Lawrence Guy: Super Bowl Champion on Fishing, Mindset, and Lessons From the Patriots

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 955 with Lawrence Guy.

Introducing Lawrence Guy

Tom Rowland: We have an outstanding guest for you, Lawrence Guy. You may know him as a Super Bowl champion from the 2018 season, but today we're going to talk about something else. He's also a big-time fisherman, and we're going to be talking a lot about fishing. That's going to be perfect for all of you, because today is cold everywhere. Unless you're a total animal in the Panhandle of Florida, or in Louisiana or Texas, you could be fishing in the snow in the Panhandle of Florida. Wow, how about that? I saw all the videos of it snowing on the beach. That's incredible. I don't know that I've ever seen that in my lifetime. I'm sure it's happened before, but we did not have the advent of social media and everyone having a phone in their pocket, being able to take videos, so that was new to me. I don't know that I've seen snow on the beach. If you have, drop a comment and let me know what year you saw snow on the beach in Florida — that would be interesting.

Tom Rowland: All right, we're going to get started with Lawrence here in just a second. Just want to tell you about the YouTube channel. We've been doing a lot of work on the YouTube channel, because putting shorts on the podcast channel kind of messed it all up a little bit. The shorts are doing great, but it really did mess up the long-form. So what we've done is move all of the long-form podcast to its own YouTube page called Tom Rowland Podcast Full Length. If you search "Tom Rowland Podcast," that's the only one that's going to pop up. We're changing the names of the other channels to TRP Shorts and TRP How-To Tuesday. But if you're looking for the long-form podcast, which is this, that's where you'll find it on YouTube. We're also having some fun with this live format, so if you're here live, please drop some questions for Lawrence in the comments and we will definitely get to those. But right now, we're going to bring Lawrence in. What's up? How are you today?

Family Life and Four Dogs

Lawrence Guy: I'm doing good. And yourself?

Tom Rowland: Doing fantastic. Before we were talking about dogs — how many dogs do you have?

Lawrence Guy: I have four dogs. I've got a Pitbull, a Maltese, a Toy Maltese, and a Bernedoodle. The Maltese is 13, the Toy Maltese is 12, the Pitbull is 11, and the Bernedoodle is, I want to say, like fourteen weeks right now.

Tom Rowland: So have you always been a dog lover, a dog family?

Lawrence Guy: Always. I loved it. I grew up with a Pitbull, and before I had kids, I told my wife, "Hey, these are going to be our best friends, and when we have kids, they're going to grow up with a memory they'll always want to have." Once we did it, we were like, boom, let's just get the Pitbull, and all four of my kids love her, jump on her, do everything, and she just takes it. So we've got to get another big one to see how that works out.

Tom Rowland: Pit bulls can be very sweet. I lived with a pit bull in college — my roommate had one named Brutus, and he was a sweet dog. Also could be tough, could be a mean dog, but to its family it was very, very sweet, and it was also a protector. You could see that.

Lawrence Guy: You could see it right now. She's very sweet with us, but when somebody different is in the house, she'll sit on the stairs so nobody can go upstairs. Her name is Bubbles, so I kind of laugh about it — my son Hamlin will bring Bubbles out, and people will say, "Go ahead and bring Bubbles out," and then they're like, "What is that?"

Tom Rowland: Bubbles — that's like on Trailer Park Boys, they've got a Bubbles too. So how old are your kids?

Lawrence Guy: Seven, five, three, and one.

How He Got His Kids into Fishing

Tom Rowland: One of your big purposes in life these days is getting kids into fishing, starting with your own kids. Tell me about your experience with fishing — when you were a kid, who brought you into it? Who taught you how to fish?

Lawrence Guy: My uncle's a big fisherman, but I grew up in Vegas, so there wasn't a lot to do — we went out here and there. As time went on, some friends would go to a park to fish and invite me along, but it didn't really come until my late twenties, when I was like, I want to really pick this back up, because it's really relaxing. I did a couple of fishing trips when I was younger with the league, and it was just a fun experience with your friends and the people on board. You learn new tricks, and I just grew from there. Then one off-season I had a couple of fishing rods just sitting there, and I thought, you know what, I have a lake behind my house — let me just go out there and cast out and literally learn how to do this better. And it grew from there. As they say, I went from one fishing rod to like six fishing rods. I went from braided line to regular line to weighted line, and it just kind of grew.

Lawrence Guy: When it came to my son, he just saw me out there one day and said, "I want to do this with you." So, as every parent does, I cast out, hooked one, and let him reel it in, and we just kept doing that for a while. Then all of a sudden I was like, you know what, you need your own rod. So I started him off with a regular push-button rod where he could learn, and he picked it up in like thirty minutes — he's really talented at it. Then I got him a spinning rod, which is a little more complicated, but you could catch so much more because it casts a lot farther. As we grew into it, my daughter came out too. It's a joyful thing, because when you look at it, spending time with the family is probably the biggest thing you could have, and fishing is about time. That time with the kids is something you just can't get back. I remember when I was little, going out and fishing, you'd sit there for hours and not know how long it's going to take until you catch that one fish, and then a relative would come over like, "It's a small one — let's cast it back out and see if we can get a bigger one."

Tom Rowland: When you were a kid and going to that park, what kind of fish were you catching?

Lawrence Guy: At that time, I don't know — I would just catch them.

Tom Rowland: Bass and catfish maybe, bluegill?

Lawrence Guy: It was probably more bluegill in that area. There were some catfish, we just didn't get them. Bass — not that much. In my area now, I've got bass, largemouth, peacock bass, you name it.

Tom Rowland: So you're in Florida?

Lawrence Guy: Yeah, I'm in South Florida — the Fort Lauderdale area.

Tom Rowland: Fort Lauderdale, nice. And you do have peacock bass there — do you have peacocks in your lake?

Lawrence Guy: Yeah, if I go throw out a rod right now, I'm going to catch like three or four peacocks — nonstop. At one point I used a fishing app to identify the weight and tag them, since I catch and release. But by the twentieth peacock, I'm not taking a picture of this anymore.

Tom Rowland: They're all the same.

Lawrence Guy: It's all the same, man. But when my son catches them, they're all new for him — it's amazing.

Tom Rowland: Are there any other exotic species in that lake?

Lawrence Guy: We've got bluegill, catfish, largemouth in there. We've also got something I call a sharkfish — there's some other stuff in there I just can't catch. It taunts me. I'll see it flow by like, "That's a big guy, I'm gonna get it," and it just looks at me and swims off.

Tom Rowland: Well, I wonder what that is. What do you think it is?

Lawrence Guy: I just see the back of it, and it's about 30 pounds — this monstrous fish. There's a couple of them that go by, and you can see the largemouth in there too, but this big one just taunts me, flowing right past. It wants me to catch and release it, but it just won't bite.

Tom Rowland: With your kids, are you fishing mostly in your lake behind the house, or are you taking them to see different types of fishing as well?

Lawrence Guy: Right now I'm just doing it behind the house, because I want to get them more comfortable with the rod and build their patience up. Fishing is all about patience — we'll sit out there three or four hours and not catch anything, and in the last two minutes you catch something, or you just don't catch anything at all. As my five-year-old's patience builds up more, I'll take him out a little deeper — just by a dock, out into the ocean real quick, and see what we can do. But as we know, fishing isn't just about skill, it's about luck sometimes too, but it comes down to whether you want to enjoy the time. I don't want him to be out there for two hours and not enjoying it, so we're building it up so he can sit there and enjoy the experience.

Knowing When to Call It a Day

Tom Rowland: That's super important in my experience. I've got three kids myself, and as a fishing guide I took a lot of people with kids out. With my own kids, I was very careful about what I call "leaving something in the tank" — if you take them out, keep their interest, and while they're still interested, leave. To where they're like, "No, I don't want to leave" — that's the perfect time to go, as opposed to some of the things I've seen where people take a kid fishing for something hard, like bonefishing or permit fishing or tarpon fishing, where a good day is catching one, and they take a kid too young for that, and the kid's asleep on the bottom of the boat, not having a good time at all. I feel like you've got to keep the action going, and if the action slows down, it's fine to help them build patience to a point. How do you know when it's time to go in?

Lawrence Guy: I look at him, and once he starts saying, "Hey, can I play with your rod?" I know it's time to come in. We're waiting — I think this summer I'm going to take him out. I know a couple of people in Tampa who do some spinner shark fishing, catch and release, and it's exciting and really fast. But he gave me a look, tackled the lures, and started playing with them, and I said, "We're good — once I catch one, or once he catches one, we've got to go in." He said, "What about everybody else?" I said, "Nah, you just catch one and we can go." Then he enjoys it and wants to go back out. Really, in the summer that's when we're out there consistently, him enjoying his time, trying to make sure he doesn't jump in the lake. He's like, "I'm gonna go get 'em right now," and I say, "Your mom would be very mad at me if you come in this house full of mud."

Tom Rowland: Yeah, just like your doodle — like a wet mop. What do you think, as far as fishing goes and the time you're having with your kids, are the biggest lessons they're learning out there with you?

Lawrence Guy: I'd say it's patience, and respect for what you're doing. Because when it comes down to anything in life, you have to be patient in realizing your skills. You're not always going to catch something, and you're not always going to get the biggest one — sometimes it's the little ones, and the little wins are big wins at the end of the day. When we sit there and share this bond, I want to emphasize that we're here together, because we kind of lose that when we're raising kids — time flies. You're always trying to build those little things into your children's minds, that we were there doing this, having fun, enjoying it, and this is how you built this skill. Because at the end of the day, you're building skill, you're building relationship, you're building respect, you're building time throughout the process. In reality, the process takes a while, because you can't catch a fish without the process — without the line, without the reel, without your lure, without your bait. You're never going to sit there and just throw something out and catch it. It's a process.

What Football and Fishing Have in Common

Tom Rowland: You were an athlete at the absolute highest level, a Super Bowl champion on a Super Bowl champion team, playing with some of the best people — you played with Tom Brady. When you talk about it, it sounds a lot like the way somebody would explain how you become a standout athlete, how you basically do anything in life. But what parallels do you see between fishing and football?

Lawrence Guy: Like I said, it's the process. When it comes to football, you do a lot more training — you run, you study film, write notes, you do everything like that. When it comes to fishing, it's kind of the same thing — it's a process of how you cast a reel out there, how you tie your knots, how you do this, and you can see if you skip the process. When you look at sports altogether, when you skip the process of doing something, it shows — it can show in the game, in practice. Same thing with fishing: when you skip the process, all of a sudden you don't have bait anymore because it wasn't good enough, or your line broke because you didn't put a heavy enough line on your rod. All that happens. So it kind of correlates, and it has to do with patience — you have to be patient to do whatever you do. And as we say in the sports world, "you see a little, you see a lot." When you look at the whole spectrum, there's so much going on, you see nothing. But when you see the little details of everything, you can catch more — you're open to more tricks.

Tom Rowland: So that's what you'd say in football too — when you see a little, you see a lot? Explain that in a football way. Where did you first understand that concept?

Lawrence Guy: When you see a little, that means you're looking at certain objects — the man in front of you, the person next to him. When you see a lot, you're looking at everything — the whole line, the wide receiver, the running back, the quarterback, what the tight end is doing. You're seeing too much, and it's just spinning in your head, so you're not really paying attention to what you're focused on. When you see a little, you just focus on the man in front of you, the person next to you, the person next to him — this little box. That means you can understand what's fully going on, because they've all got a role to do. If that guy gets up and moves back in the backfield, I see that and think, "Okay, he must be motioning, or he's coming across." That's just seeing a little of it. But if I'm seeing the whole bigger picture, it's like, "Oh, he got off, he's moving his hand, something's going on" — it's too much. You need your brain to be calm. When you look at the best athletes in the world, everything's calm — the game is slow, because they're seeing what they need to see. It's like when you write notes before a game, you'll see people with five or six pages of notes — that's so much information you don't need. You just put down what's important to you, and that's what you use, and it correlates from game to game. You're seeing a little on your paper, seeing a little on the film, and it opens your eyes to a whole other world.

How the Game Slows Down With Experience

Tom Rowland: That's interesting, because so many times when you get to a different level of competition — whether fishing or football — everything's moving so fast. I've never heard it said that way before, "when you see a little, you see a lot." The same correlation could apply to a fishing guide watching all this stuff happen — birds, wind, everything — but you notice one tiny fish behavior that tells you, okay, they're doing this, or we're wasting our time, or we've hit the jackpot, when everyone else just sees so much going on. I can see what you're talking about with football — on an NFL field, it would be hard for a regular person to imagine how fast things are happening, with a field full of super athletes all faster than anyone you've ever seen. How long did it take for things to slow down to where you felt like you understood what was going on, where you're seeing a little and seeing a lot?

Lawrence Guy: It comes with experience. Any athlete who comes into the game at any sport level will tell you how fast it is. As you get older in the game, it slows down. It took about year four for the game to really slow down to a level where I was like, oh, this isn't as fast. But that also means I can't watch high school football anymore because it's slow — if I know somebody, I'll watch them, but it's just so slow. Same with college football — you can tell the difference between, say, Georgia and Alabama versus other competition; it's the speed they're playing at. As we tell rookies coming into training camp, training camp is slow — they're going to pick up the speed once it hits the regular season, because nobody's really going full speed in training camp. The majority is at about 70% because they're not trying to get hurt, though some players do go full speed, you can tell. Then when the games start, it speeds up a whole other level, and in the playoffs, it gets faster still. As you get older, you understand the game better, you see less things, and you get characteristics from team to team, and you can actually play a little faster. When you play faster, stuff just happens — you see that guy get up and move, but there's only three or four things he could really do, and it depends on where the quarterback is. If the quarterback's under center versus in shotgun, I already know what block I'm going to get, and it slows down. I could play with confidence, and I think confidence plays a role in everything — same thing with fishing. If you're confident in what you're doing, you're going to have fun and enjoy it. If you're not, you're going to get frustrated, blame the reel, throw it, cut your line — everything you think about doing when you're flustered.

Filling the Competitive Void

Tom Rowland: That's a good comparison. Do you find that when you leave an ultra-competitive career at the highest level and move into regular life, fishing fills any sort of void where you don't have the competition, the practice?

Lawrence Guy: I think fishing is fun at this point. I've got four kids, so I'm always on my toes with them, doing everything there. But when it comes to fishing, I just enjoy it, I enjoy the experience, the process of going through it. Once you enjoy what you're doing, time just flies. I don't have a lot of time on my hands with all the kids I have, but when I do, it's a calm period, and that's what I enjoy. I've done golf, I've done multiple things, but I went fishing once on a freshly repaired bicep — that's an interesting story.

Fishing Eight Weeks After Bicep Surgery

Tom Rowland: Oh, well, let's hear it.

Lawrence Guy: I'd just had surgery on my bicep — they cut the tendon off the top of it. This was after the 2017 season, after the first Super Bowl I went to. I got offered to go spinner shark fishing on a charter, and I said, let's do it. We went to Tampa, out there at five in the morning. They asked, "Oh, you fish?" I said, "Yes, I do fish, it's going to be a good time," but I didn't tell them I was eight weeks out of surgery. I'm on the boat, we're going, and I hooked into a huge fish — I was on it for a good forty minutes, reeling it in and using that bicep, and in my head I'm thinking, I think my arm is healed, but I might get in trouble if somebody sees this. I was like, I'm definitely doing this. As it's going, the guy says, "How long have you been fishing?" I said, "I've been fishing this whole time" — and he's like, "You're struggling." I said, "Yeah — I just had surgery, fresh off of it." He said, "Wow, that's why it's taking you so long," and kept going. At one point my arm was done, tired, and I gave the rod to the other guy — he had to fight it for another thirty minutes to get it back up.

Lawrence Guy: I said, "It ain't me, is it?" He said, "No, you're just stronger." I said, "Yeah, I am — but it was a difficult day."

Tom Rowland: Well, that's a good tester to see if the surgery worked — those fish are serious, even for anybody, let alone with a compromised bicep eight weeks out of surgery. Did you ever have another problem with it?

Lawrence Guy: No, it was fine.

Tom Rowland: So you tore it at the top and had surgery — how long were you out?

Lawrence Guy: I wasn't out at all. I tore it at the beginning of the season, going into the fourth preseason game. I remember waking up one day and not being able to lift my arm. We had a joint practice scheduled, and Bill said, "Hey, we're done practicing, you guys take the day off." I said, thank God, because I didn't know what was going on, I couldn't lift it. We got it checked out, and it turned out the ligament at the top was torn, hanging on by threads. I said, all right, I've got to keep going, and I played the whole season with it. I got the surgery right after that Super Bowl, the week after, and eight weeks after that I was on the boat.

Tom Rowland: How many of the NFL players we're watching on TV any given Sunday are playing through injuries like that?

Lawrence Guy: Everybody. Everybody's out there dealing with something — I've never met a person who hasn't had something going on. It could be something small, like a quad that's been hurting all year that you don't even know about until you finally get an MRI and discover a small tear nobody knew about. Shoulders, fingers, elbows, knees, backs — there's always somebody dealing with something. Nobody's a hundred percent. Even the kickers — people think kickers are healthy, but their plant leg hurts more than their kicking leg, because they're forcing it into the ground, tearing up the knee and the hip. The only person who might possibly be healthy is the trainer, and even the coaches — look at the backup quarterbacks, the practice team, they're throwing every single day, getting their reps in on top of the starter's reps, so their shoulders and elbows are aching too. It's a very taxing sport to play overall.

Getting Started in Football

Tom Rowland: Of course. How did you get started in football — were you always a football player?

Lawrence Guy: No. My brother was playing, and when I got to high school he said, "We're going to have to come out here and do this." I said sure, I don't have anything else to do. I did Pop Warner for two years, and it was terrible — I wasn't any good, I was done with it. But when I got to high school, my brother pulled me back in, and I ended up doing three sports: football, wrestling, and track — for a lineman, you do wrestling. As I got older, I didn't like people touching my ears because I saw how you get cauliflower ear, so I stopped wrestling and just did track, running to build up my speed for football. I lettered three years in three sports, and two sports my senior year.

Tom Rowland: Nice. How long did you wrestle? That was my sport.

Lawrence Guy: Only three years — again, I couldn't do the ear thing, I had to wear headgear, and I told a teammate, "Bro, your ears look terrible, I don't want this." He said it was the pain too — they'd take a needle and drain it. I saw him get it drained once and said, that looks terrible, now I really don't want this. I was actually good at wrestling, that was the crazy thing — I was a really good wrestler, I just didn't like it as much as I liked everything else out there.

Tom Rowland: What was the track event you liked?

Lawrence Guy: I loved the 100. My brother ran track too, he went to TCU on a full ride for the 400, so I was already out there. Then we tried shot put and discus, and I was terrible at discus — so terrible that once at practice I threw it and hit the football goal post. They took the discus away from me after that. I figured that was telling me I shouldn't do this anymore.

Tom Rowland: We had the Olympic gold medalist Ryan Crouser on, the discus thrower and shot putter, and man, that guy is a serious athlete too — what those guys do to get to that high level in the field events, the training and the eating.

Life After Playing: Weight and Diet

Tom Rowland: As you were playing football, has your diet changed since you've stopped?

Lawrence Guy: It didn't change much, because I just did two months in Cincinnati this year — eight weeks — so I've maintained everything. I try to maintain what I'm doing, because I've gotten calls asking if I want to come play, and I've said, not really, I'll do things on my own terms now. So I've stayed at a certain weight. But once you're officially retired, everything changes — for bigger guys, we have to lose weight, it's better for our hearts, so we drop the weight down. Some guys don't and they balloon up — I've had friends go from three hundred to three sixty, and I tell them, you've got to lose weight. I've also seen guys go from three twenty down to two forty.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, I've seen that a lot with big athletes — after they stop playing, they go down to where they look like a regular person. You meet someone who says, "I was an offensive lineman in the NFL," and you think, you were? You don't look like it now. And they say, well, I was a hundred pounds heavier.

Lawrence Guy: Right, guys like the Pouncey twins did it, Marcus Cannon did it, other offensive linemen did it. But it's the opposite theory too — the big guys get smaller, and the small guys get bigger. You look at old running backs and they've gotten big, but the tight ends stay the same, and then you see the offensive linemen go the opposite way. It's always happened — the bigger guys eat more to maintain weight while playing, then they drop it after. And the little guys, the specialists, eat so much once they're done that they start getting bigger and bigger. I tell them, look at the tables turn — now you're in my shoes.

Tom Rowland: That's interesting. I asked Ryan Crouser what his favorite cheat meal was, and he said his favorite cheat meal is to not eat a meal, because those guys are trying to maintain a weight their body doesn't naturally want to be at, training so much and so heavy that they have to cram food in, so the best cheat for him is skipping a meal.

Lawrence Guy: That's right — I got in trouble one day for not eating enough. You've got to eat, you've got to keep a fast system going. I showed up to training camp once a little too light — I was three-oh-four and was supposed to be three-fifteen, and they asked what was going on. I said nothing, I am eating. They said no, you've got to eat something heartier. And I'm like, ugh, I really don't want to do this right now, but if I have to, I will. It's like for regular people imagining eating a full Thanksgiving dinner and then having to eat another one — nobody wants to do that. Well, actually Thanksgiving's different — we have a family debate about eating around two or three versus eating dinner at seven, and I always ask, how do you get your second plate in then? My wife says, you don't, you eat what you've got right now. And to this day, my little cousin, who's about twenty-five now, looked at me and said, "You want to make a Lawrence-sized plate?" I said what do you mean, and he said, "I know how your plates look — you pack everything on there and don't even eat it all, but it looks good."

Playing With Tom Brady

Tom Rowland: We did have a couple of questions here. Obviously everybody wants to know what it's like to play with Tom Brady — I'm sure people ask you that all the time, you probably get sick of it. But what was it like?

Lawrence Guy: It was great. Tom was very personable — as soon as I walked in the building, he knew my name, knew everything about me, and he does that with everybody. He's not one of those people who acts like he's better than you because of what he's done. He'll sit and break bread with you at the table if you're sitting there — he's not going to let people sit alone, he'll have a good conversation with you, uplift you. He's also very competitive — he does the whole "I'm going to be better than you" thing about everything. It's great in the football world, because you always want competition — everything is a competition, whether it's lifting weights or jumping, and he's one of the most competitive people you'll meet. It's a great feeling because you get to trash talk, go back to the locker room, pull up the iPad, show different things. He's a good sport about it too — he doesn't get emotional, he just takes it and keeps on going. I think that's what makes him a great teammate.

Tom Rowland: Does he like to fish?

Lawrence Guy: I'm not sure.

Tom Rowland: Who would you fish with in the league?

Lawrence Guy: If I had a choice of fishing with somebody in the league right now, it would be David Andrews. He's a fisherman — him and Ted Karras fish a lot together, and Ted Karras's family holds a fishing event every single year. They do deep water fishing, some trolling here and there. Every time he invited me on a trip, I couldn't make it because it was my daughter's birthday, and I can't miss her birthday to go fishing. I told him, why don't you just switch the date? He said they can't, it's been going on for years. There are so many people in the league who fish and hunt — a lot of my friends have bought houses on a lake or a pond and just fish in the back. I had a friend who stocked his whole lake with catfish, bluegill, bass, and other stuff, and just wanted to let it populate and have a good time — catch and release, same as me. I don't know what it is, it's probably one of those manly things people do — we fish, we hunt.

Tom Rowland: I don't know either. In my experience — I'm certainly not an NFL athlete, but I've taken a lot of NFL athletes and other athletes fishing — when I had a client on my boat who was really into it and good at it, I'd usually ask about their athletic background, because I'm interested, I was an athlete in high school. A lot of them said they were wrestlers — the best ones, a lot of the best ones had a wrestling background. There were a lot of football players too, and other athletes. But I do think fishing, especially for wrestlers, is like physical chess. Football can be like physical chess too — you're a defensive end and you've got to get around this guy, and there are a lot of different ways to do it, so you're kind of playing chess.

Fishing as Physical Chess

Tom Rowland: I think there's a lot that goes on in an athlete's mind that, in a different way, might be hard to relate to for a non-athlete, but you can get a lot of the same things out of fishing — figuring out the problem in front of you. There are fish there, maybe you can see them, and they don't want to bite. Okay, well, we're going to try something else — a smaller line, smaller lures, go to the other side — all these different ways you can try for them. I don't think it's a one-to-one relationship, but I think a lot of athletics are the same way. This person is too big and strong for you to get around — does that mean you can't do it, or you just can't do it that way? There's another way you might be able to do it. That's a lot of what's interesting about fishing — these fish don't want to bite, maybe not right now or not the way you're trying, but there is a way. For me, figuring those things out fills a lot of the void that competition used to fill — going up against somebody with more experience, who's stronger than you, doesn't mean you're just not going to win, you can figure out a way. Kind of like fishing, especially the types where you're sight-fishing for bonefish, fly fishing for bonefish or permit or tarpon, using tackle that really shouldn't be able to land a giant fish, but you learn techniques and you can land a really big fish on really light tackle. You could make some comparisons to athletics — a lot of the people who were really into it had a background in high-level sports.

Lawrence Guy: Yeah, I'd agree with you in that way, because it's all about the process, the patience of it, the tricks of different styles of fishing. Let's say you go to somebody who's been fishing sixty years, and they do something that seems weird, and you think, I never thought about this — like the way the water is flowing, so you have to cast your rod a certain angle, flip it upside down, do a little trick to it. It's craftiness — at the end of the day it's all about craftiness. When it comes to sports, it's the same, you build your craft. And fishing, you're building a craft every day, learning new things — it might not be the right bait, the right rod, the way the wind is blowing, there's always something different you have to adjust to. It might just not be your day, and you go out there like, let me try something I haven't tried before, and create something in your own style.

Tom Rowland: For young athletes — grammar school, high school — how do you think fishing could help them be better athletes in any sport?

Lawrence Guy: It's the patience. I said this before — it's the patience of being out there. I could sit out there for four hours and not catch anything, but the time flies by because I'm patient. When it comes to sports as a whole, people's adrenaline is rushing, they just want to go, go, go, go, and the most patient person is always the one who understands what's going on around them better. When you get into fishing and the skill set of it, you start realizing that everything might work for you in your own way. I like to throw a left-handed rod — I'm right-handed, I don't know why, I just love left-handed rods. I have right-handed rods too because I have to learn with those, but I do something opposite of what I'm supposed to do, and that's just unique to me. That's what happens when you come to something that's different — you learn how to do it your way, then continue until you build that craft. When it comes to sports, you might not be able to do it the way somebody else does it, or the way they're showing you — you have to find your own way to accomplish that goal. Every athlete, every person, is not the same, we're all unique individuals, and when it comes to something challenging, you have to figure it out your way and adapt.

Teaching Without Judgment

Tom Rowland: How do you use all of that when you're trying to teach your kids certain lessons about life, and you take them fishing?

Lawrence Guy: When I take my son and my daughter fishing, I don't tell them, "Hey, you're doing it the wrong way." I listen to them, I show them the way I do it, and let them figure out how they want to do it, and then we work off that skill. My son likes to cast sidearm, and I like to cast overhead, and every time he casts sidearm, I think, let me learn how to do it too, just because you're doing it that way — I have to figure out how to do it myself so I can show you how to do it in a better way and improve your skills. That's how I learned. I never tell them, "You're doing it the wrong way, this isn't how you're supposed to do it" — I ask, how do you want to do it, and we learn from that. It's like tying shoes — I do the bunny ears, my wife does the loop, and I learned how to do the loop when I broke my thumb one year. My daughter does it a different way too. Nothing's right or wrong, we just work on the way you need to know how to do it to improve and master that skill. I take that from every aspect of life — from fishing to sports to every single day with my kids. I don't like to say, "You're doing it the wrong way, hon." I try to figure out why they're doing it that way, and work with that to improve it.

Mentors and the Politics of the NFL

Tom Rowland: Looking back on your entire career, all the way back to when you first started in sports, was there a particular coach who stands out as most important to you?

Lawrence Guy: There was a whole bunch of coaches, from early on to the NFL — I can't name just one or two, everybody had a role in what I am today and how I do it. But I can tell you there were a couple of coaches who were very honest with me, and I love that about them. There was Don Johnson — he was the D-line coach for the Chargers when I was there, he's passed away now. When I got into the league, there was a lot of favoritism, but he didn't care, he'd just tell me straight, this is how we're going to do it, this is what we've got to do, here are the ins and outs. So I got to learn the ins and outs of the NFL, from the front office down to being a player, and I got to enjoy learning that from people. He was probably the first person who was truly honest with me when I got to the NFL, and I praise him for that — he could teach you skill, teach you how to run a play, but if the politics of it get to be too much, somebody has to show you that side, and he really opened my eyes to the politics of the NFL. I saw him again when I was in New England — we practiced against the Panthers, where he was a pass rush specialist, and I thanked him for opening my eyes to a point where I needed to be open. Because I could teach you anything and you could learn that skill, but if you don't know the politics of what's going on, that skill set doesn't matter as much.

Tom Rowland: Are there a lot of players who are really, really good but don't learn the politics, and fade out of the NFL when they shouldn't have?

Lawrence Guy: A hundred percent, yeah, it happens a lot. I've met players who were excellent, and you wonder, how didn't you make the team when this other person did? I can't always explain it. I remember getting a phone call from one of my mentors when I was younger, saying, I just don't understand what's going on with that, and I said, I don't either. As I got older, I understood it better, and now when I get those calls, I understand there's something to be learned — something more you could do. But it happens so often — professional sports is really a three-year sport, that's about the life expectancy of a career, though they've made it so you can play a bit longer now. Some of it has to do with who likes you, who drafted you, this person did this — it doesn't mean you're not better than that guy, it's just that his name carries weight because somebody else needs him to be successful. It happens more often than people talk about, but it's just the nature of the business — it's a business at the end of the day.

Fishing Coaches and Embracing Failure

Tom Rowland: Do you think you need a fishing coach?

Lawrence Guy: Oh, a hundred percent — they're going to teach me some new tricks, and I'm always up for learning new tricks when it comes to fishing. That's the best thing about it, there's nothing you can't learn. I want to go fly fishing — I don't know what it is, but it seems fun, getting in the water, throwing it out. When it comes to fishing, I don't see why people wouldn't do that. You always learn from your elders, from people who've been doing it a long time. Nobody has a full grasp of what they're doing — you get a little better. If you go to somebody who's been fishing a certain way you haven't tried, and you think, that's unique, I've never done that before, let me try it and see what happens — you end up enjoying it and learning from it. That's the best thing about fishing, there's no perfect way of doing it, but there's always little tricks — somebody might tell you to throw a little dirt on the worm, or hook it a certain way, and it's always something new.

Tom Rowland: There's always something — that's what I think so many people like most about fishing. Pretty much every time you think you've got it figured out, you get it handed to you, and fishing has a way of humbling you. One of the things that's interesting about fishing, similar to some sports, is that fishing is mostly failure when you think about it — you're making cast after cast, or one cast sits there a long time before anything happens, or you go from spot to spot to spot, and finally it comes together. In the scheme of things, the number of productive casts or spots that actually work is less than a batting average — you make a hundred casts and catch one fish. But if you catch a really big fish, that's a huge success. There are a lot of lessons in that I try to pass on to my kids — if you go out and don't catch anything, it's not a failure if you learned something. And if you come back and say, the wind was blowing this way, last time we went there we didn't catch anything, so this time we're going to try something else, and maybe we catch something — now you've learned, and next time you do something different. I think the fishing-coach analogy is basically that fishing guides are fishing coaches, if you get a good one. You can have a bad coach in football, and a great one who changes the trajectory of your life, and fishing guides are no different — you can go out with someone who doesn't care much and isn't a very good guide, and come away having learned nothing and not even had much fun. Or you go with somebody who teaches you all day, and maybe you didn't catch anything, but you learned a ton, and it changed the trajectory of your fishing career from that point forward. I think fishing coaches are just good guides, for the most part.

Lawrence Guy: I agree with you — as we always say, there's no such thing as success without failure. When you go out there, you might cast a hundred times and catch one fish, and that means nothing — you've still got something to go do. The worst thing you can do is give up and throw the rod on the floor and walk away — then you've failed at everything, because you didn't want to be successful. A good guide is guiding you toward a level of success through the process — through failure, through reward — but there's no reward without the failure.

Winning the Super Bowl

Tom Rowland: Interesting. All right, one final question. You start out playing football, and you're obviously very good at it — where'd you go to college to play football?

Lawrence Guy: Arizona State.

Tom Rowland: Okay, so you go to Arizona State, then get into the NFL. The ultimate goal of anyone who ever picks up a football is to be a Super Bowl champion. When you accomplish that, can you describe the feeling of being at the absolute top of that profession, defying all the odds to get there?

Lawrence Guy: That's one of those things where everybody has a different experience, a different feeling. My feeling was so great — not only did I get to share it with my brothers on that field, but my daughter was one, and my wife was pregnant, and I got to experience it with her. One of our best photos is me and her kissing the Lombardi Trophy before everybody else got to it, because once it goes down the line it gets a little nasty — everybody's kissing it, it gets slobbery. I remember thinking, this is a lot of lips on that one spot, I don't know if I should be doing this, but it's a joyful experience because you might get there once in your career, and you might never get there. I've got friends who played fourteen, fifteen years and never even made a playoff game, let alone won a Super Bowl. So it's one of the lifetime experiences I got to have twice — I also know the feeling of losing one. I lost one with a broken thumb and a torn bicep in the same game, and thought, man, I lost this, but I've got to win one. The joy of that, and of sharing it with my family and my daughter, is something I can never take back. I keep the ring somewhere safe, I don't really bring it out, but if people ask to see it, I'm like, sure — it's massive, the ring is massive. It's one of those things where the emotion is so uplifting, and then it goes away the next year, like, well, let's see if we can do this again. It's a very humbling thing, because you know next year isn't guaranteed — it's not given that you're playing, it's not given that you're going back. You just try to embrace it. You go to the locker room, and I've got all my stuff — shoulder pads, helmet, pants, cleats, gloves — because the equipment guy tells you, take everything, because you might not ever come back here. If you want it, they'll bag it up and send it to your house. I've used the same pads my whole career, and I just got them back — they're sitting somewhere downstairs. I have a buddy who bought a mannequin and put his whole Super Bowl outfit on it. It's a special moment you might never get again, like you see on TV — knowing everybody's there watching you, cheering for you, and the confetti getting shot off. It's hard to imagine, but it's like that feeling when you see somebody for the first time and get goosebumps, get chills — that's how it feels when you see those cannons shoot off.

Tom Rowland: And as a kid, you dream about that — every kid who picks up a football dreams of being in the Super Bowl, and then you're actually there. I remember at one Olympics, a reporter asked Michael Phelps if he ever imagined he'd be there, and he said, yeah, every night — that's what I do, I imagine I'm going to be here every single night. That's how you get there, I guess. But it just seems like a super surreal moment, the way you described it.

Lawrence Guy: Because remember, football is a team sport. In basketball, an individual can take over a game. In football, an individual can't take over a game — it takes a whole team. That's why it's so much more joyful and special, because it took all sixty or seventy players, from the practice squad all the way to the active roster, to get to that point. It's like when you go into a big moment, you know you're going to get there, but you don't really know — it might be a penalty, an injury. I saw a man break his arm in the middle of a Super Bowl, and I thought, that's not going to matter, and it didn't. But when we lost, we thought, maybe that injury did matter. So living through that first one, I didn't cherish it as much. The second time, I knew we were coming to New England, we knew about that season going in, and I cherished it more, thinking, I might not ever get back here. It takes a full team effort, sacrifices, going through injury after injury, to see if you can actually win it and enjoy the moment.

Tom Rowland: Wow, that's pretty awesome, man.

Fatherhood First

Tom Rowland: So now, is your focus on being a dad?

Lawrence Guy: Right now, it's there — but honestly, my focus has always been on being a dad. I'm one of the biggest family people around. It was always kids first, I brought my kids into the facility, to treatment with me, to the field. I made sure my kids were always number one in my life, because I play the sport for me, my family, and everything, but I wanted my kids to experience it with me as they got older — going in there, the football, the helmets, every kid having a helmet, something they could look back on like, "I did this with my dad." I think we can get away from that a little bit in life if we're not careful, and I wanted to make sure they got it. So my family's always been number one on my list — what can I do with them, how can I improve them, how can I make these memories, because there's something about memories you can't get back.

Tom Rowland: That's right. Well, fishing's an awesome way to do it, and certainly football is too. It's cool, you've got a great thing going on — really happy to have had the opportunity to talk to you. Maybe we can go fishing one day.

Where to Follow Lawrence Guy

Lawrence Guy: A hundred percent, I can't wait. I haven't broken a rod yet, but with this feeling of "I'm gonna show you some new tricks," I'm like, alright, cool — but I ain't bringing my rods.

Tom Rowland: Well, you need to bring your kids down to the Keys, and we'll get you out on the boat and catch some new species.

Lawrence Guy: Sounds fun to me. My husband's actually been begging me to go on a boat and go fishing — we've been trolling before, and it was boring, so we pulled it up and left.

Tom Rowland: There's so much to do outside of trolling, though. A lot of people think saltwater fishing means trolling, but we fish a lot like what you do in your backyard — mangroves, bonefish, redfish, sharks — everything I guided for most of my career, we saw before we cast to it. It's almost like hunting, clear water, you see the fish, you throw to it, which is good for kids. But there's also plenty of species where there's just a lot of action, where you're going to keep the rod bent — mackerel and different things like that lend themselves to high action. Then there are the other fish that are high-skill and low-action, but you catch one big one like a tarpon — not the best for kids, but good for you. Anyway, Lawrence, thanks so much. If people want to follow you and see more about you, where can you send them?

Lawrence Guy: Thatlguy.com, and "That L Guy" on Instagram and Twitter — I've kept that tag for years, it's very simple.

Tom Rowland: That L Guy — correct, there you go. All right, everywhere you can see that. Well, I hope — it's kind of cold today, is it cold where you are right now?

Lawrence Guy: A hundred percent, it was windy and cold — let me see, it's 56 degrees.

Tom Rowland: 56 — I don't think the peacock bass like that. I don't know a lot about peacock bass, but I know enough to know that's a tropical species that does not like 56 degrees.

Lawrence Guy: I went out there today and told my little man, hey, we could cast out maybe tomorrow, and he looked at me and said, alright, cool. I went out there and said, I don't see nothing, bro — he said it right back to me, I don't see nothing. I said, hell no. We put some weights on it and dragged the ground real quick to see if we could find something, but nothing was going to bite right now.

Tom Rowland: So 56 where you are, can you believe they had snow in the Panhandle, on the beaches?

Lawrence Guy: It blows my mind, thinking about it now — if it's actually sticking to the ground. If you go on the beach and it's sticking, are you throwing sand balls or snowballs?

Tom Rowland: A combination of both — that would not be a good snowball fight, sand in the eye and a cold ice ball on your face.

Lawrence Guy: Yeah, it would be splattering — like, hey, I got sanded, it's weird.

Tom Rowland: Florida doesn't have enough experience throwing snow to make a good snowball without getting sand in it — you're going to get sand in it anyway, or a rock, or a shell. All right, Lawrence, well, I hope it warms up, I hope you get out there with your kids and catch some fish, and I want to thank you for coming on the show. Appreciate it.

Lawrence Guy: Thank you for having me. Have fun.

Tom Rowland: All right, see you. We'll be back with another great guest just like Lawrence next week — hope you'll tune in. Check out the YouTube channel, Tom Rowland Podcast Full Length, and follow that channel. As always, we'll be back next week, live on all the socials — if you were on Instagram, we saw you, Facebook, all of them, we were there. All right, see you later.