If you watch
-What: "Hillbilly Handfishin'," an Animal Planet television series about catching monster catfish with your hands and feet.
-Local talent featured: An episode airing at 9 tonight, "Win One for the Skipper," will feature two members of the UND men's basketball team, Nick Haugen and Mike Mathison.
- Where to find it: Animal Planet is on Channel 42 in Grand Forks.
UND basketball players Nick Haugen and Mike Mathison are used to competition and playing for a crowd, but they're still a little nervous about their television debut tonight on Animal Planet's "Hillbilly Handfishin'."
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Yes, they were willing to sign up for a trip to Oklahoma where they learned to use their fingers and toes for bait and then catch and wrestle big, ugly catfish with their bare hands.
But watching their episode tonight with their friends and teammates? Both seemed concerned that if there was too much on-screen screaming and yelling, they'd never hear the end of it.
"I pretty much want to watch it in my room by myself," Haugen joked during an interview at UND.
"Hillbilly Handfishin'" bills itself as a fish-out-of-water adventure for thrill-seeking "city slickers." Led by Oklahoma hand-fishermen and self-proclaimed hillbillies Skipper Bivins and Trent Jackson, noodling is quite simple: locate catfish in underground caverns, wait for them to bite your feet or hands, and then pull them out onto the surface with assistance from a spotter andrope. But it isn't all fun and games. Noodlers must be on the lookout for snakes, beavers, muskrats and snapping turtles that take over abandoned catfish holes as homes of their own.
In the competition to catch the biggest catfish, Haugen and Mathison and four other contestants spent six hours a day for a week wading and belly-crawling shoulder to shoulder through the murky waters of the Red River near Temple, Okla. Daytime temperatures were more than 100 degrees with water temperatures in the 90s.
The water was so cloudy, you couldn't see two inches, the guys said, and it wasn't really all that fun sticking your hands and feet under piles of brush and overhangs to find fish when you didn't know what else was lurking there. It was uncomfortable and, at times, scary.
"We were in the water six hours a day," Mathison said. "By the time we were done, it was time for supper and then we went to bed. When your adrenaline stopped pumping, you died."
Haugen, who is 6-foot-2, and Mathison, 6-foot-10, aren't really "city slickers" but neither have they done much (or, in Mathison's case, any) fishing. Both are 22. Mathison is from Walhalla, N.D., and graduated from North Border High School in 2007. Haugen is originally from Rockford, Minn.
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They auditioned for the show by Skype after being recommended by a former assistant coach, Ryan Moody, who is a friend of a friend of the show's producers, who apparently liked what they saw in the UND basketball buddies. The other guests on tonight's show are newlyweds Kristen, 34, a teacher and horse trainer, and Phantom, 36, a software designer, from the Virginia suburbs, and Lori, 41, and Jhake, 21, from Manhattan and Washington, who purports to be an international financier and a model/musician.
Mathison and Haugen
didn't get paid to be on the show, but they feel like they've done something not many of the peers can claim, and they said they enjoyed the greatest of hospitality from the Bivens family during their week in Oklahoma.
The two (who had permission to represent UND and wear UND T-shirts on the show) said their time together as teammates helped them work together on "Hillbilly Handfishin'." Not that they weren't competitive with each other, and with the other guests on the show. A preview of tonight's episode showed both funny and anxious moments, lots of screaming and thrashing in the water after slippery fish, as well as a couple of scares and plenty of hillbilly witticisms.
"Six-foot-10," one of the show's hosts says of Mathison at one point. "Dang! That's a lot of bait there."
