Black Hills Sports Show runs through Sunday

By Steve Buchholz, Journal correspondent | Saturday, February 17, 2007

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RAPID CITY — Dragging a 6,000-gallon indoor fishing tank is enough work, but the trip to the Black Hills Sports Show and Sale got downright ugly for Jim and Debbie Edwards.

They crashed their pickup in Anamosa, Colo., before their rig dropped its clutch in Newcastle, Wyo., where they were rescued by the town’s mayor, who let the couple borrow his pickup for the remainder of the trip.

They made it to Rushmore Plaza Civic Center just in time to call the fire department for assistance filling the massive glass and steel tank that hulks in a corner of the Rushmore Hall.

“They usually use a garden hose, but there wasn’t enough time,” event manager Jim Glines said. “The fish were here and ready to go, but we didn’t have the water yet.”

For the line of youngsters ready to dunk a line minutes after the show opened Friday afternoon, the Edwards’ trials and tribulations meant nothing. They just wanted to fish.

After a few calls of “Here, fishy, fishy,” from his mom, Amy, 8-year-old Zach Davis of Black Hawk proved his angling prowess by hauling in the first rainbow trout.

“It’s fun, because you can actually see the fish,” he said. “You can’t see any fish when you go fishing in a dirty lake.”

Supplying the youngsters with a good time is the whole point. Give young fishermen an almost-guaranteed opportunity to catch a fish — maybe their first after getting skunked at the local stream — and you might end up with someone who looks forward to the tug of the line more than the release of the latest hot shoot ’em up video game.

“We want kids to get off the couch and away from the front of the TV set,” Debbie Edwards said. “We want them to actually go outside.”

And as a result, maybe, just maybe, the fishing bug might catch on.

“Maybe it’s not tomorrow, but this spring, a kid who catches a fish today might say, ‘Dad, take me fishing,’” Glines said.

The Berkley Outdoor Park, as the Edwards call it, is the newest, coolest thing at the 25th edition of the annual sports show. But it’s hardly the only thing that kept the attention of the hundreds of people who wandered the civic center’s two floors, dozens of vendors and rooms full of trophy mounts and items every sportsman needs (or at least desperately wants).

“If we don’t have it, they don’t make it,” Glines said. “There isn’t a square foot in this place except the bathrooms where we don’t have something.”

Glines hardly exaggerates. Visitors can buy or check out jet skis, snowmobiles, Saskatchewan walleye trips, Nisland pheasant hunts, party barges, Harley-Davidson “crotch rockets,” bank loans, custom fishing tackle from Nebraska, whirlpools, pool tables, discount hunting clothes, back adjustments, world-record elk mounts, the National Guard, mobile homes, ATVs, cars, trucks, campers, conservation groups, rifle and shotgun raffles, and benches to rest.

And there are the fish and their noble cause.

“If mom and dad bring their son or daughter here, and that makes them want to go fishing together as a family later on, I feel like I’ve done my job,” Jim Edwards said.

The Naja Shriners and The Rapid City Cosmopolitan Club sponsor the show and have grown it into one of the largest outdoor shows in the region. Glines expects up to 14,000 visitors this year.

Proceeds from the show benefit The Naja Shrine Hospital Transportation Fund and The Cosmopolitan Club’s Diabetes Research and other local charities. The Cosmopolitan Club and Diabetes, Inc., will offer free diabetes screening on the second floor southeast corner today only.

If you go

What: Black Hills Sports Show and Sale

When: 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday

Cost: Adults $5, youths 13 and older $1, children 12 and younger enter free

More information: www.blackhillssportsshowandsale.org