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GREENSBORO -- Of course, he thought they were kidding at first. Why wouldn't he? After all, how many people on earth have a fish named for them?

Bodie McDowell does. And all these years later, it still makes him proud and a little amused to think about it.

"I guess it's an honor," he once said.

McDowell was honored Monday night, when he was inducted into the Guilford County Sports Hall of Fame along with a stellar class of local athletes and coaches, each of them accomplished in their own field, none of them with a hybrid bass named in their honor.

Here's a brief description of a Bodie Bass:

Big, mean and not in a mood to be snared by net or hook. A cross between a striper and white bass, the Bodie grows to almost 20 pounds in southeastern compounds and is known to hit topwater plugs, jigs and the occasional crankbait, usually trying to kill the lure, not eat it.

Here's a brief description of Bodie:

Lean and wiry and not in a mood to be honored by man or beast. A cross between a sportswriter and a fisherman known for great acts of courage and generosity.

McDowell was the outdoors writer at the News & Record for three decades, spinning tales tall and true and yarns based on the truth until he retired in 1992. He was a president of the Outdoors Writers Association of America (OWAA) and probably was the best known sportswriter to ever work in North Carolina.

He was much bigger outside the state than in it, which is how it is with most outdoor writers. McDowell went to the first 22 Bassmaster Classics. Legendary promoter and BASS founder Ray Scott credited McDowell with nothing less than helping build the sport of competitive bass fishing, something McDowell felt comfortable with despite constant badgering from other fishermen who considered bass fishing to be more of a religion than a sport.

"It's whatever you want it to be," he'd say in his Greenwood, S.C., accent.

He stood in front of a crowd Monday night and talked slowly so the non-fishermen could understand him. And he went into the hall with the grace and dignity of a man who taught Greensboro how to hunt and fish and how to tell the difference between a deer and an elk and the importance of outdoors in our everyday lives.

"You get your name in the paper twice in your life," he once said. "When you're born and when you die. In between, though, if you hunt or fish, you get your name on the Outdoors Page all the time!"

A generation of college kids have been going to school under a scholarship in his name after the OWAA started an endowment that is now worth more than $400,000. And, of course, he's been on a first-name basis with government leaders and grimy catfish anglers, everyday men and everyday women, lawmakers and the lawless alike. One night, walking along the banks of the Dan River during a striper run, News & Record sports columnist Wilt Browning and McDowell were trying to find a good place to drop a line.

"It was pitch dark," Browning said. "And every time Bodie said something, people would call out his name. They couldn't even see him. They just knew him by his voice!"

So it came to pass in 1987 when McDowell was at a public hearing in Burlington with fisheries chief Fred Harris that McDowell was talking about the new hybrid bass being introduced to North Carolina waters.

"We ought to give it a name," Bodie said.

Harris suggested they call it the "Bodie Bass."

"Next thing I know, the Wildlife Commission has put it on the agenda for the next meeting and it just happened," Bodie said. "They called it the 'Bodie Bass.' I thought they were kidding."

He would leave the paper five years later and take a job with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission as the public information officer. He worked there for eight years before becoming a consultant. In a sense, that's what he's always been and remains to this day, our fisherman emeritus, our outdoors writer for life, the only man we know with a fish named after him.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com