Arizona Republic from Phoenix, Arizona • Page 114

REPUBLIC CITtt The Arizona Republic Thursday, June 4, 1981 Fish abundant, fishermen scarce in Colorado wilderness Bob Thomas Outdoor Editor 'vsv-y i 1 -rpi Lf, We caught largemouth and small-mouth bass, crappies and bluegills, but all were small Murphy, whose wife, Carolyn, is from Scottsdale, has fished some of the lakes around Arizona and greatly admires Arizona bass fishermen. He said there are some very big bass in Navajo, but many of the local anglers aren't up on the newest bass-fishing techniques, especially the use of sonar gear. Echo Canyon Lake, on the outskirts of Pagosa Springs, was the smallest lake we fished. A gem set in rolling, grass-covered ranch lands marked by clumps of pine, the lake is shallow with a moss bottom. However, a 9-pound largemouth came out of the lake, and it is locally known for its population of easily caught rainbows and bluegills.

My last day of fishing, on the Los Pinos River in the Ute Indian Reservation, was a partial disaster. The Los Pinos (Pine), which is heavily used for irrigation, has both German browns and rainbows and is a premier flyfishing stream. Murphy, who confesses a passion for high-country cutthroats that can be reached only by packtrain outfits, started by catching a 16-inch brown on a fly in forgotten back water. On the river itself, I caught a half-dozen or more 6-inch rainbows using gold Mepps spinners. Often, in the swift, rock-filled waters, I didn't realize I had a strike until the small fish began jumping.

In the midst of all the excitement I hung my lure on a snag one of many I managed to find in the river. Instead of cutting the line and marking off the $2.50 lure to fun, I BAYFIELD, Cola It was enough to dazzle the mind of a desert-dweller accustomed to the dune-colored sand and sere mountains of Arizona. Water. Water, everywhere. Creeks and streams larger than most Arizona rivers, ponds, lakes and reservoirs.

And green. Grass, trees, shrubs all a sea of green that refreshed my desert-tired eyes. Plus, everywhere you looked were tall mountains, some still topped by white caps of snow. But what was most impressive was the absence of crowds, especially during the Memorial Day weekend. Few visitors have discovered this spot in the southwestern corner of Colorado, just one day's drive from Phoenix.

Fishing three reservoirs and a river, I found few anglers taking advantage of the superb fishing the region offers. Even fewer were camping in the San Juan National Forest 2 million acres of Colorado Rocky Mountain highs. My guide to the area, T. Mike Murphy, a local outfitter, said vacationers start coming to the area after schools close for the summer, but crowds are very unusual. Murphy has an 18-foot Ranger bass boat still a fairly rare craft on Colorado lakes which he uses to take clients fishing in the middle of the day.

In the mornings and evenings he takes them on guided hunts for spring bear as part of a package deal offered by his company, San Juan Outfitting Inc. Each place we fished offered crawled out on a logjam trying to free the snag. Suddenly the logjam collapsed, and into the river I went The swift water cut my legs out from under me and, although the stream was only waist deep, bounced me along the slippery rock bottom until I floundered upright again. I managed to hang on to everything, but the real damage was to my camera, which was soaked. I quickly withdrew the film and put it and another exposed roll I had in my pocket inside a tin can full of water.

Film, although wet, can be saved if kept under water until it can be developed in a photo lab. We quit fishing and hiked back to the car where still shook up, put the water-filled can on the hood, forgot about it and got in. I didn't remember it until we hit the paved road several miles later. We retraced our route and almost miraculously Murphy spotted the can beside the road where it had finally fallen after somehow riding over a mile of bumpy road. I filled the can with water again and two days later the film was successfully developed.

But, as my editors told me, in the future it would appreciated that I not immerse myself in my work so thoroughly. IN BRIEF Bayfield is roughly 500 miles from Phoenix. A nonresident Colorado fishing license is $15 for 10 days, a Ute Indian Reservation license is $2.50 for two days and a one-day New Mexico license (for Navajo Reservoir) is $5.25. different angling challenges for German brown, rainbow, brook and cutthroat trout, largemouth and smallmouth bass, northern pike, crappies and bluegills. All the lakes were breathtakingly beautiful, so much so that I often found myself daydreaming at the shoreside scenery instead of watching my fishline.

The three reservoirs Vallecito, Navajo and Echo Canyon are all within 30 minutes' driving time from Bayfield, a small community 18 miles east of Durango. Each reservoir is equipped with a paved launching ramp and has marinas, tackle shops, motels and 8 tores. Vallecito Lake is 10 miles from Bayfield. A high-country lake surrounded by ponderosa pine, it has fantastic rainbow fishing most in the 2-pound range. Trophy fishermen flock to Vallecito in the early spring, as soon as the ice-bound lake can float a boat, to try for the huge German browns.

The Colorado state-record brown (24 pounds, 10 ounces) was taken from there, as was a 30-pound, 1-ounce state record northern pike. Republic T. Mike Murphy reels in a German brown trout in backwaters of the Los Pinos River near Bayfield, a town 18 miles east of Durango. Murphy, 31, and I had our best bles an Arizona reservoir, but at an fishing on Navajo Reservoir, a 35- elevation of about 6,000 feet, it is mile-long reservoir, which is mostly cold. in New Mexico.

I can vouch for the coldness. It has a tremendous amount of to reach JH hung up on a bush, I tumbled underwater structure rocks, oyg.loJj sunken trees, brush, drowned stream channels, narrow, steep-sided can- There was so few Wts on the lake yons and sharp dropoffs. 1 waf fLble to strip down, wring out my clothes and continue fishing Of the three lakes, it most resem- wearing just Jockey shorts. Most pro bowlers forced to live sparingly Ben 1 1 Avery By Alan Greenberg Los Angeles Times WINDSOR LOCKS, Conn. The RVs were lined up three-deep in a weed-choked, garbage-strewn vacant lot behind the Bradley Bowl.

A touring pro's wife, wearing chartreuse jeans and her shirttail out, watched her toddlers play in the dirt Inside the low-slung, aqua-and-yellow cinder-block building was a human sea of polyester, of Penguin shirts with names across the back. The snack-bar counter was crammed with spectators wearing hair tonic and baggy windbreakers, being served by women who might know Alice from Flo, but not Guccis from guppies. These people still believe that Perrier is a French-Canadian hockey player and a hot tub is what you get when your mother forgets to test the water. Here for a week recently was the 15th stop on the winter circuit of the Professional Bowlers Tour. But don't let the standing-room-only (950 people) crowds at the final sessions of the Greater Hartford Open fool you.

Most pros agree that the Professional Bowlers Association has an image problem. To the casual observer, the most colorful thing about most of these guys is the purple medicine they smear on their grotesquely cut and blistered throwing hands. The players are too much like automatons," says Nelson Burton a touring pro who teams with Chris Schenkel to broadcast the tournament finals Saturday afternoons on ABC. "One seems just like another." Sometimes, bo do the match sites. The PBA winter tour regularly stops in predominantly blue-collar places like St Louis, Toledo, Milwaukee, Baltimore, Garden City (Long Island), N.Y., and Peoria, I1L The tour's showpiece event and headquarters are in Akron, Ohio.

Still, the PBA tour, if not the bowlers themselves, prospers. Television is the reason. This is ABC's 20th consecutive year broadcasting the tour. The network recently signed a four-year contract to carry not only 16 winter-tour events but also, for the first time, five spring events. The reason is ratings.

Bowling attracts more viewers than all sports except football and boxing. And it draws more women than most sports. The 1980 tour had an 8.5 rating (percent of total sets with people watching), compared with baseball's 7.3, spectators, we could get away with a lot more stuff," Flannagan said. "But we don't play to spectators, we play to corporate sponsors. And if the executives from Firestone (the tour's main sponsor) want to see us look like mannequins and pay us $30,000, 1 guess we'll do it" "We follow the golden rule," pro Johnny Petraglia said, "the man with the gold makes the rules." Petraglia remembers when the image committee was formed.

It was 1966, at a summer tour stop in El Paso, Texas. The air-conditioning broke down and everybody bowled in surfer shirts and shorts. "Everybody looked so bad," Petraglia recalled. "They founded the image committee and made (touring pro) Don Johnson president His hair was longer than the Beatles'. It was the only way we could get him to cut it" And what does Petraglia like most? "The pressure," he said.

"There's nothing better than pressure. That's the key to life. If I got up on TV and needed a strike to win a tournament and wasn't nervous, I might as well be practicing." Pressure. Bowlers scoff at how their more well-monied counterparts in other sports define it How can there be pressure, they wonder, when a guy is getting paid whether he homers or pops out? "You tell Reggie Jackson the next time he gets up in the bottom of the ninth with two on and two out that if he doesn't knock the runs in, he's not going to get a check that week," PBA national tour director Harry Golden said. "Then, let's see how he handles that kind of pressure." The bowlers' main gripe is that the public and press don't regard them as athletes.

They admit that they're not athletes in the sense that football, basketball and baseball players are, but they believe that the more highly paid pro golfers have nothing on them. One thing bowlers aren't griping about these days is the increasing number of groupies their sport attracts. "We could make (Jim Bouton's) Ball Four look sick (weak)," one bowler said. "The quality of women is definitely getting better. The ones that travel most are the girls from Milwaukee." One camp follower said, "They have a saying on the tour that the only thing that changes is the wives." pro basketball's 5.8 and college basketball's 6.0.

Bowling's TV sponsors have found that 20 million viewers can buy a lot of tires, motor oil and beer. "Without TV," Burton said, "there would be no bowling (tour)." And without the tour, there wouldn't be more than 100 guys bowling their way across the country, fueled mostly by drive-in hamburgers and visions of future grandeur. Unless your name is Earl Anthony, Mark Roth or Marshall Holman, youll never get rich. For four of the last five years, all have "iB "Everybody looked so bad. They founded the image committee and made (touring pro) Don Johnson president.

His hair was longer than the Beatles'. It was the only way we could get him to cut it." bowler Johnny Petraglia finished higher than fifth on the money-winning list Each earns more than $100,000 a year in prize money and endorsements. Last year, the tour's richest for prize money, 15 pros won more than $50,000 on the 34-week tour. Not bad, until you consider that it cost some of them the high-livere and those whose wives come along as much as $750 a week in expenses just to stay on the road. And those guys are bowling's upper-middle class.

Most of them travel with their family in RVs, or, if they're single, share a motel room with another touring pro. Then, there's everybody else. Many of the others sleep three or even four to a motel room (usually illegally) and often drive day and night to the next tour stop. Most places even make them pay for practice time. They subsist on TV movies and fast food.

Why do most of them do it? Well, for one thing, it beats working. And, for another, many are hooked on the glamorous thought of finishing in the top five and qualifying for the televised championships. On the tour, it's known as "making the show." "The Show" is seen as a way to live out an "if my friends could see me now" fantasy. But, more important, it's a way to persuade a struggling player's sponsor, who may be thinking of dumping him, to hold off. More than anything, however, "making the show" is just the tease a struggling player needs to keep on trying when he should be looking for a saner line of work.

Like the gambler who beats the house big one day, then loses it all back and more but refuses to leave the table, the bowlers stay. Some of the older ones, the ones who were bowling professionally in 1959 when the circuit consisted of three tournaments, bowl because they know no other life. Even if they fail to qualify for a tournament, they can pick up $25 or $50 for bowling in the junior and senior pro-ams. For the younger bowlers, there's always time. Time to get the game together and become a superstar.

"Most of the young guys are looking for a rainbow that just isn't there," touring pro Jeff Morin said. Morin, 35, left a job as a computer operations manager for MasterCharge last year to try the tour. This year he had a sponsor. For four weeks. But don't worry about Morin.

He sells computers, runs a bowling-supply business and teaches classes in mind control But he's lucky. Touring pros go bankrupt so frequently that it's a $5,000 fine if a bowler is caught trying to "sponsor" a tapped-out friend on the circuit In the tour's early days, it was common to keep a bankrupt buddy financially afloat But the PBA, ever conscious of its image, has outlawed such cozy arrangements. "If there's a good friend out there that goes broke, I'm just going to lend him enough money for dinner," pro Sam Flanagan said. "But there's no sympathy between the foul line and the head pin. If you feel sorry for someone, they might hit seven (strikes) in a row and put you on welfare." Flanagan is a member of the PBA's executive board, and he understands the importance of keeping the network happy.

He therefore supports the rules set down by the PBA's image committee. Bowlers can't have beards or sideburns below the ear, aren't allowed to drink alcoholic beverages, or wear T-shirts or denim or corduroy jeans while competing. Players are permitted to smoke during the early tournament rounds, but not on TV. "If our income was derived mainly from Marksmen aim for spots on U. S.

shooting team The 21st U. S. International Shooting Championships began Sunday and will run through June 12 at Black Canyon Shooting Range. Individual entries have been received from 150 pistol and 160 rifle shooters. The rifle and pistol shooters, in addition to competing for 18 national championships, will be trying to win places on teams representing the United States in the Confederation of the Americas Championships in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Nov.

5-15. The teams also will compete in the Second World Air Gun Championships in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Aug. 8-15, and the World Moving Target Championships in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Oct. 16-Nov. 3.

Additionally, the winners at Black Canyon will qualify for the National Sports Festival in Syracuse, N.Y., July 21-25. Col. William Pullum, chairman of the National Rifle Association's International Shooting Committee, is at Black Canyon with other team officers to observe the rifle and pistol championships. Pullum said the final U. S.

team will consist of shooters to fire the 50-meter free-rifle matches, the English match and air-rifle match, women's air rifle and standard rifle, men's free pistol, rapid-fire pistol and air pistol. Also, there will be junior teams in most of these events. A team also will be selected later in the 300-meter rifle for the Confederation of the Americas matches. The moving-target championships will consist of teams to fire running boar, clay target and skeet For 15 years these matches, which include the important Olympic shooting events, have been dominated by a handful of aging shooters. The lack of young shooters is due largely to the increasing costs of shooting equipment, ammunition and travel, plus insufficient opportunity and lack of money for the juniors.

Thanks to Pullum and dedicated people like Gary Anderson, director of NRA operations; Marie Alkire of Mesa, an NRA board member, several members of the Women's International Rifle Association; Col. Jack Rollinger, director of civilian marksmanship; and an outstanding National Guard shooting program, we now are seeing an organized farm system that produces young shooters. At the grassroots of the program is my old friend Jack Powers of the Daisy Air Rifle Co. in Rogers, Ark. Powers is retired now, but his work is carried on by Bob Doss.

At last the NRA is helping Daisy, something I urged many times while on the NRA Board of Directors. The culmination was the two-day Daisy-NRA National Junior Invitational conducted recently at Colorado Springs, with 104 top youngsters competing in air rifle, air pistol, and air moving target running boar. The top shooters from that tournament are at Black Canyon, along with other top national small-bore shooters. They will compete in all of the rifle events, which include air moving target We still are not paying our sportsmen, but Rollinger, the director of civilian marksmanship, is providing some travel subsidy, and the film people at Luke Air Force Base are providing, at cost, mess and barracks space and a bus for transportation to the range. i 'If we were playing football, this race would be considered the Super Bowl' Ex-milkman enters round-the-world yacht race Actor leads entries for roping contest Ben Johnson, Academy Award-winning actor and 1953 world-champion steer roper, was first on the entry list last week when 10 charter members filed $100 registration fees for a 60x60 roping contest Nov.

12-15 at Laveen, which is southwest of Phoenix. The contest will be the final event of the 1981 Ropathon at Bill Roer'a arena. Sixty ropers older than 60 will participate in a 20-steer match. Each entrant is entitled to one throw with the back gate open in a 500-foot arena. The winner will get a $6,000 prize plus a $1,000 trophy saddle.

Chariwr antrsntt: Johnton; Leonard NmI, Kingman; Ban Snura, Portal; Marlon CatiwWar, Cata Granda: Bit Rouaau, ToMaton; Bob Carlock, Dava Young and Elmar Raad, Phoaitix; Roar, Uvaan; and PhD Slallar, Turlock, CalH. By Joanne A. Fishman New York Times NEW YORK Neil Bergt grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, and went to work as a milkman. He saved enough money toting milk bottles to buy a small plane and begin a career as a bush pilot, flying to the most remote areas of Alaska. When the company he worked for went bankrupt 11 years ago, Bergt bought it Today, his company is known as Alaska International Industries, a conglomerate involved in oil drilling, construction and transportation.

Bergt, 45, has decided to pursue a dream. And he dreams big. He has become the first American to enter a yacht the Alaska Eagle in the Whitbread round-the-world race. The race begins Aug. 29 at Portsmouth, England, and consists of stops at Cape Town, South Africa; Auckland, New Zealand; and Mar del Plata, Argentina.

Begun in 1973 and held every four years, the race has every extreme of nature from the cold and ice storms in the southern Pacific Ocean to the doldrums in the Atlantic. "If we were playing football, this race would be considered the Super Bowl," Bergt said. "It's the toughest race there is." Unimaginably rigorous, it will take the approximately 25 entrants about eight months to race the 26,000 miles. The boat that wins will have been pushed hard every mile. The Royal Naval Sailing Association of England, which coordinates the race, describes it as "an event that tests and stresses the people and equipment to the extreme limits and provides a degree of adventure seldom achieved elsewhere in our modern world." Other entries include yachts from the Netherlands, France, England, Finland, Belgium, Norway, New Zealand, West Germany, Switzerland, South Africa and Spain.

The boats range in size from a 41-footer owned by Karl Meinecke of West Germany to the 80-foot Ocean Greyhound sailed by Leslie Williams of England. Bergt's Alaska Eagle is a 65-foot yacht designed by Spar km an Stephens. Four years ago, when the yacht won the Whitbread, it was known as Flyer and was sailed by Cornelius van Rietschoten of the Netherlands!.