The waterskiing community is truly one big connected family. The first week of July I loaded the family up and headed to The Lakes of Cypress for the Big Dawg tournament. This was our first Big Dawg tournament so my wife and and kids were a little reluctant to go and watch other people ski, the boys could not understand why they were not going to get to ski.
When the top 16 starting skiing we were in a dilemma of who to cheer for. We just purchased our boat from Jay Leach who got it from Chad Scott so they had to be cheered for because we were somehow connected. I skied a set with Seth at Ski Texas two months earlier and eventually purchased a ski from him so we had to cheer for him. We ski at Lago Santa Fe so we were definitely going to cheer for "our" Todd (Johnson).
Just when we had our favorites all figured out a skier went down in front of us during one of the head to head rounds. He swam over and got out next to our tarp and set his ski down. He was out of the tournament and one would assume he was not happy about that but as we thanked him and remarked to him how awesome and motivating all of the skiers were he struggled to remove his "Big Dawg" jersey and vest then handed the jersey to my ten year old son and smiled at him and my seven year old and told them this is for you boys. It reminded me of the old Coke commercial with Mean Joe green giving up his jersey. Only Green got paid big bucks to give it up. Jerry Goodson did it out of the goodness of his heart.
We left the tournament with four big smiles on all of our faces and another member added to our extended waterskiing family. "We" cannot wait until next year.
Jerry if you find this... thank you very much, that jersey has become one of my son's prized possessions.
As a side note, we left the tournament that Sunday and drove to Bennett's ski school. My ten year old slalom skied for the first time the next day. My seven year old slalom skied for the first time on Tuesday.
