Fly Fishing Ambassador Joe Brooks

In some circles Joe Brooks is considered the father of saltwater fly fishing. Lefty Kreh, Mike and Joe Brooks are in the throws of trying to tell Joe Brooks amazing story.

This is a film about a man who was the epitome of the word “sportsman.” Joe Brooks could have been a standout in multiple sports on a professional level. He was a great baseball player who played for a short time for the Baltimore Orioles. He was a bruising boxer, a scratch golfer and a hulking football player. Yet Joe, more than anything, was a legendary fly fisherman. Yes, he was a superb sportsman, but not just in the traditional sense of a man engaged in a particular sport, but rather as Webster’s dictionary’s secondary definition phrases it, “a person who is fair, generous,a good loser and a gracious winner.”

But Joe had not always been described that way. Those who knew him early in life were familiar with a much different man. One who was troubled and angry. He was a drunkard. He was a whoremonger. He was a violent soul who often ended his late night drinking binges locked in a jail cell for beating up some poor barfly who happened to agitate him. His family life was in shambles. A black sheep in a family that operated a very successful insurance business in Baltimore, Maryland, Joe was soon cast out for his dysfunctional and irresponsible behavior. His first two marriages, not surprisingly, ended in divorce and Joe soon found himself living far away in an isolated, run-down cabin in the backwoods of the Maryland countryside.