BOB KORNEGAY: FISHING? GOLFING? SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO GO

A number of years ago, on a rather inclement winter’s day, I spied a friend of mine doing something I at the time considered rather foolish.

“Don’t tell anybody you saw this,” my friend requested, looking miserably uncomfortable.

I didn’t answer. I just stood there dumbfounded.

What I saw my friend and a rather large party doing was playing golf.

Now, most folks know I believe golf to be a rather silly game under the best of circumstances. Given that day’s weather conditions, however, circumstances were far from the best and golf, according to Kornegay, went way beyond silly.

It was cold (at least by Southwest Georgia standards) and the blustery, blistering wind made it seem even colder. Heck, it was all I could do to take out my garbage which, by the way, was just what I was doing when I “caught” my friend and his buddies on the golf course across the street.

Back inside my house, I started chuckling over the image of a half-dozen grown men frenziedly chasing little white balls across Early County’s equivalent of the Arctic tundra.

Refrain from sharing this? Not tell?

Uh-uh. No way. This was way too good a coffee-shop story to pass up.

Then I checked myself. Just by chance I happened to glance up at the wall in my son’s empty room. Hanging there was a sizable, nicely mounted crappie; Kyle’s first all-by-himself fish caught 15 years prior when the boy was just four years old.

“Wait a minute,” I said aloud to myself. “Wasn’t the weather just like it is now when that fish was caught?”

Looking back, it certainly was. My offspring and I didn’t have any more business fishing that day than my buddies had golfing that particular afternoon. I had even less reason, probably. At least none of them were out there with an innocent child risking, at best, a severe chill or, at worst, hypothermia.

I remembered it well. It was one of those I-just-gotta-go-fishing days. I couldn’t help it. I hadn’t wet a hook since Thanksgiving. It was fish or go crazy.

I readied the boat, prepared to leave, and as luck would have it Kyle caught me red handed.

“Where you goin’, Daddy?”

“Fishing, Kiddo.”

“Can I come?”

“Sure,” I said after only a brief hesitation. I’m sorry, but I never could say no to my son when it comes to fishing, weather be hanged. Besides, Mama was nowhere in sight which, of course, justified my poorly-thought-out decision.

So, off we went, one otherwise sane grownup and a potato-chip devouring, Gatorade-swilling rug rat, off to do battle with the crappie population of a white-capping state park lake in 40-degree cold with monstrous wind chill.

What a reckless gambler I was. By all rights that day my son should have been ruined for life where fishing was concerned. This was certainly no time to place a rod in the boy’s hands and expect him to enjoy it. Did I say gambler? Idiot’s much more appropriate.

It is said, however, that God looks after fools. Perhaps he knows when their foolishness is well intended. I think he probably had such people in mind when he made crappies, a gullible, easily-caught species if ever there was one.

We had a ball, the kid and I. I don’t recall ever once feeling too cold or too windblown and I don’t believe Kyle did either. And when that big (to four-year-old eyes, anyhow) speck came aboard flopping and dousing us both with icy droplets, it mattered not in the least that the two of us really should have been home talking about fishing rather than engaging in the act.

And of course you know I changed my mind regarding golf and all the grief I was going to give my buddy over his bad-weather golfing excursion.

Yeah, right.