Imagine receiving a call from your son, telling you he just got off the phone with your brother — a brother you never knew you had.
That’s precisely what happened to Eddie Stiefel, a Bassmaster Opens competitor from New Jersey, who’s fishing this week’s Eastern Open on the Kissimmee Chain of Lakes in Florida.
Not only did Stiefel discover he had a long lost brother, he learned that his brother is also a member of B.A.S.S. … and he, too, fishes tournaments.
What are the odds?
Even more incredible is that both are in Kissimmee this week on the same body of water (albeit fishing different events). Eddie traveled south from his hometown in New Jersey, while his brother, Robert Mathis, drove over from Odessa, Texas. The two are now reunited and pre-fishing together after 50-plus years.
Fate calling
“It was the strangest thing,” shares Stiefel. “My son calls and says, ‘Hey Dad, I just got off the phone with your brother.’ I said, ‘What brother? What are you talking about?’
“Then he tells me this supposed brother, Robert, went on Ancestry.com searching our family history, and that’s how he found my son, Eddie Jr. It was mind-blowing. I didn’t know how to react. Then Junior forwarded a photo, and when I saw my brother’s image, I saw myself.
“It looked like me in a cowboy hat!”
It turns out Eddie and Robert share the same father, but Eddie’s mother married another man and later had two daughters. Long since passed, his parents died without informing Eddie that the man he believed to be his biological father was actually his stepfather. As you might guess, all that came as a shock.
“A flood of emotions hit me,” Eddie admits. “It made me question who I was, and what I should believe. Then I thought of my two sisters, whom I’m close with … what would they think?
“In a way it made me angry. I felt deceived. But then I realized that my (younger) brother, Robert, had it much worse. He didn’t have his siblings to grow up with like I did. It had to have been a lot harder on him.”
Although Robert knew he was adopted, it wasn’t until he reached his fifties that he decided to search for his biological family.
“I didn’t look anything like the people I grew up with,” he says. “I knew, deep down, something was missing.”
Family ties
By high school, Robert left home and was out on his own. For years, he struggled. But through determination and hard work, he eventually established his own business, which prospered. Through it all, the one constant in his life was fishing. It provided the release he needed to cope with the void and challenges he dealt with for so many years.
“It wasn’t easy,” he confesses. “In fact, it was really rough at times … and fishing was my escape.”
Meanwhile, 1,800 miles away, Eddie was living a much more secure and comfortable lifestyle — encouraged and supported by the parents who raised him. When it was time to set out on his own, he, too, built his own business. And to escape the pressures of that business — just like Robert — he turned to bass fishing.
Their upbringings were different, and so were the waters where they learned to fish. Eddie plied the urban rivers of the Northeast — the Hudson, Connecticut, Delaware and Potomac. Robert fished big Texas reservoirs like Amistad, Alan Henry and O.H. Ivey.
Now that the two are together, scouting the waters of the Kissimmee Chain of Lakes, they’ll have plenty to catch up on. It’s amazing that after more than 50 years and half a continent of separation, they found each other, and that they share a love for the same sport. Even better, both have their own sons now … and you guessed it, they love to fish, too.
Bass fishing is obviously part of this family’s DNA.
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