What started as a fun summer afternoon playing disc golf in turned into an afternoon of stress and worry after one Aggie senior lost his ring in Research Park lake.
Tyler Pharr, biology senior, said after an errant disc flew into the water he decided to just jump in to retrieve it.
“It was the only disc I have, I don’t play that much, so I only had one disc and I wasn’t about to spend $20 on a new disc,” Pharr said. “So I decided, I’d just take my shirt of and jump in the water and swim under and try to find it.”
Pharr did find the disc, but while he was underwater feeling around for it, he lost something much more valuable — his Aggie Ring.
“I felt it slide off of my finger as I was moving my hand through the water,” Pharr said. “I ran out of air so I came up and I told everybody to get in the water because my ring came off.”
Brock Troy, a community development sophomore said he thought Pharr was joking at first.
“When he came up, he came up with the disc, but then he was like ‘Guys, now we have to look for my ring,’” Troy said. “We thought he was kidding but he was serious. And then we spent the next few hours looking for his ring.”
Though the team of five guys looked for the ring for hours, even going so far as to buy some goggles to aid in their search, the ring remained lost at the bottom of the lake. Pharr said this wasn’t the end of the search, though.
“I went out there two other times with my dad and some scuba gear and both times, looked for several hours and didn’t find it,” Pharr said. “Finally, the guy that we’d been filling up the tanks with at the scuba place told us, ‘I have a friend who has all this professional gear and he could come out there and help y’all look, he’s got an underwater metal detector,’ so we just said, ‘Yeah, that’d be awesome.’”
Pharr said they jumped on the opportunity to recover his little piece of Aggieland and shortly thereafter a gentleman from the fire department came out to the scene of the missing ring.
“He came out with a couple of his firefighter friends and had all this really professional looking stuff out there and went under the water for about five minutes and he popped up and was like, ‘Is this it?’” Pharr said. “We’d been down there for hours and hours looking for it and it took him five minutes with the metal detector, but he found it.”
After about a month and hours of searching, Pharr’s ring was finally returned to his finger.
Jake Glass, interdisciplinary studies senior and friend of Pharr who helped with the initial search for the ring, said he was happy for his friend.
“I’d been giving him a hard time for a while about how he didn’t have a ring anymore,” Glass said. “He was pretty excited. He kind of gave me a smug grin, like, ‘You can’t make fun of me anymore for not having one.’”
Pharr said he felt almost embarrassed that he didn’t have his ring during that time.
“Being a senior, and walking around campus and not having a ring on, that’s what being an Aggie is — you get a ring when you’re done, that’s a sign that you’ve accomplished it and you’re an Aggie,” Pharr said.
Kathryn Greenwade, vice president of the Association of Former Students and Class of 1988, said this is not the only story of an Aggie going to great lengths to recover his or her ring, and that it likely won’t be the last.
“I think we all know how we would feel if we lost our ring, and we don’t want someone else to feel that way,” Greenwade said. “It’s almost like it becomes a personal mission for an Aggie to help reunite another Aggie with their ring.”
Pharr said he is incredibly thankful for the help he received while looking for his ring.
“People that I don’t know offered their Saturday to come out and didn’t want to get paid to do it just because they realized it was a missing Aggie Ring,” Pharr said. “You only really see brotherhood like that between soldiers and missionaries, I don’t see it anywhere else. You just don’t see people do stuff like that for other people.”