Modern Fishing With Jared Jeffries

For us local basketball fans the name Jared Jeffries will for sure ring a bell; many of you will remember that Jared played at Bloomington North High School and was Mr. Basketball for the state of Indiana in 2000. His basketball career continued at Indiana University where he played but two seasons leading the 2002 squad to the final game of the NCAA tournament where the Hoosiers were defeated by Maryland 64-52. You might still remember that against Duke in the East Regional Semi-finals…Jared scored 24 points to go with 15 rebounds as our team beat the Dukies 74-73! Jared was then selected the #11 overall pick in the 2002 draft (1^st round) by the Washington Wizards; the next 11 years he made his NBA mark playing for 4 teams (New York Knicks twice) on his way to scoring 3003 points, 798 assists and 2,563 rebounds.

>>> Click Here <<< to listen to Jeff’s phone interview with Jared Jeffries …

All of this might lead you to ask what this has to do with my outdoor column; well this past fall I was searching through the directory on my TV for fishing shows and there was a listing for Modern Fishing with Jared Jeffries. I will quickly admit that my first reaction was pretty simple…odd that there is a fisherman with the same name as our basketball star; heck, he even spelled his first name the same way? I quickly clicked on the-more info button and didn’t get much more…so I grabbed my I-pad and Googled the name of the show, fully expecting it to be some bubble bellied guy with an accent and a bad fishing hat. There to my surprise was our basketball player…Jared and he was holding a sea trout. I honestly did a double take and for sure this was Jared. I scurried back to my TV control and immediately DVR’d an upcoming show.

A few days later I checked and indeed the show had taped so I quickly pulled it up and watched in amazement as there was our guy, all 6’ 11” of him, standing in the front of a boat casting for big sea going fish. I was completely pulled in by the show and simply couldn’t get over the fact that all these years and I never knew, nor heard a thing about him being a fisherman or an outdoorsmen. What made it more special was when they went to the break and pulled back from his boat…right there on the side was the Indiana Hoosiers logo-wow, very cool!

What I came to figure out was that I had missed the first show; I took care of that by hitting the record series button. Two weeks later I was rewarded with the show that filled in all the blanks; the first show had done the research and provided the history lesson as to why Jared would have his own fishing show. Seems like besides basketball…Jared’s second love was the outdoors; this show provided many photos of Jared as young boy all the way up to and through his IU basketball career. There was one picture after another and it became clear to me that his father and uncles had provided the experience and upbringing to really spark Jared’s interests in both hunting and fishing. What I loved even more were the short clips with his mother where she would describe him and how much he loved to be outdoors. What the first show proved was this; Jared was not just another athlete…his love for fishing ran deep.

One edition that proved to me how tough Jared is and how much he loves fishing was the Cape Cod show. Jared was fishing just off of Cape Cod for Bluefin Tuna with Captain Dom; the fishing was obviously tough…if you watch the NatGeo show called Wicked Tuna then you already know how tough these fish are to actually put in a boat-the pros don’t land but about half that they hook up with. During this show Jared really worked hard and long but they never landed one of these thousand dollar fish. What impressed me was the fact that through it all he really enjoyed being out on the ocean; there was a school of Humpback whales along with a pod of dolphins that made for some up-close and personal connections with some of God’s finest creatures and Jared took it all in and obviously appreciated the great nature show he was privy to.

Modern Fishing with Jared Jeffries is on the Outdoor Channel (ch. 606 on Direct TV). The show runs at various times during the week; however the first run of any show is on Sunday’s at 3:30pm. Give it a watch and support one of our own basketball legends as he works hard to Enjoy the Great Outdoors.