His angle: inspiration

The Boston Globe -- (DETROIT) Clay Dyer is a professional angler by trade and a profile in courage in heart.

Dyer was born with no limbs except a partial right arm. He casts his fishing line by placing his rod under his neck - like Isaac Stern playing the violin at Carnegie Hall - and whips his body seaward. It looks like a golf swing. When he scores, he reels in the line and removes the fish with his teeth, thanking the Lord.

To make up for his limitations, Dyer possesses other skills. Standing 40 inches tall and weighing 86 pounds sopping wet, he can sweet-talk a bass like a Casanova at closing time. He can cast a lure into a bucket 60 feet away with better control than Josh Beckett.

Nothing fazes him. During a recent fishing tournament, his boat engine exploded. Unfazed, he kept right on fishing, drifting with the current. He has battled 6-foot waves in a boat on Lake Erie, giggling like a kid on a roller coaster.

"My message to the world is: If I can, you can," says the sunburned pride of Hamilton, Ala.

He uses no special equipment - none - and steers the boat himself at 70 miles per hour using the well-callused stub where his right elbow should be. He ties his lures with his teeth and his tongue. It is a tedious process. Sometimes the boat rocks and the barbed hook snares his tongue or sinks into his lips. No matter; he calmly pops it out and keeps on fishing. Blood or no blood.

"It's not fun till you get it out," says Dyer. That's as close as he gets to complaining.

Don't try to help him, either. He doesn't expect it. He doesn't want it. Other anglers have tried.

"They always tell me, 'Let me do that for you,' especially when tying on lures," he says. "But when you're competing for that much money, if I were to lose a fish, I would want it to be my fault."

Dyer is in town with 400 other anglers for the $1.5 million Wal-Mart FLW Tour Chevy Open on the Detroit River. Everybody knows who he is.

Ish Monroe, an angler on the rival Bassmasters Elite Angler Tour, says Dyer is an American hero.

"He is the most unbelievable human being I've ever met," says Monroe, shaking his head. "He's a real inspiration." READ MORE