Okay. I can live with the designated hitter in baseball.

I need more evidence before I`m convinced that the three-point shot is poison to basketball.

I can even face the truth of football, that it has become ballroom dancing since they put in all those new rules against honest violence.

But this time, they`ve gone too far.
This breaks my heart.
They are trying to take lying out of fishing.
Would I lie?
I am distressed to report that even fishing has fallen under the heavyhand of the reformer.

Just the other day a guy in Florida admitted he had stuffed a frozen bass with lead weights and passed it off as fresh and heavy.He had to give back his prize money.

All fishing tournaments now require contestants to undergo polygraph tests.Any one who fails is not allowed to fish. Ever again. Any where.Unless he lies about lying, of course.

A couple of guys from Michigan had to have their catch verified by a polygraph. Something about too many female walleyes in their tournament creel. It doesn`t matter.

The point is they needed proof that their fish story was true.

Aren`t we talking here about the end of civilization as we know it?

Lying and fishing have been going together longer than Nancy and Sluggo.

Separating the two is as unthinkable as breaking up a pair of bronzed baby shoes.

Which came first, lying or fishing? Better you should ask which came first, the fish or the roe?

Without lying, fishing is just worm washing.

I should have seen this coming. It was inevitable when tournaments began giving away prizes for fishing, as if the fish weren`t prize enough.

Where there are rewards, there are rules. Where there are rules, there are rules keepers.  Now there must be no question that the winner is holding up his catch with clean hands.

Just recently in Texas, a tournament fisherman was disqualified for putting lead sinkers in the stomach of the winning bass.

So what`s new?

Plutarch, the Greek biographer, reported the first fixed fishing tournament. Cleopatra and Mark Antony were fishing the Nile and, according to Plutarch, each was trying to catch more fish than the other. Ignoring diplomacy, Cleopatra had loyal eunuchs under the water tying fish to her hook.  It was her barge and her river. How would it look if she lost to a Roman? She would never get away with that today. She would have to take a lie detector test.

(If you can`t convince anyone to swim underwater and help out, you can always pre-catch prized fish and freeze them until tournament time. Thawed fish are not the same as fresh, no matter what headwaiters swear, so the careful planner will keep fish in a live well until needed.)

Stopping this sort of deception is okay as far as it goes, I guess. But what I`m afraid will happen is that, in the zeal to clean up its act, fishing will eliminate lying altogether. That would be a sad day for all of us who have ever lost the big one.

And is there a fisherman alive who ever caught a fish bigger than the one that got away?

My favorite fish story, and one I defy the science of lie-detecting to diminish, is the one about the fellow who wanted to catch the world`s smallest fish.

He had to use the lightest tackle possible, of course.  For his pole, he started out with toothpicks but switched to straw.  He had to rig his line with tweezers. He went from thread to a single strand of silk and finally to a wisp from a spider`s web.

He caught minnows and gold fish and guppies and worked his way down to paramecium. He had his single-celled catch mounted on a slide and would invite friends to look at it through a microscope.

When they had adjusted the knobs and eyepieces to get the tiny little prize in focus, he would say:

“And if you think that one is small…”