If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look who he gave it to. — Dorothy Parker
National Football League fans will wail and gnash their teeth if the league and its players don’t settle a labor lockout before September.
A lot of Americans couldn’t care less. They see this as a fight between billionaire owners and millionaire players squabbling over how to divide $9 billion in annual revenues. That’s money 99.9999 percent of us can’t imagine in our bank accounts.
Many fishermen and a majority of citizens likely feel the same way about the ongoing lawsuit over which boat will be declared winner of the 2010 Big Rock Blue Marlin Tournament.
It’s been a year now — the 2011 Big Rock is this month at Morehead City — and still nobody’s seen 2010 first-place cash.
It seems the boat everyone thought had won last June — the Citation, with a record 883-pounder worth $1,237,575 — committed a violation because a crew member, Peter Wann of Alexandria, Va., failed to buy a North Carolina saltwater fishing license before the tournament began. Big Rock rules require everyone to have a RSFL at the drop of the green flag. So, Citation’s win was disqualified.
The Citation’s owners — mainly Michael Topp of Chester, Va. — hired an attorney to dispute the Big Rock tournament committee’s disqualification. The lawyer, Andy Gay, first tried to stop dispersal of all prize money until first-place money was settled. He lost two court decisions, which handed the Carnivore second-place money ($217,570) and Wet-N-Wild the third-place prize ($144,380). But a third appeal by Gay over first place is working its way toward the N.C. Court of Appeals.
Meanwhile Capt. Ed Petrelli of Carnivore and Capt. Tony Ross of Wet-N-Wild have been forced to spend $5,000 to hire attorneys.
Ross said the Citation group told him and Petrelli the dispute wasn’t about money, then almost immediately suggested they’d drop the lawsuit if the two crews would give Citation 85 percent of their earnings.
If Carnivore and Wet-N-Wild win a final court decision, Petrilli’s group would earn an additional $781,883, while Ross’s team would win an added $130,942. No wonder Citation wants a chunk of that change. What a fix for the Carnivore and Wet-N-Wild crews.
You’ve got to feel a little sorry for the Citation bunch, because they didn’t know Wann didn’t have a license when they pushed away from the dock that morning, but they bear some blame in that regard, also. At the captain’s meeting before competition began, tournament officials made a point that everyone on any boat in the tournament had to have a license. No one from the Citation was at that meeting, and no one asked Wann about a license.
In several interviews, Wann said he was the one who brought up the subject, asking Capt. Eric Holmes if the boat still held a blanket license as it had when it was a charterboat. Told it didn’t, Wann went on-line and bought one — after the marlin had been boated.
The lawsuit, Ross said, is multi-millionaire Topp “screwing with” the Big Rock Tournament, simply because he can. Topp has been unavailable for comment.
This brouhaha may lower future entries, which could hurt the Big Rock’s charities, and that’s not good. As for the rest of it, the NFL billionaire-vs-millionaire battle probably holds as much interest.
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