Staff Writer
Last Modified: Friday, April 8, 2011 at 11:14 a.m.
HOUMA — Seated in a local restaurant Thursday night, R.J. Molinere ate just a little, careful to keep his fingers clean because he had already signed many autographs and would be signing more.
Then he watched — along with a cheering crowd — as a segment of his life unfolded on the big screen, later pronouncing his worldwide TV debut a success.
“I was so pumped up I wasn’t concerned about eating,” the 49-year-old R.J. said. “I wasn’t scared or nervous; I was just pumped up.”
R.J. and his 22-year-old son, Jay Paul, were among those featured in Thursday night’s installment of the History Channel show “Swamp People,” which attracted 4.2 million viewers when it premiered last fall. It follows several south Louisiana hunters during the month-long gator season. Hunters hail from Pierre Part, Port Sulphur, Bayou Sorrel and the North Shore.
The Molineres, of Grand Bois, will appear in eight of this season’s 16 episodes. On Thursday’s episode, entitled “Hunter or Hunted?,” viewers learned that father and son had vowed that this was the year they would snag an 13-foot, 850-pound gator dubbed Dozer. The gator had eluded them the past two years, the announcer told viewers.
“We can’t catch this bad boy,” Jay said, adding later that “a big gator don’t get big from being stupid.”
The two were determined that their skill and combined years of experience would prove successful. But R.J. decided to “charm” the gator anyway, splashing a mixture of blood and chicken juice on the baited line they hoped would hook their prey. After the show, he explained that this is something he has long done to attract gators to his traps.
“I’m going to give it my special ritual magic touch,” R.J. said on TV as he dipped his cupped hand into an ice chest filled with the special mixture.
“I want to get some revenge on him,” Jay Paul tells the camera. “I got a bullet with Dozer’s name specially on it.”
The pair got their monster gator in the end, the climax of a drawn out battle between man and reptile made even more dramatic by the announcer’s grim warnings about the damage its massive jaws could inflict.
It was Jay Paul who fired the shot that ultimately caused the gator to go still and prompted a celebratory fist bump between father and son.
“One shot. One shot,” Jay Paul told R.J. “It don’t matter what size.”
Footage of the pair at Flynnstones bar in Bourg closed out the hour-long episode. Viewers got to watch R.J., a world-champion arm-wrestler, taking on his opponent for a $1,000 prize. The announcer told viewers that R.J. competes to supplement his gator-trapping pay.
R.J. and Jay Paul had confided a day earlier that they were anxious to see how they would be portrayed in the finished episode. In the end, though, R.J. said he was pleased with the TV version of himself.
The one thing he found odd was the off-camera voice that yelled “shoot him, shoot him,” as Jay Paul leveled his gun and prepared to fire.
“I didn’t know who that was, I know we didn’t say that,” R.J. said. “When we heard that, my son and I just kind of looked at each other.”
Relatives, on hand to watch the show with the new celebrities, said Dozer wasn’t the biggest gator the two had bagged.
Robert Boudreaux, R.J.’s brother-in-law, said he and R.J. once caught a 12-foot specimen that they killed with a garden rake.
Molinere said he has only had one bad season in the 30-plus years he’s been hunting gators, and that was the one that followed Hurricane Katrina.
Father and son were tight-lipped when asked if they bag bigger gators in future episodes.
“You’ll have to keep watching to see,” R.J. said.
Staff Writer Eric Heisig can be reached at 857-2202 or eric.heisig@houmatoday.com. Follow him on Twitter @TerrebonneCrime.
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