Cathy Martindale

Wild Side Host

Ever since Cathy left home she has not let her foot off the pedal. Growing up in Texas, the massive state it is, gave Cathy plenty of opportunity to explore the diverse outdoors of the Lone Star State with its many faces...from the mountains and canyons of Big Bend to the prairies of the west to the “Piney Woods” of East Texas to the lush rivers and streams around Austin to the citrus groves her grandfather cultivated in the Rio Grande Valley to the annual vacation spots on the Texas Gulf Coast... always with rod in hand. Port Aransas and Corpus Christi were where the Martindale clan almost always headed out to once a year (and sometimes Lake Texoma when the stripers were running).

Loving to fish wasn’t just a passion for the family since they always ate their catch, but, it was pretty much the only way they could afford to get out of town at all...a bucket of bait, some poles, and a coupla tanks of gas in the old Pontiac got ’em down the road more than a few times.

“My favorite childhood vacation memory was when my Dad, my brother and I were in a rented johnboat just drifting in the channel off Port Aransas when my Dad hung into a 50 pound Drum fish with a 10 pound test line” (NOTE: this fish has gotten heavier over the years). “That crazy thing dragged us all over the channel for about 45 minutes till the fish finally gave up and let Dad land him. It's a good thing, too, because a huge barge was headed straight for us and I don't think my Dad was about to give up his fight with the fish to move the boat out of the way!” reminisced Martindale.

Since then, she has had bigger fights with fish, including her favorite, when she hung into 22 striped and blue marlins off the coast of Kona, Hawaii. She actually pulled a 600-pound blue up to the side of the charter boat after a long battle. “Believe me,” said Martindale “you are not protected one bit with a fighting chair. I always thought the rod was somehow connected to the chair and the fisherman just leveraged the fight. NOT TRUE! YOU are connected to the fish with the belt and if you let up one bit when you have a giant fish on the line you could end up a mermaid, dude!”

There are plenty of fish(y) stories to go around with Martindale (you’ll have to ask her about the time she put a lawn chair over a 15 pound catfish to keep it from flipping back into her farm’s stock tank...it didn’t work) Or the time she was out fishing with Tennessee Wild Side guide Joey Monteleone (back when he was just Joey Monteleone) and they ran out of gas. Guess who had to get out and swim while pushing the boat to shore!

Cathy swears she’s cooked venison 6 different ways after friends killed a deer one morning. Anyone who’s familiar with her kitchen abilities knows it was probably 6 variations of charred jerky!

But, she’s thrilled to be working on Tennessee’s Wild Side since it was her dream to host an outdoors TV show from the beginning of her broadcast career.

“It sounds crazy, but after all the wild turns my career has taken me I’ve finally hooked the show I’ve always wanted!” said the longtime country music disc jockey.

She’s been a country dj since she was a teenager and went on to host several TV shows on The Nashville Network, hosted two internationally-syndicated radio shows (including the one she’s been on for 8 years now “Racing Country USA” heard all around America and Europe), she’s co-hosted a national infomercial with AJ Foyt which took her from the starting line of the Indy 500 with AJ to his ranch in Texas, plus she’s starred in over 4,800 television commercials.

“Rich??? Not hardly. When you go in and crank out 10 commercials at a time and break for lunch to go back and do another 5 we’re talking quantity, not big bucks. I’m no Howie Long!” says Martindale.

When she’s not working on the radio or TV she likes to scoot out to Lake Tahoe with her husband and 6 year old son and take in the downhill and cross-country skiing and snow-tubing (which is “like slamming down a mountainside at 60 mph with your eyelids peeled back to your hairline”).

A lifelong love of horses (she broke her first horse herself) made it an easy transition to the rodeo life for awhile in Texas. She’s fanatical about her NFL, gardening, and Moms In Touch, an organization of mothers who gather weekly to pray for their children and schools.

“We need prayer in school NOW! What an opportunity we have now to bring back the principles and solid values of my childhood that were stolen away with political correctness.”

Although she’s now grown and has a family of her own she makes sure they all get in on the action when it comes to the outdoors. The first baby gift she ever got when she announced her pregnancy on the air? A Mickey Mouse rod and reel set, of course!

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