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Okie Noodling becoming Girls Gone Grapplin'
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Lee McFarlin with a fish caught by noodling (Wikicommons)
Bull riders can make millions of dollars in their careers. Ty Murray, a bull rider and all around rodeo champ was celebrated, married a music star, and was able to compete on ABC television show Dancing with the Stars.
Bullriding is however a largely useless endeavor. Unlike Bronc busting which was used to force horses to accept a rider, bull riding accomplishes nothing but endangering the participant.
Another sport that very well can be more dangerous than bull riding is noodling. Noodling is the process of a noodler putting a hand in a hole under water and allowing usually a catfish to bite it. Then the noodler fights the fish and gets it onto the shore. When a noodler places their hand in a dark hole, they risk getting bit by snakes, snapping turtles, a hunting beaver or various other creatures including the animal that the noodler wants to get bit by: the catfish. Catfish are bottom feeders and they try to avoid the hot sun by getting into deep holes on the bottom. therefore the noodler sometimes has to submerge themselves and therefore risk drowning. At least this extreme sport has a purpose: to catch a fish. This sport has been going on for centuries and could be one of the oldest sports in history. Its popularity waxes and wanes. The first wave of popularity occurred when 1989 handfishing champion Jerry Rider appeared on Late Night with David Letterman on NBC in 1989. The next wave of popularity occurred with the 2001 release of the documentary Okie Noodling (the 2008 sequel Okie Noodling 2 is being rebroadcast wed. July 8 2009 10 pm CST on PBS affiliate OETA). The third wave of popularity might occur with the release of the video series Girls Gone Grabblin' Grabbling is what they call noodling in Tennessee. Okie noodling showed backwoods men crawling around the muck, with a soundtrack by the Flaming Lips. Girls Gone Grabblin' shows bikini clad girls writhing around in mud trying to hold on to an undulating fish. The host of Amazing Race, Phil Keoghan, makes a special appearance but he doesn't claim it on his credits even though he reported on Girls Gone Grabblin' for the CBS Early show.
One of the main things holding back the popularity of the sport, is that it is so dangerous that noodling is illegal in most states. At the time the documentary Okie Noodling was released, noodling was only legal in 4 states: Oklahoma, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana. After the popularity, it is now legal in ten states: Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kansas, Illinois, and Arkansas. With the recession hopefully more states will allow noodling because it is the cheapest sport unlike NASCAR which is very expensive and wastes a lot of fuel. As Girls Gone Grabblin' shows, a noodler doesn't even need much clothes. In fact in Oklahoma, it is illegal to even possess any equipment like hooks or ropes while noodling. Some nonpurists resort to using scuba tanks but they interfere when wrestling with the fish. It is however advised to use scuba gear when noodling near submerged roadways. Oklahoma has a lot of artificial lakes created by dams and no one bothered to remove the roads that were in existence before the lakes were created flooding them. Under the submerged roadway, pockets are created which make a great place for the catfish to hide under. The problem is that a noodler can reach into the hole and the asphalt can shift, easily trapping and drowning the noodler.
With all the risks of drowning, and the certainty of being bitten by at least something, why do people noodle? One reason is that a farm raised dressed catfish sells for at least 2.01/lb wholesale so a 30lb catfish can cost at least $60 while a noodled catfish just costs a little bit of pain. However, noodling has much less pain than falling off a bull.
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