Anglers' angles

Cheating takes place all the time in sports, even more than we think. The Houston Astros stole a page from the cheater's manual when they tipped their batters off to what sort of pitch was coming in the 2017 and 2018 seasons. This was done in much the same fashion by the 1951 New York Giants: someone would watch to see the catcher's signals and then relay the purloined information to the hitter.

In football, Tom Brady can tell you, the best way to cheat is to have someone deflate the other team's footballs. 

Let's face it: as long as there are humans involved in any gainful activity, someone will look for a corner to cut. But surely no one involved in the time-honored sport of fishing, the classic Huckleberry Finn activity where a kid and his dad bond over a bamboo pole, some string, and a bent pin, would do anything so dastardly as to cheat in a fishing tournament, right?

Hold the presses. Officials in Ohio are saying that  Jake Runyan and Chase Cominsky won a pro fishing tournament with a $30,000 purse by stuffing their fish, not with crabmeat, but with weights. They have been indicted; each of them faces three felony charges.

 

The charges are for cheating, attempted grand theft, and possession of criminal tools. The Cuyahoga County prosecutor has filed fifth-degree felony charges that could land these jokers in the Walled-Off Astoria for a year, with $2500 in fines to boot.

 Prosecutor Michael C. O'Malley said,  "I take all crime very seriously, and I believe what these two individuals attempted to do was not only dishonorable but also criminal."

The prosecutor really took a deep dive into the charges he could lodge, adding on top a misdemeanor count of unlawful ownership of wild animals, because they allegedly had raw fish filets on their boat. Their fishing licenses could be suspended indefinitely if they are guilty on the filet rap

It all happened at the Lake Erie Walleye Trail tournament in Cleveland. A routine inspection of the fish they submitted showed lead weights and fish filets shoved down the gullets. Before their stupid scheme was detected, they were set to win the competition and be named Team Of The Year and split a sway of $28, 760.

The scales (!) of justice started turning when someone noticed that the fish they claimed to have caught seemed to weigh a lot more than others of that size. Judges cut the walleyes open, and out came the hardware while the other fishermen howled and carped, their hopes of winning floundering.

"We got weights in fish!" declared Jason Fischer, director of the Lake Erie Walleye Trail fishing tournament.

Some of us who have no interest in fish that don't come from a supermarket seafood counter packed in ice might find it hard to believe that something is fishy with these tournaments, but these contests are a big deal to a lot of people. Runyan and Cominsky claimed to have won more than $300,000 last year - but that was when one of them failed a tournament's polygraph test and had to return some of his ill-gained loot.

I have the same question I have all the time in these matters: how do these people go home and face their friends and families in the wake of such perfidy?