fish and kept it on for a long time, perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes, and it made four beautiful jumps, all of a piece, all very high at exactly the same angle, all against the current, each done perfectly as if by instruction from the Argentine Bureau of Tourism. The fish must have weighed between twenty-five and twenty-eight pounds, and when it finally broke off, I felt no sense of disappointment, just awe.

One of the things that made the group work was that we had no hierarchy, other than the fact that Berlin had put us together. But he was enjoying too much pleasure in our success to want to dominate the group. He was fishing very well—the largest fish of the week would be his thirty-one-pounder—but what he seemed concerned about was that everyone do as well as he was doing. Some members of our group who might nominally have been the most dominant figures at the table based simply on accomplishment in other fields, like Steadman, were among the lesser fishermen. Everyone kept his ego in check. George Lee, the late arrival to the group, was obviously the best fisherman. Yet he was low-key and self-contained about the fishing, a man obviously antihierarchical by nature. To him, fishing is an end in itself, and he was, if anything, less a scorekeeper as the week progressed than the rest of us were. That helped: The best fisherman among us was the least interested in receiving the unofficial gold.

The rest of us maintained a light veneer of scorekeeping—because if we were not in some kind of zone ourselves, then most assuredly the river was, and therefore some sort of score demanded to be kept, if only by the rules of the lodge. So the rest of us returned after every shift, and partially seduced by the brilliance of our good fortune, we inevitably talked about how many we'd caught and how big they were, the ritual benchmarks of fisherman talk. But George was content to say, very simply, that he'd had a very good day. He was, Kruse, who was his roommate, told me later, deliriously happy to be fishing here; it was for someone so talented the rarest kind of fishing, as Kruse noted, the fishing of a lifetime.

But he had no need to talk about it. “To appreciate how wonderful the fishing is for him this week,” Kruse added, “you have to do a lot of shitty fishing on a lot of shitty occasions. That way, maybe you earn the right to fish like this once in a lifetime.” Gradually, George became the secret star of our group, not just because he was the best fisherman but because he might also have been the most interesting man among us, funny, smart, unconventional, mordant. He was the most unprepossessing looking of us. If we were not exactly fashion plates ourselves, we all nonetheless wore the casual clothes of the upper middle class, successful American men at serious play: sweaters, corduroy pants, cool understated albeit expensive vests. George, by contrast, more than a little overweight and balding, looked a little like a rogue figure with a bit part in a Shakespeare play. His clothes seemed chosen precisely to offend the style preferred at a cold-weather lodge (he looked as if he was dressed for a not really good Caribbean bonefishing lodge just about to close: loud orange T-shirts in combination with green pants); Ralph Lauren most assuredly would not have approved.

Yet we all were becoming aware, day by day, that looks and clothes and medical reports aside, George Lee was our prince, the one seigneur of fishing here, the man who not merely carried himself with the greatest skill but advertised himself the least and went about it for nothing but the inner pleasure; it was for him the most private expression of self. Moreover, he had become by the third night something of the star at the table as well, wickedly funny, sardonic and self-deprecatory. He reads widely—it had been a long time since I had talked with anyone about the novels of William Humphrey. I was intrigued by him, and his darker sense reminded me of two of my brilliant outlaw writer friends, Hunter Thompson and the late Freddy Exley; he seemed like someone from their pages. He struck me as exceptional, authentic and, finally, real.

He did not seem a man for a conventional life, not a readily domesticated species. Fishing is his life. A brother, Art Lee, writes about fishing, and apparently George is a great aficionado and collector of arcane fishing gear, which he occasionally sells on the Internet—right now there is a truly ugly mounted carp that he may well sell for $45. I don't understand why anyone would want to mount a carp; that anyone else would want to buy and hang a mounted carp seems stranger still. When, with a rare bad cast, he buried his fly deep in the back of his head this week, he joked about wanting to keep the fly there permanently as his first true fisherman's pierce, which seemed oddly appropriate. When his marriage had ended recently, he had immediately gone to see the talented outdoor artist Galen Mercer and had him draw a steelhead trout, which George took to a tattoo artist and had emblazoned on his left forearm, as if to symbolically demonstrate the change in his life—first things were now first.

He seemed to have a number of fishing places of his own: a trailer in upstate New York; a small place in Newfoundland, which he was not quite sure he actually owned even though he had bought it and there may or may not have been a deed to it; and a place on the Umpqua River in Oregon. At first George was apparently a little nervous about meeting the rest of us, fearing we might be a group of Darth Vaders of the fishing world, a bunch of men who, all having made our first $100 million on Wall Street, now intended—as a parallel birthright—to do as well with the trout of the Río Grande. What George really feared, Kruse told me later, was that if we did well on a river like this with fish this big, we would think it was because we were that good at fishing, not because we had the good luck to be at the right place at the right time. Would we really know, George wondered at the beginning, the difference between larger good fortune in life and true fishing skill?

I knew better, and I think most of the others did as well. Though modesty is not necessarily one of my—or, I suspect, the others'—virtues, the sheer good fortune of being here on a great week imposed its own involuntary humility. I knew my limitations and that the good luck I had enjoyed, catching five or six big fish a day, had little to do with talent. If talent had been the basis for the trip, I would not have made the cut. There was one blessed period on my last day, when within one forty-minute period I took a twenty-six-and-a-half-pounder and then on the next cast a twenty-four-pounder. I was smart enough to know it was about the river and the stars and the fish and the guides. I knew I was still a marginal fly fisherman—perhaps after twelve sessions in high winds down here, my grade had moved up to a B–. That upgrade was the extent of my illusion about my abilities.

That did not lessen my pleasure in fishing—perhaps it made the pleasure even greater. I retained the sweet pleasure of the truly innocent at play in wonderful water among the obsessed. I remember not just the big fish I caught but also the beauty of the ones that got away, especially the one that made those four great jumps. What I liked as much as the fishing was the group. Day by day, the pleasure of the water seemed to blend into the pleasure of the group dining. We seemed to be intrigued by one another and surprisingly open to one another. Oddly enough, we did not talk much about fishing during the meals—that was mostly taken care of during the predinner cocktail hour. Sometimes we were light, and sometimes we were deadly serious. One night one of the Californians asked the New Yorkers where they were on September 11, and we all spoke informally. By far the most moving was Jock Miller, two of whose sons were employed in the World Trade Center area, and as he described what it was like trying to get in touch with them for a crucial three or four hours (all the phones were down)—it was, he said, the worst day of his life—he broke into tears.

Gradually, we melded into one group. Gary Aka and Charlie Krueger, the two California attorneys, shy at the beginning in the face of all our noise, were annexed and talked about fishing with us next year. At the final dinner, we gave out awards. George Lee was named Patagonian Rookie of the Year, and he received a uniquely ugly ashtray. Jock Miller won the Truth in Competition award: Aretsky handed him four stones to help weigh his fish in the future. Someone talked about the rare quality of friendship in this group so casually put together. Steadman later shrewdly suggested that it was not quite friendship; he had carefully tracked who we were and how we had gotten there and what the lines of connection were. We are not really friends. What we have is something more unusual: We have an almost perfect example of fellowship.

Dick Schaap was one of the very best journalists of his generation, a man whose career reflected the enormous generational changes in his profession forced upon it by technology. He was a man of newspapers, magazines, books (lots of books) and, finally, as print began to decline in the middle of his career, of television, a world into which, unlike so many of his print colleagues, Dick made the most natural of transitions.

He was also a very good man. He treated a vast range of people with respect and dignity, and he conferred on them uncommon good will. As such, he was unusual—almost unique—in the richness and breadth of his friendships in a world where relationships are increasingly adversarial. He was simply one of the best-loved people in this profession. That is rare. Not many journalists can manage to do high-quality work and yet retain the friendship of many of the people they cover—and compete against.

He wrote his own memoir this past year, and he subtitled it, in self-deprecating satire of all the ghostwritten books he had produced, “Dick Schaap as Told to Dick Schaap.” When he finished the manuscript, he sent it by for a blurb. I read it and enjoyed it, though when I put it down, I was touched by no small amount of melancholia, and even a bit of envy. Dick, it was clear, though we were almost exactly the same age and had covered many of the same things, had had a great deal more fun than I had had over the years.

We met for the first time as college journalists, representing our respective school newspapers at Harvard Stadium in the fall of 1953 at a Harvard-Cornell football game, he on his way to being the editor of the
Cornell Daily Sun
, me on my way to becoming managing editor of the
Harvard Crimson
. We were, in the way of ambitious young college journalists, properly wary of each other. (If both of us knocked on the door of the
New York Times
or the
Herald Tribune
after we graduated, what would happen if there were only one opening?)

There was, it would turn out, plenty of room for both of us, and we ended up longtime colleagues over what is now more than six decades of reporting. Eventually, I went to the
Times
, and he went to the
Trib
; I went overseas, he stayed in New York and became one of the last
Trib
city editors and, in time, a columnist for the paper. Though his column was citywide, his best work was always in sports, in no small part because he never saw sports as a narrow, enclosed place—as the Toy Department, as it was scathingly known in most newspaper circles. Rather, he enjoyed it not merely for the athletic competition inherent there, but he saw it as serving as an important window on the larger American society.

Because of that, he became at a rather early age—in his 20s—a very important figure in the world of modern sports journalism. Long before it was fashionable, indeed beginning when it was quite unfashionable, back in the late '50s, he was far ahead of the curve in writing about the rise of black and Hispanic athletes. More, he wrote not merely about their athletic abilities, but about their feelings as well.

This was at a time when few black athletes had made their way into the top level of professional and college sports, and were still greatly outnumbered by white athletes. But where blacks were even more outnumbered was in the ownership-management hierarchy of sports—and, to be blunt, in the world of sports journalism.

That world was very white, too, and surprisingly inflexible. Most of the more influential figures in it had come up in a very different era, some 20 or 25 years earlier, accepted far more rigid racial premises, and had little tolerance for athletes who were in any way different from the norm, or in any way outspoken. Many of the sportswriters and editors of that era thought they were greatly advanced in their thinking if they wrote that it was all right for Jackie Robinson to play for Brooklyn. They did not, however, want to hear about his off-the-field grievances, his troubles in finding a house or getting a meal in a restaurant.

It could be said that the empathy factor in this world was rather marginal. Most of the leading people in sports and sports journalism reserved what little empathy they had for themselves, or for people as much as possible like themselves.