Captain Phil Harris (22 page)

“When you do something much of your life,” said Grant, “you don’t think much about it. It’s just something you do.”

Once Phil got used to being in the spotlight, he learned to have fun with it.

One predawn morning, he and Mike were walking down a dock in Edmonds, Washington, heading for Mike’s boat for a quiet, leisurely day of salmon fishing, one of Phil’s forms of relaxation.

Even though it was still pitch dark and the surrounding lights offered little illumination, the owner of a boat on the other side of the dock was able to see enough of Phil to identify him.

“Hey,” the man yelled out, “aren’t you that guy on that show?”

“What are you talking about?” said Phil, playing dumb.

“You’re that guy,” the man insisted. “What’s your name?”

“Bill,” said Phil.

“No way,” said the boat owner.

“Well, what’s that guy like?” asked Phil. “Is he okay?”

“Yeah, he’s a pretty cool dude,” said the boat owner. “And you’re him.”

The man jumped into his boat, reappeared an instant later with a camera, and snapped a picture, leaving Phil to shake his head at the power of television.

Phil’s appeal, especially among women, grew to proportions even he had trouble grasping. At first, he went bonkers when women began throwing themselves at him on a regular basis. In the early years of fame, he welcomed every available female fan into his bed, or her bed, or any free nook or cranny. And there was no shortage of volunteers who wanted to count Captain Phil as a conquest.

Women would approach him and blatantly ask the good captain if he’d like a blow job. Right then and there, on the spot. The rush included
a ton of beautiful women, but in the long line of admirers were also gals of all shapes and ages.

Phil became accustomed to women lifting their shirts and asking him to sign an impressive boob. Some not only got inked with his distinctive signature but also received the Golden Ticket, his hotel room number, along with a time he could slot them in.

Because Dan had worked with several famous musicians, he knew the drill. So when he began accompanying Phil on some of his autograph sessions, it didn’t take Dan long to realize his friend needed a crash course in Groupies 101.

For one thing, Phil was giving out his cell number like it was in the phone book. He didn’t realize that, after the thrill of the encounter died down, he might not be so anxious to have these women bombarding his phone line 24/7.

Phil followed the same routine with his e-mail address. “He would give it out to random gorgeous chicks,” Dan said. “But when his inbox was flooded with demands for attention, he’d be overwhelmed.”

Phil soon realized he was going to have to do the unthinkable.

“I never thought I’d be in a position to be turning down so damned much beautiful pussy,” he said, “but I just don’t have the time. Ain’t that a bitch?”

Even those Phil did have time for learned that intimacy with the captain didn’t always mean full benefits. Mike Crockett remembers walking down a dock in Seattle with Phil and three of his companions from Texas, two male friends and a new girlfriend. Mike noticed the two men were wearing sharp jackets emblazoned with the
Cornelia Marie
logo.

“Wow,” Mike said to Phil, pointing to the jackets, “those are really nice. I don’t have one.”

“Don’t feel bad,” Phil’s girl told Mike, “I blow him and I don’t have one either.”

While strangers may have treated Phil with reverence, he didn’t get that reaction from his old friends. Mike was amused when his wife,
Susan, a salesperson for a wine company, informed him that she was one of a select group of employees to win the organization’s grand sales prize: a dinner at a fancy downtown Seattle restaurant with . . . Captain Phil.

“Dude,” Mike told Phil, “you’re attending this dinner in downtown Seattle with people from the wine industry.”

“I am?” said Phil.

“You are,” said Mike. “And I’m going to be there.”

“Why?”

“Because Susan won a dinner with you.”

The fact that a company would consider dinner with him to be a grand prize was beyond Phil’s comprehension.

But no matter the occasion, he was never shy about living up to his image. While the other five couples sat at the dinner table, buzzing about their upcoming meeting with the famous sea captain, Mike and Susan remained quiet.

When Phil finally arrived—late, of course—he headed straight for Mike, gave him a big hug, and proclaimed loudly, “Fuck, oh dear, I can’t believe you’re here.”

That was the Phil the others had all come to see.

“It was really strange,” said Mike, “to be sitting in a room with ten people you don’t know who are all so excited about meeting this famous guy and in walks your fishing buddy.”

“I never treated him any differently,” Jeff said. “To me, he was just Phil, still wearing his T-shirt, Levi’s, and cowboy boots.”

And that’s the way he was determined to stay. “I’m not going to be any different,” Phil kept telling family and friends, worried that the fame and fortune might turn him into somebody he wouldn’t like.

The key, he felt, was keeping it all in perspective.

“I’m one of the luckiest guys alive,” he said, “to be able to not only fish, but to have the notoriety that comes with it. I didn’t ask for it, I wasn’t looking for it, and someday this will all be behind me and I’ll be the same guy I’ve always been, just plain Phil.”

If Phil occasionally strayed from that perspective, the Bothell gang was there to pull him back.

“When he’d start to act like Hollywood, we’d call him on it,” said Jeff.

While Phil’s friends may not have been able to relate to his celebrity status, they didn’t dispute the image they saw on TV.

“To us,” said Jeff, “he was always this bigger-than-life kind of guy who lived fast and hard.”

Those who saw him only on the tube or at a distance might have thought all his fame meant to him was a lot of crazy nights and wild sex. They would have been wrong.

While it was harder for Phil to carve out time for his old friends because of the many demands of his burgeoning public life, when Jeff’s wife, Michelle, was diagnosed with cancer, Phil was there.

“He made it a point to come by the house to see her, or at least call, every time he was in town,” Jeff said.

When Michelle’s condition worsened, Phil visited her at the hospital before heading up for what would turn out to be his last fishing trip. Michelle died in October of 2009, four months before Phil’s own passing.

Phil spent much of his time on land making charitable appearances. His schedule, though, was such a whirlwind that sometimes he didn’t know his destination even while en route there.

“What are we doing?” he asked Russ one time after boarding a plane.

“We’re going to a retirement home.”

“Why do I want to do that?”

“You’re already in the air, so you’ve got no choice,” Russ replied. “Besides,” he added, “it’s good karma. You and I are going to be there one day with somebody sponge bathing us.”

The organizers of the event were expecting 125 to 150 paid customers for a dinner honoring Phil. They had to switch to a much larger venue when 375 people ordered tickets.

They could have sold still more, but heavy ticket demand at the end left no time to relocate to a still bigger venue.

At the end of the evening, Phil and Russ were heading up a flight of stairs toward an exit when Phil stopped and, looking back down, saw a segment of the crowd still lingering below.

“We can’t leave,” he told Russ. “There are still people down there who want to meet me and get an autograph. I don’t want to let them down.”

“You’re kidding, right?” said Russ.

“No, let’s go back.”

The pair returned, the receiving table was set back up, and Phil sat there for an additional two and a half hours.

“He wasn’t one to sign a quick autograph and good-bye,” Russ said. “Every one was accompanied by a minimum of forty-five to sixty seconds of exchanging pleasantries. Then another minute and another minute. He wanted the person to feel comfortable. That was the real Phil.

“What people saw on the outside on TV didn’t tell you what was on the inside. Yes, he had that look. The guy was everything you would expect a crab captain to be—grungy, foulmouthed, and generally disgusting. His gruff exterior included the harsh voice, tattoos, and cutoff shorts. But, when you got to know him, you discovered a gooey chocolate center.”

His appeal may have been obvious to his fans and to Russ, but Phil himself remained as puzzled about the effect he had on people as he was the first time he was recognized.

On one occasion, he and Russ spent six hours at an appearance at a grocery store outside Seattle to promote Phil’s brand of coffee, drawing a crowd of around a thousand.

Russ drove Phil’s Corvette on the trip back to Seattle while Phil sat in the passenger seat with a Red Bull.

“I don’t get it,” he told Russ.

“Get what?” asked Russ.

“Why were they standing in a long line to get my signature?” said Phil. “After all this time, I still don’t understand it.”

“You go into people’s living rooms one night a week,” Russ replied. “And somehow, some way, you’ve created a connection with them. Your personality, the way you speak, the way you act. They see you raising your boys on TV. How you deal with them. Parents relate to that.

“You’ve got to understand something. Maybe it will scare you, but you impact people’s lives. So how you behave when you meet them is important. If you receive them coldly, then they’ll think you’re an asshole. If you receive them warmly, like you did with those people today, they are going to go home, watch the show, and feel like you are their friend.”

Although Russ himself became good friends with Phil, their relationship began as a mutually beneficial business arrangement. In the summer of 2006, as the ratings for
Deadliest Catch
began to rise, and Phil’s visibility along with it, he started to listen to people who told him his rapidly growing fame should translate into fortune.

To make that happen, Phil knew he was going to need a business manager and a lawyer.

First, the manager. Phil’s favorite sport was auto racing, so that offered him a comfort zone in which to explore his options. When he found Russ, who was running a sports and entertainment marketing management company, Phil searched no further.

“We forged a friendship over the phone when he first called me,” said Russ. “He wanted advice. I flew up to Seattle in November of 2006 and he picked me up at the airport. I had no idea what I was getting into with this guy.”

Nobody joins Phil’s inner circle without going through initiation rites. In Russ’s case, Phil wasted no time.

“He and Sig and some other guys took me out to dinner and got me trashed,” Russ said. “I was drinking Jack and Coke, Red Bull and vodka. Finally, they brought out the duck farts [whiskey, amaretto, and
Bailey’s Irish Cream, a Phil favorite]. I was ripped all night long and they thought, Hey, this guy’s all right.”

Then it was time to talk business.

“Phil wanted to know how the TV/entertainment business works,” Russ said, “so I kind of gave him the dime tour with respect to talent fees, his rights, merchandising, licensing, and endorsements. I also floated some ideas about what could be done with the
Cornelia Marie
.

“I stressed that there was a lot more to it than just ‘Hey, I’m Captain Phil Harris and you should go to so-and-so auto dealership.’ I compared it to NASCAR and Indy racing, showing him how the drivers, teams, and sponsors all make money. The possibilities for crab fishing, I said, were roughly the same.”

Russ figured the best way for Phil to see the parallels between his profession and his obsession as a sports fan was to take him to some races. Russ brought him to a NASCAR event in Las Vegas in March of 2007 where Phil met an icon of the sport, Tony Stewart, who became a good friend.

Phil subsequently called Tony to wish him luck before a race and he won. A ritual was born. Tony insisted on a Phil Harris call before every race. Tony even joked that he was going to pay for a satellite phone on the
Cornelia Marie
so that, even when Phil was fishing, he could make the prerace call.

Tony didn’t have an exclusive hot line to Phil, though. Greg Biffle, another driver, also became a friend and a recipient of those lucky calls. When one of them was followed by a first-place finish for Greg, Phil bragged to anyone who would listen, “That was me, man. I won the race for him.”

In May of 2007, the connection between the crab boats and the race cars went public when Russ arranged for Phil to take fellow captains Sig Hansen and Johnathan Hillstrand, along with Phil’s dad, Grant, to Charlotte for the Coca-Cola 600.

“That’s when it really clicked that these guys were something special,” Russ said. “We were standing down in the pit area on a Thursday
before cup qualifying when one of the photographers shooting the cars saw our group. ‘Hey,’ he yelled, ‘those are the guys from
Deadliest Catch
.’ All the other photographers turned and started snapping shots of Phil Sig, and Johnathan. Then many of the drivers spotted the three captains and came over to meet them.”

At the Charlotte airport on the way home, the group was approached by a couple from New Zealand.

“When your show comes on where we live,” they told Phil and his companions, “everything comes to a halt.”

“That trip,” said Russ, “got Sig and Johnathan thinking, ‘Hey, we’ve got something here.’ So they went out and got their own management.”

“After we had been on the show for a year,” said Keith Colburn, captain of the
Wizard,
“the novelty had worn off. As captains, we were all more interested in how we could capitalize on the opportunity. As a result, the interaction between all of us became a little strained. We were not only competing for crab, but for endorsements and appearances as well.”

Working within the parameters of what the Discovery Channel allows the individual captains to generate in terms of outside income tied to their roles on
Deadliest Catch,
Russ and Phil first signed an endorsement deal with a manufacturer of winches for crab boats.