I was a huge baseball fan growing up — and while the responsibilities of being a husband and a father have caused me to turn slightly away from a sport that plays 180 games a year, there’s still one thing I really enjoy watching on a baseball diamond.
Since the game’s inception, most pitchers have thrown the same three pitches: fastball, changeup and some sort of breaking ball. They all deliver the same way, seemingly using every muscle in their bodies to achieve the velocity and movement they’re aiming for.
Then, once in a while, along comes a knuckleballer.
You watch this guy and you’d think anybody could hit his pitches. He just lobs the ball up there with little effort at speeds far less than what the others throw. But with the way the ball dips and wobbles, there are times when it’s hard for the catcher to even catch it, much less for the batter to hit it.
It’s one of the true oddities in sports.
Kind of like Florida angler John Cox.
Believe me, I refer to him as an “oddity” in the utmost complimentary fashion. But let’s be honest, in a day and age when so many people are fishing offshore and looking at their electronics, Cox is pro fishing’s knuckleballer.
He proved it for the 9,387th time at Wheeler Lake in June.
In triple-digit heat indexes that were causing everything from heat exhaustion to melted water bottles among the rest of the field, Cox found a secluded, dirt-shallow cove loaded with slimy grass and locked a Berkley Swamp Lord Frog in his hand.
It reminded me of the knuckleballer doing something that looked like it couldn’t possibly work against big-league hitters. But Cox rode the tactic to a third-place finish with a four-day weight of 70 pounds, 8 ounces.
It was a beautiful thing to watch, but it wasn’t a new occurrence.
Since Cox joined the Bassmaster Elite Series in 2020, I’ve seen him fish seawalls up North for smallmouth when everyone was fishing drop-shot rigs on the main lake. I’ve seen him slinging a Berkley The General around shallow cover when everyone else was using a crankbait or jig out deep somewhere for largemouth on the ledges.
Seeing a guy succeed up shallow like he does without reading big-time electronics should make all of us little guys feel good. Because, like the knuckleball, we can all learn how to do that if we commit to it, when it might take a certain amount of elite ability to throw a 90-mph fastball.
I wrote a column similar to this about Indiana pro Bill Lowen once titled “Bless the bank beaters” because Lowen is another guy who gives all shallow-water anglers hope.
I guess Lowen’s a knuckleballer, too. But Cox is a bit different because, in addition to being a knuckleballer, he’s a bit of a knucklehead.
Again, I say that in the absolute best sense of the term. But even former Bassmaster Classic champion Jason Christie pointed it out on Bassmaster LIVE during the Wheeler event.
“John’s one of those guys who, if he ever decides to fish eight hours, there’s no telling what he’ll catch,” Christie said, laughing. “But he talks and laughs and jokes for four hours and fishes the other four.”
That’s just another thing that makes Cox an oddity in today’s pro-fishing world.
He’s competitive — he’s won over $750,000 with B.A.S.S. and thousands more with other trails — but he always seems to be having fun.
After one of the weigh-ins for this year’s Bass Pro Shops Bassmaster Classic, I asked Cox how he managed to catch a stick and a bass on the same cast two days in a row. Looking back, it was a corny question that goes against every journalistic principle I’ve learned.
But Cox laughed out loud and said, “Yeah, it’s been a weird week for me.”
Honestly, it’s been a weird career. Maybe a little bit of a weird life.
He’s a knuckleballer in a fastball world, and I hope he never feels the need to throw harder.
