Landry's biggest catch

Andrew Landry was minding his own business, standing on the bank of that 28-acre lake at Maridoe Golf Club in Dallas. He cast his line into the water, and as luck would have it, proceeded to hook about a six-pound fish.

As Landry was reeling the fish in, a man playing golf on an adjacent hole walked over to take a look at what he’d caught. Landry remembers the man laughing, and then he realized who it was.

The man was George W. Bush. Yes, that George W. Bush, the 43rd president of the United States. He was traveling with his own private gallery, er, Secret Service agents, too.

“I felt the safest I've ever felt on a golf course,” Landry says with a grin. “He was a super nice guy. It was pretty cool.”

Landry, who defends his first PGA TOUR title this week at the Valero Texas Open, has been fishing for as long as he can remember. He started when he was a little kid growing up in Port Neches-Groves, Texas, which is about 90 miles south of Houston on the border of Louisiana and the Lone Star State.

“We loved bass fishing,” Landry says. “My grandpa had a place at the lake. Then we eventually turned into salt water fisherman so we really pound that in the offseason.”

Port Neches-Groves is also where the Pea Patch was. Landry and fellow TOUR pro Chris Stroud grew up playing the nine-hole course – Landry even shot a 58 over two consecutive rounds there. The land the course was on is now home to a housing development, though.

“It's funny that we have two TOUR players that played from a nine-hole goat ranch, seriously,” Landry says. “It's pretty amazing that both of us got out (here on TOUR).”

“It just shows that it doesn't really matter where you come from, it just matters the determination and hard work, anything that you put your mind so that you can accomplish.”

After graduating from Arkansas in 2009 with a degree in communications, Landry hit the mini-tours -- golf clubs and fishing rod in hand. Among his favorite events on the Web.com Tour was the Price Cutter Charity Championship in Springfield, Missouri because it also hosts a fishing tournament that week.

Landry never won there – not with driver or rod in hand -- but still says “that was pretty cool.”

Unfortunately, he’s a little too busy on TOUR now so his rod and reel stay back at home in Austin, Texas. Landy squeezes in some time to fish whenever he can during off weeks, but he’s got different priorities than he used to -- he and his wife Elizabeth became parents to Brooks a year ago.

Landry loves being outdoors so much – “If it starts raining for more than a couple of days, he gets cabin fever,” Elizabeth told PGA TOUR Entertainment – and being on the water, that Landry says if he didn’t play golf for a living, he’d like to be a fishing guide.

“It's something I always had a passion for so it would be fun to do something like that,” Landry explains.

His biggest catch was that 50-inch redfish he landed at a favorite fishing hole, which is essentially a ship channel that he and his buddies have learned to work, in Cameron, Louisiana.

“It was an hour-long process getting it in,” Landry says. “So, it was pretty fun, though. (Redfish) have got the most power – not of any fish but of the ones you catch pretty regular -- so it's fun to catch them.”

Landry’s best catch, though, came the day he knelt down on the pier at that fishing pond near their Austin home and asked Elizabeth to marry him.

“I just thought it was a normal afternoon at the fishing hole,” she told PGA TOUR Entertainment. “The sun was setting, and I was concentrating on taking pictures.”

Landry got down on one knee behind her, holding the tiny box with the ring carefully in his hands.

“Hey, why don’t you take a picture of this,” he said.

Elizabeth turned around and “she freaked out,” Landry remembered.

“I don’t think she said yes, though,” he said. “But we’re married now.”

Now, that’s quite a fish story.