If you never had the pleasure of fishing with J.O. Brooks, you missed a treat.
Brooks, maybe the best known fisherman in central Arkansas, died Saturday while recuperating from an automobile accident that occurred as he drove to Lake Dardanelle to fish for striped bass. I regret I won't have that pleasure again.
Mark Hedrick of Little Rock summed Brooks up best.
"I know avid fishermen and I know rabid fishermen, but J.O. was the only person I ever knew who was addicted to it," Hedrick said. "I mean, he was really, truly addicted to fishing. He had to have it. It was like a drug to him. If he couldn't fish for two or three days, it literally drove him crazy."
Regrettably, that's the backstory behind his final drive. Brooks traveled to Lake Dardanelle almost every day to fish for stripers since December. He was almost 90 years old, but he got up every morning at 3:30 p.m. in order to be fishing by dawn.
Bad weather kept him home for a couple of days in early February until he couldn't stand it anymore. He was going fishing, thunderstorm be damned. Brooks called a friend who refused to go, but he begged Brooks to wait a day. Brooks was tired of waiting.
"I guess you could say those stripers finally killed him," Hedrick said.
Brooks was the first person I fished with when I became Outdoors Editor for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in February 2005. The annual white bass run at Lake Maumelle hadn't begun yet. We caught a few, but we had fun and struck up an enduring friendship.
Every time he called, he said, "We catchin' them on evah cast!"
As quirky as he was, you never knew what kind of weirdness would happen when you fished with Brooks, but you could always count on something.
Rusty Pruitt and I fished with him several times last summer at DeGray Lake. The fish didn't bite early in the morning like Brooks expected, so he rooted around every point, every cove and every brushpile on the lake until he found them. He was doggedly tenacious.
When fishing at DeGray, Brooks always stopped at a certain fast food drive-thru in Bryant. When we rendezvoused at Malvern, Pruitt took me aside and told me about that morning's stop. Customarily impatient, Brooks cut around a vehicle placing an order at the speaker and pounded on the drive-thru window. The woman taking the order from the speaker covered her ear and turned away to hear.
Brooks got out of his truck, pried the window open and demanded three sausage and egg biscuits.
"Here's you a sausage and egg biscuit," Brooks said, walking up from behind the boat as the story concluded.
I took it, but turned to Pruitt and murmured, "No way I'm eating this after a scene like that."
"It's nothing. He does that every morning," Pruitt said, laughing. "They're used to it."
If the fishing was good at some place like DeGray, Brooks swore it was the best lake in America. He gushed like a young man in love. The object of his adoration was faultless and pure. DeGray Lake was the best hybrid striper lake in America. Lake Maumelle was the best lake in America for just about everything. People come from all over America to fish for this, that or the other on whatever lake he fancied.
It was never "one of the best," either. It was always THE best.
Oh, but if the fishing was bad for a few weeks, his rage was boundless. He wrote incendiary letters to the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission about how Lake Maumelle or DeGray was the worst fishing lake in America (after having been the best just months before), how it blighted the reputations of our state and all of its citizens, and how their sorry fishing cost the state untold millions of dollars in lost revenue. He demanded people be fired. He demanded public hearings.
He insisted that I publish those letters in my column. He copied them to the governor, to the legislature and, if he was really piqued, to our congressional delegation.
Eventually the fishing would pick up again, and all was forgiven.
I hate to think that there'll never be another like J.O. Brooks. He was the garlic in the spice rack of the fishing world.
Sports on 02/28/2019