"biting Off More Than You Can Chew"
<div class="IPBDescription">or, "Using sports equipment as bait"</div> This fish story has been travelling from office to office so I thought I'd bring you up to speed:
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Having a ball with a Kansas catfish</b>
The combination of a 50-pound flathead catfish, an 8-inch basketball and the Internet has made Pam and Bill Driver worldwide cyber-celebrities.
Let me explain:
On May 28, Bill was standing on the deck of his house in Wichita, Kan., when he saw a red ball floating strangely on a nearby lake.
He walked to the lake and discovered the ball was stuck in the mouth of a flathead catfish.
The fish had apparently attempted to grab the ball and pull it down into the lake. However, the inflated ball kept pulling the fish back to the surface, and the catfish couldn't dislodge it.
After yelling to his wife, Pam, to grab the camera, Bill waded into the lake and managed to get the cat close to shore, where he cut the ball and removed it from the fish's mouth.
The exhausted, but uninjured fish swam away.
End of story. Right?
Not hardly.
The Drivers returned to their house and called The Wichita Eagle newspaper and outdoors writer Michael Pearce.
"I'm sitting here on a Friday afternoon. I'm looking at the worst outdoor page I've done in four years," said Pearce, recalling a series of stories and photos that had fallen through during the week.
The phone rings.
It's the Drivers and their catfish story.
"He's telling me this story and I'm thinking, 'You know, this has got to be true because if this guy was going to make something up, he wouldn't go this far off the wall,'" Pearce said.
The Drivers then delivered the photos, and Pearce knew he had the solution to fix a sub-par outdoors page.
The headline to his story: A Tough Pill to Swallow: One Man's Encounter with a Largemouth ... Catfish?
But the story didn't end with that Sunday's newspaper.
The Associated Press picked up the story, and the photos and a short version of the Drivers' tale started making the rounds on the Internet.
I received an e-mail copy of it Tuesday from a local fisherman. The same day Register Star graphic artist Marty Bach got the same e-mail from a friend in Eugene, Ore. And, Register Star Life & Styles assistant editor Will Pfeifer saw the photos on an "urban legend" Web site.
On Tuesday, Pam Driver said she had received seven or eight calls from reporters who had seen the story on the Web or via e-mail. One caller was from England.
As she had with other newspapers, Pam gave the Register Star permission to use the photos with two requirements: she wanted a photo credit and a copy of the edition in which the story ran.
Pam plans to display the newspapers at her home.
"With all of this interest and the copies that are coming, I think I'm about to fill the walls of my game room," she chuckled.
While the Drivers enjoy the notoriety, they also would like to make money from their photos.
"If there's a contest or something, I'd put the money in my husband's retirement fund," she said. "That would be nice. "We've never had anything like this happen, so we really don't know what to expect. We're having fun with it at this point." <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
As an added bonus, here's some photos:
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Having a ball with a Kansas catfish</b>
The combination of a 50-pound flathead catfish, an 8-inch basketball and the Internet has made Pam and Bill Driver worldwide cyber-celebrities.
Let me explain:
On May 28, Bill was standing on the deck of his house in Wichita, Kan., when he saw a red ball floating strangely on a nearby lake.
He walked to the lake and discovered the ball was stuck in the mouth of a flathead catfish.
The fish had apparently attempted to grab the ball and pull it down into the lake. However, the inflated ball kept pulling the fish back to the surface, and the catfish couldn't dislodge it.
After yelling to his wife, Pam, to grab the camera, Bill waded into the lake and managed to get the cat close to shore, where he cut the ball and removed it from the fish's mouth.
The exhausted, but uninjured fish swam away.
End of story. Right?
Not hardly.
The Drivers returned to their house and called The Wichita Eagle newspaper and outdoors writer Michael Pearce.
"I'm sitting here on a Friday afternoon. I'm looking at the worst outdoor page I've done in four years," said Pearce, recalling a series of stories and photos that had fallen through during the week.
The phone rings.
It's the Drivers and their catfish story.
"He's telling me this story and I'm thinking, 'You know, this has got to be true because if this guy was going to make something up, he wouldn't go this far off the wall,'" Pearce said.
The Drivers then delivered the photos, and Pearce knew he had the solution to fix a sub-par outdoors page.
The headline to his story: A Tough Pill to Swallow: One Man's Encounter with a Largemouth ... Catfish?
But the story didn't end with that Sunday's newspaper.
The Associated Press picked up the story, and the photos and a short version of the Drivers' tale started making the rounds on the Internet.
I received an e-mail copy of it Tuesday from a local fisherman. The same day Register Star graphic artist Marty Bach got the same e-mail from a friend in Eugene, Ore. And, Register Star Life & Styles assistant editor Will Pfeifer saw the photos on an "urban legend" Web site.
On Tuesday, Pam Driver said she had received seven or eight calls from reporters who had seen the story on the Web or via e-mail. One caller was from England.
As she had with other newspapers, Pam gave the Register Star permission to use the photos with two requirements: she wanted a photo credit and a copy of the edition in which the story ran.
Pam plans to display the newspapers at her home.
"With all of this interest and the copies that are coming, I think I'm about to fill the walls of my game room," she chuckled.
While the Drivers enjoy the notoriety, they also would like to make money from their photos.
"If there's a contest or something, I'd put the money in my husband's retirement fund," she said. "That would be nice. "We've never had anything like this happen, so we really don't know what to expect. We're having fun with it at this point." <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
As an added bonus, here's some photos:
Comments
my thoughts exactly
It's a basketball. Look at the last picture. You can clearly see the basketball lines.