Ruben Sanchez’s man cave doesn’t feature the usual bank of big screen televisions and pool tables, with a stuffed deer head or two mounted on the walls. 

For Sanchez, it’s “my sanctuary,” a place to retreat within himself to take away “a lot of my demons.” He is a Purple Heart recipient and former airborne paratrooper who uses his getaway to assemble handmade fishing rods in a converted garage of his Weslaco home. 

Battle Born Rodz is what he calls his company, a title well-earned with his years of service in the U.S. Army while being stationed first in Germany, and then eventually Afghanistan, where he was seriously injured. Battle Born for now is a two-man shop with his brother-in-law helping with the building of rods. They ship out as many six rods a week to points all across the country.

“California, Florida, Alaska, you name it,” Sanchez said. “We haven’t stopped since May 2021. There hasn’t been time to go into retail with all the individual orders we get.”

It all started as “a side hustle, a hobby,” he said, with his late mother sitting in the corner of what would become his workshop. 

“My mom would see me making a rod for myself and say, ‘Ever thought of doing it as a business? There’s going to be people who will want your fishing rods.'”

It seemed like an unlikely path for someone who grew up playing soccer – not fishing – in Mission. By the time Sanchez’s mother made her suggestion, he knew the newfound hobby was the therapy that would provide an exit from the demons of his recent past. 

Attention To Detail

Each of the carbon fiber fishing rods lined up in Sanchez’s workshop requires the careful assembly of 15 parts before getting to a finished product. 

Sanchez holds one rod up, looking down the length of it, checking if everything is lining up just right. Each rod has a personal flair, a touch that makes it unique, be it a Dallas Cowboy logo, a customer’s last name or a Mexican theme of some sort, especially those with a serape design. 

“Those are my biggest sellers,” he said of the Mexican themes. “A custom rod is more personal, so it has more of a value to a customer than a regular, store-bought rod you can get at Wal-Mart.”

Plastic bags filled with foams, reel seats, threads and lines hang over a long work board where the individual pieces are attached to the rods during the assembly process. The work on a rod can take days or weeks, depending on what a customer wants. Investors have already offered resources to scale up his operations but Sanchez is hesitant for now to go bigger. 

Battle Born Rodz exists and succeeds, in part, due to the role of social media in today’s business world. Working in solitude from his Weslaco home, he has a national presence thanks to the thousands of followers he has on TikTok and its video-focused networking service. 

Sanchez picks up his cell phone, gets online in seconds, connects to TikTok and scrolls down his account page which is filled with videos and music, a lively digital marketplace that can take him anywhere.

“It’s crazy,” he said. “It’s where people know what I’m doing.”

Finding His Way

Sanchez described going through “a culture shock” in coming back to the Rio Grande Valley after his years of overseas military duty. 

“It was like back to reality,” he said in dealing with a more normal life after the rigors and dangers of military life in Afghanistan. 

It was a reality of dealing with the aftermath of what his military years inflicted. He suffered serious injuries, sidestepped death more than a few times, endured back surgery and painful knees from jumping off planes, and in his personal life, went through a divorce. 

“There’s a saying in the military that you’re either broken, disabled or a drunk,” he said. “I was all three.”

Sanchez would regroup back home, but it would take time. He recalled those years back home when “everything would pile up,” especially his struggles with alcoholism. He would remarry, go back to college and get this degree, all of which helped as he worked through rehabilitating from injuries and surgeries.

Sanchez sensed he still needed something more to take the space he was giving to drinking. He turned to kayaking and then with it, found fishing, which together gave him a physical challenge where he could apply his restless energies. It led to Sanchez giving up drinking, a development that surprised some of his family members who figured fishing would give him another outlet for alcohol. 

The opposite turned out to be true. Fishing liberated him and led him to sobriety. 

“It’s enough for me to be out on the water,” Sanchez said. “When I go more than a few days without fishing, I start getting anxious. Then I get back out there and I’m fine.

“It centers me back,” he said.