Video Transcript
People like to call me “Two Tries Tupou”. I play prop. I’m here at the Colorado XOs and I’m from Seattle, Washington.
My name is Tre Smalls, I’m from Charleston, South Carolina, and I play back row.
When I started fishing, I was maybe about 11 or 12.
People who taught me how to fish have kind of bit all over the place. You know, like I said, my grandfather was big into, spearfishing. Spent time up in my grandmother’s place, her cabin up in the island, fishing out there, and then also doing salmon fishing and crabbing with one of my homies.
I started fishing in Charleston, South Carolina.
I did a lot of salt water and then I turned fish water, freshwater.
I fish a lot back home. I actually spent a lot of my summertime out on the boat with one of my friends. We’d go out on his boat all the time out on the Puget Sound trying to catch King Salmon.
My late grandfather. He taught me how to fish, just casting it out there, being patient, you know, doing the old-fashioned way, hooking the worms onto the rod and everything.
Right now, my favorite fish to catch would probably be salmon.
My favorite fish to catch is probably catfish.
I have trout fished before. At my grandmas cabin over the summers, that’s what we used to do all the time, is go catch some nice trout out there.
No, I haven’t, I haven’t trout fished yet. Yeah, it’s my first time.
Interesting fact about me is I actually have a fly fishing merit badge in Boy Scouts. I was one of the very first merit badges that I got at Scout camp.
No, I haven’t fly fished before. It’s just me casting, that’s it.
The hard part about fly fishing, I’ll would probably say is reeling it back so it can flow. Like the real can flow down river because I’m used to like just like casting it out there and then like, you know, realing it back across the river, not letting it go down.
Yeah, you know what, it kind is. Rugby is kind of similar to fishing. People might think, like, how so? I think a lot of it is patience, you know what I mean. When your team is out there, you know, working their butt off to get a try, like it doesn’t just happen like that sometimes. Sometimes it does, but most times you know, you’ve got to go into different phases of the game and dig down deep and, you know what I mean, work together to, you know, I mean, get that try.
And I feel like it’s the similar process with fishing. You know what I mean.
One, it takes a lot of patience and two. Like there’s a lot of hard work and little details into things, you know, like in terms of like what kind of bait you’re using, you know what I mean, like what are the fish using that day? Like, what are they eating?
Do I think fishing is similar to rugby? Yeah, I think so in the patients aspect. Because a lot of things like fishing, you’ve got to be patient. You can’t, you know, try to rush and be like, oh, it’s been 30 minutes, I haven’t caught anything and maybe two hours before you catch anything and rugby’s the same way, you know, if you’re like, you know, you’re trying to play your game and it’s like, I can’t seem to get into the part where I can get the ball. But if you’re patient enough, your time is going to come.
Rugby so far is actually it’s a lot of fun. I’m loving it. A lot more freedom to do things than football. And it’s just, the games always flowing. So that’s always fun.
Oh, man, I fell in love with it. You know, I was skeptical at first when I first started playing rugby, but then all of a sudden I was like, wow, I really like the sport a lot and now I’m in love.
