From football to fishing, Camden native still brings the ‘boom’

On the football field in Camden, Neaven Reevey earned the nickname “Boom” for all the bells he rang on defense.

“I was a hard hitter,” he said.

Reevey, 26, loved the sport and hoped to play in college after graduating from Woodrow Wilson High School, and the internet’s still filled with his highlight reels from the gridiron. But new footage of Reevey is floating around these days, too — videos of him out on the water, among the lily pads, where he’s known as “Boomerang” for casting fishing lures and retrieving them, over and over for hours at a time, several days a week.

His father first took him and his older brother fishing, in saltwater, when each was 3 years old. “He used to tie a rope around us in case we got too far away,” Reevey said.

Fishing is the new football for the East Camden native, and his prowess on the water is earning him attention and sponsorships. On a recent weekday afternoon, Reevey was standing on his new 12-foot Vibe kayak out by lily pads again in Collingswood’s Newton Lake. The kayak retails for $1,300, but thanks to Reevey’s 4,670 Instagram followers and his constant posts, tags, and story updates, he’s part of the company’s “field staff.”

He’s known as @boomerang_fisher and has his own jersey.

Ralph Reevey Jr., Neaven’s older brother, is also on Vibe’s field staff, though he doesn’t stand up as much.

“I’m a little bigger than he is,” Ralph said in the middle of the lake.

Fishing is the most diverse hobby in the world, for fun, for sport, and for the table on just about every continent. It’s a language-of-sorts that a fisherman from South America could share with one from Siberia if they met on the water. Among the professional ranks, however, the majority of fishermen who get paid and compete in tournaments and get their own television shows are more often white and Southern. There are exceptions, of course, including professional bass fishermen like Mark Daniels and Ish Monroe.

“Fish don’t see race,” Monroe told the Undefeated in 2018.

Arthur Bronson, 69, of Concord, N.C., fished professionally for 30 years and said he was the first Black host of a fishing television show in the United States. In most tournaments, Bronson said, he was the only Black fisherman on the water, and in 1995, he founded the International Federation of Black Bass Anglers.

“That was a play on words because the species is also known as the black bass,” Bronson said of his organization.

Bronson said the Reeveys’ story has a key component: an older, adult male who took them fishing when they were children.

“It doesn’t matter what race. If they didn’t have a father or uncle or grandfather who took them fishing, it’s difficult to get started,” Bronson said. “My uncle on my mother’s side got me involved.”

Reevey, who works as a forklift operator, catches plenty of largemouth bass, arguably the nation’s most popular freshwater sporting species and the focus of professional fishing leagues. But that’s not the fish he’s after.

Reevey fishes almost entirely for the northern snakehead, a large, toothy predator that’s native to China and Russia, and is considered an invasive species in this country. Snakeheads now live in tributaries of the Delaware River in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and are prevalent in the tidal waters of Maryland. Anglers are supposed to kill them, but a growing number, like Reevey, value their fight too much to do it.

“Once I got one, I was hooked,” he said. “They are serious predators.”

He prefers to fish for them on the top of the water, with rubber frogs designed to simulate the real things. Snakeheads often chase them down out of the lily pads and explode up from the water to bite them.

“They do got some nasty teeth, but that makes me love them even more,” Reevey said. “They’re interesting, and it’s just a challenge. Trying to land them is a whole ’nother challenge.”

Reevey has fished for northern snakeheads in Maryland and placed in tournaments. He’s fished in Florida, where the invasive bull’s-eye snakehead has also been established. He longs to head to Southeast Asia, to hunt the giant snakehead, the largest of them all.

Ralph Reevey Jr., 32, also has an Instagram account, @chiefcrappieraider, and targets smaller crappie and panfish, often overlooked in the sporting world.

“I didn’t want to give up on the fish that got me started to begin with,” Ralph said.

Neaven Reevey said he gets about 40 messages a week on Instagram. People want to know where he’s fishing, but he keeps his best spots to himself. In recent months, after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests, Reevey posted several messages in support of the movement on his Instagram story.

“You know, there will be people who say, ‘Just stick to the fishing content,’” he said on the lake. “Did I lose a few followers over that? Maybe. But that’s fine.”

Reevey sees a future in fishing, either working for one of his sponsors, guiding other fishermen, which he’s already done, or more video.

“I could see a show,” Reevey said. “That would be real nice.”