Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/617925
T om Prawdzik liked to say that a steady diet of off-season polka dancing kept him nimble afoot when it came time to follow his setters through the ankle- twisting cover of his beloved Michigan grouse woods. But even the feet of the greatest ruffed grouse hunter of the modern era—maybe the greatest who ever lived—weren't light enough to sidestep prostate cancer. It finally caught up with him on September 18, three days after the Michigan grouse opener. He was 83. While I was aware of Tom's condition when I devoted my September/ October column to him, I hoped—like every- body else who knew this humble, gracious, immensely likable man— that he'd have more time. It's fashionable to use high-profile athletes as the measuring sticks of accomplishment in sports other than their own. How many times have you heard someone called "the Michael Jordan" or "the Tiger Woods" of his or her game, whether it's pitching horseshoes or breaking clay pigeons? Well, no matter how finely you slice, dice, or mince it, Tom Prawdzik's achievements as a grouse hunter stand so far above everyone else's that they render comparisons meaningless. Over the course of some 55 seasons, Tom and his hunting partners flushed more than 35,000 ruffed grouse, and converted a significant (hell, staggering) percentage of those flushes into kills. Think of it this way: If Tiger Woods were the Tom Prawdzik of golf, he'd have blown past Jack Nicklaus' record as if it were nothing but a fairway bunker on a drivable par four. many of those flushes as possible into kills. He was, in sum, the ultimate grouse- hunting pragmatist, epitomizing the spirit of Rick Bass' great line: "If your intent is to gather birds, you've got to raise the gun and step up and fire, not write poems about how pretty they are." Easy to say, but desperately hard to put into practice—especially when ruffed grouse are the quarry. Tom Prawdzik did it as well as anyone ever did, and better than anyone else ever will. DEF N ot long ago, at a dinner party in honor of a friend's birthday, I found myself seated across from an attractive, 60-ish woman I hadn't met before. As usual at these affairs, there were a number of conversations going on at once, and at some point I heard her tell another guest that she'd grown up in South Dakota. My antennae went up at that, and when I had an opportunity to engage her directly, I said, "I heard you say that you're from South Dakota. Whereabouts?" "Huron?" she said, inflecting it more like a question than an answer. "Oh, sure," I said. "I've been there." "You have?" she said, clearly incredulous. "What on earth for?" "A number of reasons," I said, "but mostly pheasant hunting." "Oh, well, that makes sense," she said, nodding. "If you're a pheasant hunter you'd know Huron." "Yeah, I've hunted all around there," I continued. "Wolsey, Woonsocket, Carthage." Tom Prawdzik lived a full life among the birds. • Cheryl Ladd's pheasant country. • New products to make your hunting safer and sweeter. S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 9 7 n addition to high visibility, L.L. Bean's No Fly Zone Dog Vest repels ticks, mosquitoes and other biting insects. I Tom Davis u n d o g s G The thing is, there was nothing magical or mysterious about Tom's methods. He was constantly on the lookout for new cover, he had specific ideas regarding what he wanted from his dogs (and how to teach them to deliver it), and he always had a plan— whether it was a "big picture" plan on how best to work a particular piece of cover, or a situational plan on how best to approach a dog on point. As Tom himself put it, his goal was to hunt "efficiently," by which he meant maximizing his flush rate and converting as