Floating downstream one day along the Ocmulgee, north of Macon, I came across two fellows fishing from the muddy bank of the river. Both men wore white cotton Atlanta Braves jerseys. And both men were fighting to get their fishing line untangled from the nearby branch hanging over the slow moving current..
Trolling over toward the bank, I though I might be able to assist to the pair of frustrated anglers. After several attempts, we were able to free the bigger man’s lure from the limb. However, the other man’s line snapped; and his lure was left dangling from the leafy branch. As the two men thanked me for helping them free their lines, they conceded that they had been getting their lures hung in the tree about nine out of ten times that day.
“So you’ve only been hitting the water one out of ten times, then. Huh!”
The pair looked at one another, nodded in agreement, then the bigger one asserted, “I reckon so, if you look at it that way.”
Then the pair introduced themselves as Uggla and Upton – never clarifying which was which. They fess up that their boss had given them the day off because of some struggles which they were having at work. Then one of the two piped up, “Yeah! We have about as much luck fishin’ as we used to have with women.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” the other confessed.
“Yeah!” the first continued. “About one out of every ten times that we asked a woman out – she’d accept our offer.”
Then the other jumped in, “And out of those, we’d get to first base with about one out of ten.”
The first continued the sequence, “And out of them, we’d get to second base about one in ten times.”
“And to third with about one out of ten of those,” the big guy confessed.
Rounding the base path the first guy then boasted, “But we’d hit a homer with about one in ten of what was left!”
With the last statement, I inquired, “So you guys only got lucky with one girl in every one hundred thousand attempts.”
The two men looked at each other with slumped shoulders. “No!” the bigger guy confessed. “It’s more like one in a million. Nine out of ten times we hit a homer; we’d wake up from the dream – with soiled shorts.”