Reel Passion

As rain spits from a low gray sky one evening, Mike Bostwick, perhaps the best fly-caster in all of Colorado, stands by himself in Aurora's Utah Park. An observer can tell it's Mike Bostwick (he looks a little like Stalin, but much friendlier) because of his rugged-sportsman-looking shirt, on which is stitched "Mike Bostwick," and because he's the one tossing a fly line an unusually long distance out onto the grass, the green filament curling gracefully into Picasso loops before snapping out like an unrolling tongue several dozen feet away.

This solitary scenario couldn't play out if John Elway wanted to heave some spirals through a tire in City Park, or if Peter Forsberg decided to stop by Big Bear ice arena for a little slap-shot practice. Yet even among fellow anglers, Bostwick and his competitors have felt the loneliness of the long-distance caster. They are the Maytag repairmen of sports champions.

"No groupies," sighs Washington state's Steve Rajeff, who has towered over the sport for three decades without enjoying anything resembling widespread recognition. "No Nike sponsorship. It's not like, 'There goes Tiger Woods!'"

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Competitive casting belongs to that niche of athletics born of extracting the highlight-reel moment of a recognized sport and then concentrating it into a stand-alone activity. This process has yielded such spectacles as long-drive golfing competitions, slam-dunk-offs and home-run derbies. Each is defined by a certain pointlessness of effort: hitting a golf ball without actually playing a round, dunking with no game on the line, blasting a pitch over the fence without it counting for a run. Or casting a fishing line on dry land, with no intention of reeling in a fish.

Yet all these sports have found large, receptive audiences -- with the exception, alas, of competitive casting. While there are numerous casting clubs across the country (none in Colorado; the real fishing's too good), and the American Casting Association promotes the sport, competition audiences are more Pop Warner than pop star. This year a fly-fishing show on the Outdoor Life Network was canceled after a three-year run.

Unlike, say, slam-dunking, the pursuit of casting is galling to many of its own. Serious fly fishermen (usually a redundancy), whose wordy yammerings about Zen and angling-as-metaphor-for-life manage to clog bookstores every spring, see casting against a fellow fly fisherman as a perversion of their near-spiritual sport. "There are a lot of people who look down on the competitions -- who say that real fly-fishing is not a competitive sport," says Jon Spiegel, who manages Boulder's Front Range Anglers store. "A lot of people take fly-fishing a little too seriously."

Then again, Bostwick is no dilettante. A Denver-area native who grew up fishing in local ponds alongside his father for anything and everything, he found his very specific calling in 1987, when he scraped together enough money and time off to travel to Montana, where he studied for three days at the feet of master caster and fishing-video guru Doug Swisher. Swisher, an ambidextrous distance caster, told him that with enough practice, anyone could crack the ranks of big-time casting, and Bostwick set to work with the determination of an ant moving a brick.

Bostwick estimates that between 1987 and 1998, he put in about 20,000 hours of practice, a training schedule that makes Jerry Rice look slothful. Most of the time was spent in his Westminster back yard, or at various parks across the metro area. (It will come as no shock to learn that Bostwick, a licensed electrician, is divorced.)

Each of his solitary practices follows a certain pattern. First he stops by a local park, perhaps on the way home from work. (During the winter, he wears a parka and casts in the snow.) Bostwick warms up with some straight casts -- the foul shot of the sport -- with about three or four hundred throws to start. Next he works on curve-line casts. Then it's on to double hauls and slack lines and reach casts. By the time he's done for the day, he's put in another three or four hours of practice (more on weekends) and has another thousand or so casts under his belt.

The near-full-time work has paid off. For a while, Bostwick was the undisputed best competition fly caster in Colorado. He won the Colorado Open Fly Casting Championship, held annually in Lyons, every year between 1991 and 1996. (The tournament is no longer in existence.) Prior to each year's competition, Bostwick would virtually move on-site, where he would practice throwing for hours on end. He kept a meticulous notebook, listing where he was at any given moment on the river.

In a casting competition, contestants must drop a fly -- really a piece of yarn on the end of a leader -- inside a hula-hoop-like target; for the distance portion, they haul their line back and forth until they let it fly with one final, mighty toss. Distances vary according to the line weight permitted by individual competitions. But Bostwick's record of dropping a five-weight line 105 feet from his body stood as the standard until very recently.