Names in the Game

Flashback

Introducing
HEIDI MASON, 21, Sport Fisherman

Mason is the reel deal.

Captain Ahab in Moby Dick. Robert Shaw as the crusty shark hunter in Jaws. Santiago in Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. Heidi Mason knows them all. She has read the books, seen the films and knows that the face of deep-sea fishing has always been hoary, haggard—and male. "I won the Miami Billfish Tournament when I was 16," Mason recalls. "The next year I was in line to register, and the man in front of me said, 'Young lady, this line's for anglers.'"

Old salt, meet angling's spice girl. Since her first day on a boat (when, at age seven, she reeled in a 53-pound sailfish), Mason has confounded top sport fishermen by being two things they are not: young and female. She's also smart. She was a straight-A student at Miami's Ransom Everglades High and is now a junior premed at Harvard. "When I went for college interviews," she says, "most of the interviewers just wanted to swap fish stories with me." Mason has plenty of those. She holds three world records, including one for catching a 463-pound hammerhead shark, in '93. "I fought the hammerhead for more than two hours," says Mason. "My forearms were ground beef afterward, but it was worth it. The best fish stories involve the ones that didn't get away."

-- John Walters

Flashback
LOUISE SMITH, 82, stock car racing pioneer

Smith hasn't lost her drive.

She was going on vacation. At least that's what Louise Smith told her husband in February 1947 when she drove off in the couple's showroom-new maroon Ford coupe and headed for Daytona Beach. But when Smith returned home to Greenville, S.C., the following week, she arrived by bus. "My husband asked where the car was," recalls Smith. "I told him, 'That old thing was no good. You got a lemon.' That's when he pulled out The Greenville News. The headline read LOUISE SMITH WRECKS AT DAYTONA. He looked at me and said, 'Now, what happened to the car?'"

If the late Noah Smith, her husband of 47 years, was the love of Louise's life, then racing sat right on his bumper. In the 1940s and '50s, Louise raced alongside the men who pioneered stock car racing, winning 38 races while barnstorming tracks from Canada to Florida. "She drove just like I did," says Hall of Fame driver Buck Baker. "She drove to win."

Smith, who in April became the first woman inducted into the International Motor Sports Hall of Fame, in Talladega, Ala., got her start in racing in 1945 when NASCAR patriarch Bill France Sr. came to Greenville looking for a crowd-pleasing race promotion. He found it in Smith, then 29, who had a reputation for outrunning the police. She still lives in Greenville and enjoys nothing more than making the speedometer on her '96 Buick LeSabre match her age. "I can't walk so good anymore," Smith says. "But when I sit in my car, everything is all right."

-- Richard Deitsch

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