Honors for a hook-and-bullet story

On Tuesday, the Southeastern Outdoor Press Association awarded third place to “Down Goes Emeritus,” which was published Nov. 24, 2019.

It is a story about having taken an ancient buck with a screwball rack that bedeviled the Old Belfast Hunting Club for nearly a decade.

We appreciate the honor, but we are especially happy that a panel of judges gave that level of recognition to an old-fashioned hunting story. It doesn’t happen very often.

We keep tabs on award-winning material. Contest winners are often things like, “The Wonderful World of Butterflies,” or “Turkey Vultures, Nature’s Vacuum Cleaners,” or “Tips to Attract Pollinators to Small Acreages.” Many writers keep a reserve stash of articles in their back pockets expressly for contests. These are usually odes to Grampa’s old hunting coat, an old flannel shirt or Daddy’s battered old Thermos. Judges can’t resist odes to old hunting dogs, especially if the dog dies in the end.

It’s been that way for about 30 years, since the sages in our business concluded that the survival of outdoor media depends on nonconsumptive content. Sports Afield, once the premier outdoors magazine, was the first to sell out. Its stable of columnists included George Harrison (not the Beatle) writing about songbirds; Ted Kerasote writing nonhunting and even anti-hunting apologia; and Ted Williams (not the baseball player) writing firebrand environmental articles.

The low point came in the 1990s with cover articles about pumpkin cannon championships in Delaware and a series about Kerasote job shadowing anti-hunting activists within People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Sports Afield ceased publication for a time and returned under new ownership as a high-end big-game hunting magazine. I occasionally see it on newsstands, but I haven’t read it in about 20 years.

Hook-and-bullet content providers shared a tenuous social and professional existence with nonconsumptive providers until 2003, when tensions boiled over at the annual Outdoor Writers of America Conference. A spat between the Sierra Club and the National Rifle Association at the conference’s awards banquet triggered the conflagration. The hook-andbullet providers abandoned the organization en masse and formed the Professional Outdoor Media Association. Both groups seem happier since the divorce.

Meanwhile, most of the hook-and-bullet media abandoned experiential articles in favor of roundups. “Top 10 Tips for the Rut!” “Five Public Land Strategies for Trophy Bucks!” “Seven Can’t-Miss Bets for Spawning Bass!”

A writer can knock out that kind of article in about one hour. Traditional hunting and fishing stories are fun to write, and fun to read, but they require a lot of work to make them breathe. When one wins an award, it validates the genre.

Naturally, social and political biases influence awards. If you don’t enter articles about climate change in OWAA’s contests, for example, you won’t win.

Several years ago, an outdoor media organization awarded second place to an article I wrote about deer hunting with Basel Khalil in the Ozark National Forest. Judges are anonymous, and they should not contact contestants. A judge phoned me to say he thought Basel’s story was the best entry, but he refused to award a first-place vote to a story about a Muslim, which was not mentioned in the story. Basel lost out to an ode to an old sweater.

I judged the newspaper division for the Association of Great Lakes Outdoor Writers this year. The rules required contestants to submit a Web link for each published entry. A syndicated columnist from Rhode Island submitted only typed manuscripts. After asking the awards committee chairman for permission, I contacted the writer and told him I read his stuff and believed it would be a real shame for such high-quality work to be denied proper consideration.

The writer said he sent manuscripts because he was ashamed of the butchery that editors had inflicted on the published versions. That made me really curious because the manuscripts were quite good.

That process illustrated that hook-and-bullet writing is still vibrant in Great Lakes region newspapers. I found it encouraging and inspiring.

The coronavirus pandemic has impelled a lot of people to discover hunting and fishing. Storytelling is elemental to the outdoors culture, and we hope newcomers and novices enter our exciting world of adventure through this and other newspapers that offer traditional outdoors content.

To readers that have been with us for a while, thank you. We dedicate this award to you.