Last year's champion to defend his crown
by Scott Mobley
Bob Fasano is a high-tech executive, in a high-flying Silicon Valley Internet firm has appeared on Jay Leno's Tonight show with the likes of actress Sandra Bullock and basketball legend Magic Johnson.
Bob's claim to fame?
He's on a champion frog jumping team.
Bob's father, Gene Fasano, coaxed a record-breaking jump out of a frog in Monterey. The team swept the competition at the California State Fair in Sacramento.
But the standout ranus jock appeared on Leno after winning the World Series, Super Bowl
and Kentucky Derby of frog jumping at the Calaveras county Fairgrounds in May 1998.
Bob's frog, Pretty Lady, leaped 19 feet, four inches on a chilly, drizzly day.
The victory was especially sweet for Bob because it marked the Gustine Frog Team's 40th anniversary as the competitors in the International Frog Jump.
Gene Fasano won in 1988. Bob's brother, Frank, won in 1979. "We've won in each of the last three decades in a row," said Bob.
Bob is 36 and says he's entered the frog jump since he was in diapers. His four- and six-year-old youngsters have never skipped a jump. He's taking his one-year-old with him when he defends his championship this weekend.
"In our family there's Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter and the frog jump," Bob says. "It's a tradition with us, and I'm proud of being part of something that's unique."
The frog jump is serious competitive business for the Fasano family. Bob's team strategizes all year, talking frogs the way others may discuss thoroughbreds or racing cars.
While the Gustine Frog Team this year will sport the logos of high-tech sponsors like Exodus Communications and DSL Network, the ingredients of it's success are like a family recipe.
Each year Bob's team snags 250 to 300 hoppers in an undisclosed San Joaquin Valley bog. His father and uncle grew up in the valley and know the best spots. As in real estate, location is everything in finding champion jumping frogs, according to Bob.
The Gustine team will take about 80 frogs to this year's fair, so each of the 25 children, parents and grandparents on the squad get to jump several.
The frogs travel in temperature-controlled boxes that reproduce their native swamp environment. And each year after the fair, the Fasanos release the frogs where they had snagged them.
Bob says there's a science to preparing frogs for the jump. It covers everything from feeding the amphibians to handling them to jockeying them on the pad.
But that, too, stays with the family.
Article from the Calaveras Enterprise 1999 Calaveras County Fair & Frog Jump Jubilee Official Guide.
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