100th Sporting Life: Works of Art

An exclusive celebration of a collaboration of talent

My first Sporting Life column ran in Fly Rod & Reel in March of 1992. Lee Wulff had been writing the back-page column and I was asked to take it over when he died. When someone said, “I hear you’re replacing Lee,” I was smart enough to say, “I’m writing the column; I’m not ‘replacing’ Lee Wulff.”

There’s always some apprehension when you go to work for a new publication, so by way of testing the water, that first column included a midrange curse word and an unflattering wise crack about neoprene waders, which were considered state of the art at the time. Neither comment was entirely gratuitous, but swearing and disparaging remarks about potential advertisers are two things that will stop the hearts of overly cautious editors and a writer likes to know where he stands. When then-editor Silvio Calabi left both in, I thought, Okay, this could work.

Silvio had also said he’d get an illustrator, but I didn’t know who until the issue with the first column arrived. I didn’t expect much—a quick line drawing or maybe just a generic logo that would run in each issue like a trademark—but the artist turned out to be John Robert (Bob) White and the illustration was the kind of watercolor you wouldn’t be surprised to find hanging in a gallery.

That first column centered on two fishermen who had come back at dusk while their partners had stayed out till the bitter end, and Bob’s painting was just that scene: Two guys carrying fly rods have just arrived at a pickup parked on a rise next to what looks like a Russian olive tree. It’s twilight, with a yellowish just-past-sunset sky and purple stands of cottonwoods in the near distance with faint mountains on the horizon. The fishermen look tired, as if they’d fished far upstream and had just now trudged back. It was perfect: Not just a scene from the essay, but also—somehow—the same pensive, end-of-a-long-day feeling.
That was then. This is now the 100th column Bob and I have done together... Read More »
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