On this, the 4th of July, a day intimately associated with liberty, it is appropriate to reflect on the strides this nation has made to expand freedom in the world of sport.  Think of Jackie Robinson, the first African-American to play major league baseball.  Consider Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to run the Boston Marathon.  Or how about Manny Ramirez, the first Dominican outfielder to take a leak behind a manually-operated scoreboard during a pitching change in an American League game.  Truly, as a nation, we have much to be proud of.

Kathrine Switzer, failing the Boston Marathon gender test.

But many are surprised to hear that, until very recently, there were still obstacles to full participation in the athletic endeavors that make this country great.  One such barrier fell the other day, as the state of Missouri made it legal, for the first time, to "noodle", or fish with one's hands.

A guy named Phil, with a giant catfish caught by hand

As a teenage boy in a small Missouri town, I often worked with country people who spoke of noodling.  Not having much interest in fishing, I never accompanied them on their clandestine trips to muddy creek banks, where they told me they would stick their arms into hollow logs, risking bites by snakes or snapping turtles, to catch catfish by hand.  As a result, I have wrongly assumed all these years that the fish they caught would fit on a dinner plate. 

It turns out these men were diving under water, holding their breath and sticking their arms into catfish "holes" where they would grab fresh-water behemoths, smaller than a jet ski but not by much, and wrestle them into submission.  Where noodling is permitted, a fish must typically be as much as two feet long in order to be a legal catch.  Catfish are bottom feeders who will remain stationary for long periods of time, eating anything that floats by, and as a result can grow to be enormous.

"He followed me home--can I keep him?"

You would think that the Missouri legislature, in its wisdom, would have long ago followed the example of the other eleven states where handfishing (also referred to as "hogging") is legal, and let man and fish fight it out fair and square.  Missouri's scruples in the area of man-fish relations stemmed not from fear for fisherman's safety, but from a solicitous regard for the fishes' sex life.  Handfishing, according to fish and game officials, depletes the number of sexually mature fish.  Well, what do you want noodlers to do--knock before entering?

Moby Catfish

Since moving to the east coast thirty-five years ago, I've gone deep-sea fishing a number of times and had naively formed the opinion that it is more challenging than fresh-water fishing.  Having conducted further research into hand-fishing, I now believe that the only way ocean fishing could measure up to the challenge of noodling is for the beer-sodden men who pay hundreds of dollars to fish off Florida or Cape Cod to crawl overboard, find a bluefish or a marlin and subdue their prey using nothing but wrestling holds learned on WWE Royal Rumble.

Exhausted noodlers

So here's to America's hand-fishers, true sportsmen who eschew fish-finders and other high tech doo-dads that unfairly tilt the pond in favor of humans.  I salute you, but I have one request. 

If you don't mind, I'd rather not shake your hand.