Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/496918
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 3 1 I t's remarkable how many of our current attitudes and beliefs toward sporting life originated with a fellow named Gene Hill. And it isn't solely because of the words he wrote. He certainly inspired many of today's outdoor scribes, but his influence goes far beyond his own writings. I sometimes think there's a little bit of Gene Hill in all of us. I never knew him in the personal sense, but when I was a young man making my own way in my own world, he was a young writer and I read everything he wrote and knew him intimately through his words. His ability to take an over- under, crossways or catty-cornered look at anything, reduce the subject to its essence, and then relate it clearly and succinctly to the reader was unequalled. Gene made us think about things that flew under the radar, things that were there, but unseen. He made us cognizant of things we didn't even know we knew, but did. And the lessons don't lose their relevance when we go indoors. The world of the outdoorsman is the truest part of life. It is life itself, stripped of its human artificiality, reduced to its life-and- death, cut-to-the-bone, essence. I was thinking about one of his revelations the other day, something I'd read some 30 or 40 years ago and never forgot. I couldn't find it when I went to look it up, so I'll just take a shot at paraphrasing it here. The gist of the epiphany was that he didn't small-town politics. And I believed those things were important! I believed it was important who ran our town and who ran the country and who was in Congress. I thought it was important to know what was going on in the world. I thought that art, music, and Robert Matthews h o t g u n s S hunt and fish because he thought those things were important. He did them because he knew that most of man's other pursuits were just as unimportant. You need to think about that— just let it roll around inside your brain for a little while before you continue. The first time it really sank in, I was shocked! I was a newly minted young lawyer at the time, practicing law and committing What better place than the outdoors to instill in a young'un kindness, decency, and respect for all, including himself and his fellow man. The author introduces his two-year-old grandson to the fine art of fishing at a local farm pond.