It's like I didn't learn a thing from watching The Last Dance. If "Michael Jordan" and "competition" are in the same sentence, I need to realize a couple of things: one, that he's definitely participating in said competition, and two, he's probably succeeding.
Yesterday, I wrote that Michael Jordan's 80-foot Viking fishing boat, "Catch 23," was registered in the Big Rock Blue Marlin fishing tournament. I saw another person's name (Stetson Turney) in the "captain" slot on the boat participant page, and figured MJ didn't have much to do with the tournament. Maybe I thought he was letting a friend use it, or that he owned the boat for recreational purposes but not for competitive ones... I don't know. I guess I was naive.
Throughout the duration of the Big Rock Blue Marlin Tournament in North Carolina, the tournament's official Twitter page has been continually tweeting updates regarding which boats were catching what. Occasionally the tweets would pick up some traction, like when 36 people liked a blue marlin update.
Then, at 10:37, another notification went out, just like all the rest, and Twitter (relative to the other posts) exploded.
And no, the boat hadn't hooked up with a white marlin. It hadn't reeled in a sailfish, which wouldn't have counted toward the big prize. "Catch 23" had hooked a blue marlin. And MJ was on the scene to talk about his 442.3-lb. haul.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the NBA Hall of Famer was happy yet unsatisfied with the catch.
Though 442.3 pounds is nothing to shrug off, it only just covers the 400-lb. minimum required for a blue marlin to qualify in the competition, as stated in the official rules. Additionally, the rules say that a team can only boat one marlin per day, and so that will be the end of today's big haul for "Catch 23."
It's unlikely that this will be the grand prize-winning catch of the tournament, as last year's winner was a 914-lb. behemoth that set the new tournament record. No winning marlin in the past 25 years has weighed in at under 450 pounds.
Again, we still don't know that Jordan is the guy holding the rod and putting up a fight with the monstrous fish. Still, Jordan and his boat are on the board, and when he says he wants to come back with something bigger, I won't doubt his ability to back up his talk.
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