A New Generation of “Sports” Take the Stage – Part 1
PORT O’CONNOR TEXAS – I shuffled my flip-flops across the lot toward the front of the store. It’s Saturday morning 5am, and the circus just got to town for another weekend. Boats of all make, are in the gas slots under the awning. As I approach the sliding doors, it’s a subdued gauntlet of fair-skinned-fishing-shirt-wearing weekend warriors, dozens of them in fact, and they’re surrounding the cashiers who protect themselves, and the tobacco products, on an elevated island front-and-center to the store. The lines for each of the open registers snake around, ten-deep times four.
For the cashiers it’s just another Saturday morning in Port O’Connor, Texas, but for me? I looked for an exit strategy upon entry. The circus we spent all week avoiding, was right on time for yet another weekend, tall ones, short ones, fat and skinny, clean and dirty were all carb, caffeine and nicotine loading for the next battle, as always – at the rickety Port O’Connor boat ramps.
My caffeine and sugar, the sugar a true rarity, in hand, I decided it’s time to take on the lines of perfumed, clean and coiffed fishermen waiting patiently in line, and take my place at the end of the line. To my amazement, the lines had disappeared, a testament to the skills of the cashiers seasoned by Saturdays and Sundays. It was then that I saw them, and where my thoughts went from there – in the next four hours of driving the escape route for home.
The two young, let us say twenty-something, fellows at the very front of the line were wearing identical tan Howler Brothers hoodies – not similar, identical. The storm that had been brewing in my head for some time now, struck me with a lightning bolt, like seeing old friend Alvin Dedeaux with 10-thousand subscribers on YouTube … WE HAVE A NEW “SPORTS” LOOK among us, and it’s plain as day.
If you’re one of the new generation of “SPORTS,” you might not even know what a “SPORT” actually is, or what it was. Fly fishing SPORTS are like-minded individuals who, of a like mind, given up their individuality in favor of uniformity driven by long-hauling trends created by appealing marketing and subliminal peer pressures. In my early awareness, a Fly Fishing Sport could be spotted by; the fedora, the Filson, the tweed, the flask conspicuous in the necessary brand of fly fishing vest pocket. Every piece of the ensemble impeccably clean, and shirts pressed by their local dry cleaners. By now, you must be catching onto the fact that being a “Fly Fishing Sport” is not exactly a compliment, and it’s not. But it is absolutely not the worst thing you could be labeled as either!
PART 2 – MODERN HISTORY OF Fly Fishing SPORTS – COMING THURSDAY
Category: Apparel, Body-Mind-Soul, Culture on the Skids, Equipment, Fly Shops
