My best friends outside athletics are all fly fishermen. The whole thing of being out in nature relaxes me even after the busiest day. On a blustery March afternoon, Braine, protected from the cold water by insulated chest-high waders, slips quietly into the Chattahoochee River north of Atlanta. The willowy, 8-foot graphite rod trembles as Braine holds it straight out in front of him to check the alignment. Fly rods are never called poles.
Poles are for catfish.
Braine bought his first fly rod in 1963 when he was an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. I used it to catch bream and bass around the college. I never thought about trout until the early 1980s when I was an assistant coach at Fresno State. The nearby Kings River is a wonderful fishery and that s where I discovered the joy of fly-fishing for trout. As he drifts the fly through the rapids, a trout, probably a brown, swirls but misses.