Then again, it may have had something to do with the piscine power of that lucky Bud Man shirt attorney Jamie Greer had borrowed from his dad, Dave Greer, the much-celebrated Dayton trial attorney, well-known jazz musician, author, raconteur and lifelong fisherman.
Whatever it was — and I’m partial to the latter — 12 days ago, Team Buckeye Tuna suddenly found themselves with a thick, bigeye tuna peeling long stretches of line off one of their reels as though they’d latched onto the back of a Cadillac roaring full-bore down the road.
The Dayton-based team — which this year included Jamie, his best friend Lance Gildner, Rob Jones, Jarrod Keely and Dave Dunton — was competing in the 51st annual White Marlin Open, the biggest and richest billfish tournament in the world.
And, this year, the winner of the tuna division would pocket over $1 million.
Jones, president of Jones Fish Hatchery & Distributors in Cincinnati, ended up on the rod for the much-anticipated fight, but the rest of the team was around him, urging him on just as they would have any of their anglers in that position.
“No one wants to be coached, but in the excitement, everyone is going to give advice,” Greer laughed. “We were cheering him on, telling him to hang in there. But no one else can touch the rod and he’d get a polygraph test before any prize money was given out at the end of the tournament.”
If the team members had trouble containing themselves, it was understandable.
“Over the years we’ve probably caught over 100 nice tunas, and I can say that every single time you’re fighting the fish, you think to yourself, ‘I forgot how strong they are!’” said Gildner, a tequila importer from Bellbrook.
“You don’t catch them and reel them in, you hook them and then get your butt kicked to the point you’re almost ready to cry or give up. Pound for pound, I think they’re the hardest fighting fish out there.”
The 2024 tournament — which usually runs five days, but this year added a sixth to compensate for rough conditions from the remnants of Hurricane Debby — drew a fleet of 318 boats and paid out $8.59 million in prize money to top finishers in the blue marlin, white marlin, tuna, wahoo and dolphin categories.
Team Buckeye Tuna’s original members were Jamie, his dad, Dave, his brother, Tom, and Gildner.
They formed a tournament team in 2003 after years of fishing for fun and in 2012 the reconfigured group began competing in the White Marlin Open.
Over the years they registered three second-place finishes in the tuna division, once being edged out by just a half pound and another year missing the top spot by only two pounds.
This time — in the hour or so it took Jones to wrestle the bigeye to the boat — his teammates knew they had something special.
“When it got close and we got ready to gaff it, you could see it and I said, ‘Guys, this isn’t just a good fish, it’s a great fish!’” Gildner said. “And once it was inside the boat and we saw how fat it was, we were thinking, ‘This is well over 200 pounds!...This just could be a winner!’”
While Dave Greer wasn’t with them in the flesh this year, he was present in fabric.
“People kid me because all I ever drink is Budweiser,” he laughed. “And at one of our first tournaments, I had my Bud Man shirt on, and we won.”
That was the 2006 San Luis Cabo Tuna Jackpot Tournament in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. It’s the largest tuna tournament in the world and the Buckeye team — then Jamie and Dave Greer, Gildner, and Dunton — caught a 7-foot, 318-pound yellowfin tuna that they fought for 4 hours and 40 minutes.
At the Cabo tournament, team members can take turns on the rod and the battle wore them all out. Their catch was the tournament’s first-ever 300-pound tuna and they won $152,000.
Today, that mounted fish hangs on the wall of Jamie’s office at Bieser, Greer & Landis on Monument Avenue.
“Dad’s Bud Man shirt became our lucky shirt, and he wore it to every tournament,” Jamie said.
“Yeah, I know all the secrets of the deep,” Dave deadpanned.
For this tournament, Jamie wore his dad’s good luck garment every day and saw it pay off soon after their boat — the Blue Runner piloted by Captain Mark DeBlasio — pulled into the Harbour Island Marina in Ocean City.
Word had reached the large crowd gathered for the day’s weigh-ins that Team Buckeye Tuna had a big fish on board.
“A lot of the people know of our team, and they were cheering,” Gildner said. “The scales are at the back of the marina and as you go back there, there are like townhouses, maybe three to eight stories tall, on both sides and every balcony had someone on it. They were holding their fists up and yelling ‘Way to go!’’
“When you weigh in, they watch it on the internet and people at the scales are freaking out.”
Team Buckeye’s tuna would weigh 220.5 pounds.
“And as you go back out, there’s a special feel,” Gildner said. “Everyone now knows, you’re the No. 1 boat. You’re the team to beat.”
This year, in the “gut-cramping,” as Gildner put it, tournament days that followed, no one who came to the scales overtook Team Buckeye, which pocketed its biggest payday ever:
$1,007,012.00.
While the boat captain and mate got 30 percent, the rest was split between the five team members on board and one — Jim Boynton of Massachusetts — who paid his entry, but couldn’t join them.
“The money obviously is very nice,” Jamie Greer said. “But our goal was to win the tournament, whether it paid $1 or $1 million. It’s about having fun and the competition.”
Fishing and football
“I grew up a freshwater fisherman,” Dave Greer said. “My dad would take me on canoe trips into the wilds of Canada where we wouldn’t see anybody for 10 days. That was my idea of fishing.”
While they sought muskies, they more often caught northern pike.
Dave passed the love of fishing on to his two sons, though he admits Tom — now a family physician in Dayton — wasn’t as fanatical as was Jamie:
“Jamie lives and dies to fish.”
The Greer family has a place in Northport, Michigan, on Traverse Bay, not far from the Upper Peninsula.
“I spent all my summers there since I was born,” said Jamie, who’s now 60. “I’d fish off the rocks and we’d charter a boat for lake trout and salmon. Later, when I was in college, I worked on a charter boat there in the summers.”
As a kid, he’d been mesmerized by the movie Jaws and lobbied his dad to take him shark fishing.
Soon after the movie’s 1975 release, they went to Islamorada in the Florida Keys and Jamie caught a tiger shark that weighed over 200 pounds and Dave caught a hammerhead.
In the Keys in 1978, just before he turned 14, Jamie caught a 260-pound mako shark that brought him some publicity.
The fish took the lead in the Junior Division of the prestigious Metropolitan South Florida Fishing Tournament.
Back home, Dayton Daily News outdoors writer Don Timmons wrote a story on him that was accompanied by a photo.
Annual shark trips to Florida eventually gave way to fishing in places like Panama, Venezuela, Costa Rica and the Outer Banks.
“He discovered there was more excitement in tuna fishing than sharks,” Dave said.
After playing football and wrestling at Oakwood High School, Jamie went to Indiana University and met Gildner, who joined the same fraternity.
“I grew up in Plymouth, Indiana, a little town near South Bend,” said Gildner. “Some of my earliest memories are of fishing with my father on the Yellow River.
“When I met Jamie, we immediately hit it off. We basically were brothers who had never met.”
Jamie agreed: “Lance is my best friend. My dad looks at him as another son.”
At IU, Jamie and Lance fished in nearby ponds and lakes.
“He’d always had been able to go saltwater fishing, but I never had,” Gildner said. “Finally, though, we went to the Oregon Inlet in the Outer Banks. Jamie had discovered a migrating school of giant bluefin tuna, and I caught one that had to be close to 400 pounds.
“I was mentally blown away by the whole experience. It was so physically demanding, it almost overwhelmed me after growing up catching bluegill, striped bass and northern pike.”
Years later, when they entered the Cabo Jackpot, Jamie said tournament officials wanted everyone to come up with a team name:
“We came up with Team Buckeye Tuna. Dave (Dunton) went to Ohio State. My wife went there, too, and so did our son, Bobby.
“And I love Buckeyes’ football. It’s one of my favorite things to watch. I’ve been to a lot of games, including three national championships.
“So, we got an artist to do our logo. It’s a bigeye tuna, except it has a buckeye for its eyeball.”
‘It changed my whole world’
When they caught the winning tuna is 2006, they used a small sailfish belt instead of one of the sturdy harnesses they use now.
The battle — with just Jamie, Lance and Dunton taking turns on the rod and Dave Greer, the team’s fourth member, forced to watch because he was coming off hip surgery — took a toll.
“It wore us out to death,” Jamie said. “We drank all the water on board and then all the Diet Coke.
“By the time we got the fish in, we were 60 miles out and running out of time to get back to the scales. If you miss the deadline, you’re disqualified.
“Coming back, all we had to drink was the beer on board, so it was like coming in drunk to your wedding reception.
“We made it back with just 16 minutes left. There were lots of cheers. It was our first big fish. Our first big win.”
After the initial festivities, the team members slipped away for a private celebration and found a local bar off the beaten path.
“To us, it had been like climbing Mount Everest,” Gildner said. “We couldn’t believe we’d just won the biggest tournament in the world. We asked the bartender — who I later learned was the owner — for four of the best glasses of tequila he had.
“He went to the end of the bar and this door in the wall that opened to a mop closet. There was a sink on the floor and a mop. And there was a wooden barrel on its side on a shelf.
“He poured four glasses from the barrel, and we made a toast. And when I sipped it, it freaked me out.
“It was the most enjoyable spirit I’d ever had. I wanted to know who made it, but he wouldn’t tell me because he didn’t want another bar to start selling it.
“It took me nine years, but I finally found out the family who made it.”
In October of 2015, a week after he contacted the Becherano family, he flew to Mexico and struck a deal to be the exclusive importer of the Cantera Negra to the United States.
“Now it’s trending to be one of the top tequilas in the country,” Jamie said.
The success came at a perfect time for Gildner, who 3 ½ years earlier had been diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer. Since then, he said he’s undergone nearly 70 surgeries:
“In 2015, I was in the worst of it, but when I got involved with the tequila that uplifted me.
“I didn’t want to be defined as the cancer guy and suddenly I wasn’t. People stopped me and talked about my tequila, not my cancer,
“It changed my whole world.”
Now, nine years later, he hasn’t just survived, he’s thrived.
These days the best medicine for him is a fishing experience like he just got in Ocean City. He said he loves everything about these competitions: “First off, you just can’t get over how powerful these creatures of Mother Nature are.
“And I love being around my buddies
“And if I weren’t out there, I wouldn’t have seen some of the things I’ve seen. We’ve been in massive schools of migrating gray whales, surrounded by millions of bait fish with striped marlin eating them.
“Every time I go out like that, I can’t believe my fortune.”
But, as he learned with this last tournament, there’s a price tag.
“Yeah, the Friday before they left, Jamie and Lance took me out to lunch,” Dave Greer said. “I gave them the Bud Man shirt and said, ‘I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’ll buy this lunch for you.
“’But if you guys win, you’re going to buy me lunch for the rest of my life!’
“So, I’ve got them good now”
But they should’ve known.
Like he said, “I know all the secrets of the deep.”
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