Bass Fishing Tournaments (Anglers, Women, Gambling, Locations)

Bass Fishing Tournaments (Anglers, Women, Gambling, Locations)

The Road to the Classic

Ever since Ray Scott held his first bass fishing tournament, the definition of a professional bass fisherman has been anyone with the money to pay an entry fee. That’s arguably still true. Many would say a real pro is someone whose main job is fishing tournaments and working for sponsors, not someone with a day job.

However you define it, you can’t just pay your way into the top BASS tournaments anymore and hope to earn a free trip to the Classic. That was once the case. Now you have to qualify through other events.

BASS runs a byzantine array of tournaments today. It has changed its event names, formats, and Classic-qualifying schemes virtually every year since ESPN acquired it. Most anglers in the Classic qualified through season-long performance in earlier BASS events.

Each year’s Classic also includes six anglers from the so-called “amateur” ranks, who qualify through Bass Federation tournaments. They are not full-time professional bass fishermen. Some have minor local sponsor deals, and many have won money or merchandise, so call them semi-pros. Many aspire to fish full time and use the Classic as a springboard for that career — with or without a regular nonfishing job.

The presence of these “amateurs” underscores an odd fact. The Super Bowl of bass fishing, the so-called World Championship, is open only to BASS members — and it pits some amateurs against full-time touring pros.

Nor are the full-time pros in the Classic necessarily the best bass anglers in the world, as BASS claims. Highly accomplished, long-established pros who fish only FLW tournaments are not eligible for the Bassmaster Classic at all.

So, technically, it is inaccurate for BASS to claim, as it does every year, that the world’s best bass anglers are fishing the Classic. What it has are the top-performing BASS members who qualified through their achievements in the previous season’s BASS tournaments.

BASS has a longer history — and a greater media following — for its championship than FLW does. That doesn’t make the Bassmaster Classic a “world” championship, or one composed of the “best” bass fishermen in North America, let alone the world.

In fact, plenty of top BASS pros have fished the FLW Championship, which will be held for the eleventh time in 2006. Roland Martin fished the very first one in 1996. Gary Klein and Rick Clunn fished the second. All three fished the third, as did two-time Bassmaster Classic winner George Cochran.

Cochran won the 2005 FLW Championship, and he will fish only FLW tournaments after the 2006 Classic. Luke Clausen won it in 2004, then twenty-five years old and a 2002 Classic qualifier. Like Cochran, Clausen plans to fish only FLW events after the 2006 Bassmaster Classic; he finished twenty-sixth in the 2005 Classic.

Both Cochran and Clausen received half a million dollars for their FLW Championship victories. That was more than double what their counterpart Classic winners received in the same years — lest anyone think the largest amount of money goes to the “best.”

BASS says it sanctions some twenty thousand bass fishing contests every year. That seems a stretch, but it at least includes many thousands of local club events across North America through its Federation. It also counts the new weekend-angler circuit dubbed the Bassmaster Series — technically, the ESPN Outdoors Bassmaster Series presented by Advance Auto Parts.

Most top-level pros have personal stories of sacrifice, taking chances, and family support — and in many cases a divorce. At some point, most have had just enough money to get to or from an event. It has been that way since the beginning.

Take forty-eight-year-old tournament stalwart Gary Klein. He has fished competitively since he was fifteen. At sixteen, still living in his native California, he placed third in the year-end standings of a major Western circuit.

His parents put up his entry fees in the early years, with the understanding that he would pay them back with his winnings. In six years and forty tournaments, Klein failed to do that only twice. From time to time he lived in his bed-equipped van when he couldn’t afford a motel room.

His breakthrough came in 1979, when he won $10,598 and a Ranger boat in a BASS event. As of 2006, he has qualified for the Bassmaster Classic twenty-four times — fourth most — placing second in 2003. His BASS winnings alone rank sixth on the all-time list, at more than $1.3 million.

There are a hundred tales of anglers who worked hard and sacrificed, and there have been almost since Ray Scott started BASS. Lately, professional bass anglers from Japan have taken sacrifice, persistence, and perseverance to an even greater extreme. Japan is trying to eradicate imported bass because they have harmed native species — yet its avid freshwater anglers are crazy about American bass fishing.

To prepare for a January 2006 FLW event on Florida’s Lake Okeechobee, Shinike Fukae went to the lake in December 2005. He practiced on the water eighteen days straight before the practice cutoff. Said Fukae later, “No Christmas. No New Year’s. Just fishing.” He won the tournament.

Nothing takes the grit-and-determination award, though, like the saga of 2004 Citgo Bassmaster Classic champion Takahiro Omori. He now hails from Texas, living near the renowned bass factory of Lake Fork. He came to the United States virtually penniless and without speaking English, expressly to achieve his dream: to be a professional bass fisherman and win the Bassmaster Classic.

Now thirty-five, Omori grew up near Tokyo. He fished as a youngster with his father, read Japanese bass fishing magazines, and idolized Rick Clunn.

To his father’s dissatisfaction, he skipped college, worked various jobs, saved up $2,000, and flew to the United States in 1992. Here, he rented a Ford Escort, lived out of it, and competed in two tournaments — finishing 304th out of 325 anglers in the first, and 256th out of 326 in the second.

He returned the following year as a boat hauler for another Japanese angler, living out of a 1965 Chevy Suburban for the next three years. In 1996, he won a BASS event that garnered him a bass boat and $14,000. In 1997, he bought a camper van and a trailer at Lake Fork.

In 2001, he qualified for the Citgo Bassmaster Classic. Along the way he made enough money to buy a home near Lake Fork, which he is rarely in. He spent an additional $25,000 to install a swimming pool that he does not swim in. He uses it only to test lures.

Omori stays in campgrounds while fishing tournaments and eats rice with chopsticks in his RV. He is often the first person on the water and the last one off it during practice days. Single and hobbyless, he is probably the most dedicated, focused, and obsessive of all professional bass fishermen.

At the 2004 Bassmaster Classic, Omori was in second place after two days. On the third and final day, he caught three keepers in the final forty-five minutes — the last with just five minutes to spare. When named the $200,000 winner, he raised his fists in the air, then sank to his knees and pounded the stage. Afterward, the jubilant-tearful-relieved look on Omori’s face said everything that his limited English could not.

Women and BASS

Most bass pros are Wonderbread-white, and there is little ethnic diversity among them. There seem to be more Asian bass fishing pros, in fact, than black or Hispanic pros put together. It also bears mentioning that women are, and have been, remarkably absent from BASS tournaments. But not because none of them wanted to compete.

When Roland Martin competed in the first Classic, he was not allowed to bring along his fiancée, Mary Ann, because they were not married. That was Ray Scott’s dictum. (Bill Dance had introduced the two at a bass tournament.)

The year was 1971, and Mary Ann was then a good enough bass angler to probably have bettered many of those who fished at Lake Mead. In fact, she was the first woman to fish an otherwise all-male bass tournament, doing so in 1970 at a non-BASS event at Millwood Lake in Arkansas.

In 1973, at a BASS tournament at Ross Barnett Lake in Mississippi — then as Mrs. Roland Martin — she walked up to Ray Scott in front of a bunch of people and handed him a personal check.

“What’s this for?” said Scott.

Martin replied, “It’s for an entry fee for me to fish a Bassmasters tournament.”

“You gonna fish one of my tournaments?” exclaimed Scott. “It’ll be a cold day in hell before a woman ever fishes one of my tournaments.” Then he tore up the check.

“He was upset at me for trodding on sacred ground, I guess,” says Martin. “It kinda hurt my feelings and embarrassed me. And I think Roland was embarrassed.”

Not so embarrassed that he didn’t win that tournament. And although upset, Mary Ann and Roland named their son, born two years later, after the founder of BASS. She remains friendly with Ray Scott to this day. Her son, Scott Martin, is a major competitor in FLW tournaments — which also have very few female competitors.

“I dropped it and got involved with Bass ‘N Gal,” says Martin.

Bass ‘N Gal was a national women’s bass fishing tournament organization started in 1972 by Sugar Ferris, now in the Texas Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame. It prospered in the 1970s and 1980s but eventually went out of business. In ten years of competing on that circuit, Mary Ann Martin was perennially one of its top competitors, and she won the year-end Bass ‘N Gal Classic in 1978.

When queried by the media in the early years about the ban, Ray Scott always raised the awkward “potty issue.” He also professed concern for the spouses of his “hairy-legged” male anglers, who would worry about their men spending an entire day alone in a boat with another woman.

But the fact is that he considered participation in his tournaments to be by invitation. Male or female, if he didn’t want you or didn’t approve of you for any reason, you weren’t invited. And no women were.

It would not be until 1991, when Ray Scott no longer owned BASS, that a woman — Vojai Reed — would fish in one of its events. Reed fished seven BASS tournaments in total, with little success.

There has been no great movement for women becoming involved in fishing, and no significant groundswell of sponsor support. Even so, BASS announced a women’s professional bass fishing trail in 2005, with most events taking place in 2006, sponsored by Triton and Mercury.

Coincidentally, a woman named Martin — Pam Martin-Wells — won the first event of the new Women’s Bassmaster Tour. Like the very first Bass ‘N Gal event, it was held in Texas.

Business or Gambling Addiction?

Omori, like all bass pros and many wannabes, is extremely competitive and believes fiercely in himself. That belief made him willing to take what many viewed as a foolish gamble: investing his talents, energy, and passion in a career in tournament bass fishing.

And since anglers have to ante up to enter most bass tournaments, the gambling analogy is hard to avoid. Texas Hold ‘Em poker tournaments have been the rage for nearly a decade. The Worldwide Leader in Sports and other cable networks have made poker a major part of their programming.

Which begs two questions about competing in bass tournaments with cash and merchandise payouts: Is this gambling? Is it addictive?

“Oh, yeah,” says Terry Segraves, “It’s pretty addictive. You’re always gambling that the next one’s gonna be ‘it.’”

Rick Schair has a salient take on this. He is a Georgia businessman, a former avid tournament angler, and president of Wet-A-Line Tours, a company that takes anglers to premier upscale destinations in Mexico and Brazil. He is deeply involved in the bass fishing industry:

At a BASS tournament in South Carolina one time, I was eating dinner with a bunch of fellow competitors before the last day of the tournament. One guy said, “If I don’t get a check in this, I won’t have enough gas to get home or enough money to make my rent payment.”

I told him, “That has to be the dumbest thing I ever heard in my life. You should be home flipping burgers and feeding your family rather than here gambling away your last few dollars!”

Tournament fishing is an absolute gambling addiction. A lot of people don’t realize it, but on the local and national level it’s like playing cards or shooting craps. It’s a compulsive gambler’s habit. Not to mention the money that is spent to facilitate it.

In today’s environment, you can spend $100 a day in boat gas and oil alone in a tournament on a big lake. Every time you come off the water, you have something that’s broken or needs replacing. And all of us are compulsive tackle junkies. Each of us has enough tackle in his boat to fish for a hundred years. None of us can pass up more tackle. We can’t buy one red crankbait. We have to get two, just in case. What if we lose the first one?

At some point I came to the realization that unless you have the time to devote to practicing and putting in the hours on the water, you’re just donating money. The compulsive gamblers never come to this realization. They have forgotten why they started fishing in the first place, which was to have fun and enjoy a day on the lake.

Tournament fishing is not fun. It is a long, hard day of running and gunning, fishing too fast, and then regretting taking off work and spending all that money when you don’t win.

And there are many guys whose only fishing is done in tournaments, so they compete in order to try to win money. I drew a partner in a tournament once who said to me, “Why would you want to go fish for fun when you have a shot at winning some money?” When you reach that state, you’re addicted.

Most top bass pros — especially those in the Citgo Bassmaster Classic — do not feel they are addicted to competition or gambling.

In March 2006, BASS issued a media release touting anglers in its Elite Series. It quoted Brooks Rogers, a thirty-year-old Texas guide who could not find enough sponsors to cover his $55,000 entry fees and other costs. So he invested in himself by taking out a bank loan — without hesitation, according to BASS.

One can only imagine that the loan officer must have been a tournament angler.

“I’m looking at it like any other business opportunity,” said Rogers. “If you’re fixing to buy a restaurant, you’ve got to come up with the money, and hopefully you do well enough to pay it off. And that’s how I’m approaching this.”

Rogers must have been talking with Jay Yelas, the 2002 Classic champion and fifth all-time BASS money winner. Yelas considers a career in professional bass fishing no different from taking a chance on a start-up business.

“Tournament fishing is like an obsession or a passion for a lot of guys. It can be like gambling, but I don’t think it is,” says Yelas. “It’s like any small business owner starting up a new business. You have to spend a lot of money in investment to get it going, and the early stages are the growth part. All our expenses are tax-deductible, and a gambler’s are not. Any new business would be a gamble, whether it’s a donut shop or a software company or whatever. That’s what fishing is for these guys, it’s just a small business.”

The business, of course, is part catching bass and part being a walking-driving-casting pitchman — for fishing tackle, boats and motors, trucks, petrol, and assorted other products. Not to mention tourism, at least tangentially.

It’s interesting that both Rogers and Yelas reach for food-business comparisons. Twenty-six percent of all independent start-up restaurants fail within the first year. Sixty percent fail within three years, on initial investments averaging between $250,000 and $500,000.

And neither bass pro mentioned that most of the money he expects to win will come out of the pockets of fellow competitors. That sounds like a poker game.

Speaking of gambling, there is no formal betting on professional bass tournaments — at least not in Las Vegas, home of the first Bassmaster Classic. Two weeks before the 2005 Classic, I sat in the Sports Book at the Las Vegas Hilton, watching eleven professional baseball games at one time. Other large screens switched to the latest horse race from Santa Anita, Pimlico, Aqueduct, or wherever.

Odds were posted for upcoming baseball games, the 2006 Super Bowl, assorted boxing matches, a hundred horse racing events, NASCAR races, the World Series, the Indy Racing League, golf tournaments, the Gold Cup in soccer, WNBA games, Formula 1 Grand Prix racing, and a slew of other contests. The Bassmaster Classic, just two weeks away, wasn’t noted.

So I went to the betting window and asked whether I could place a bet on the Bassmaster Classic.

“The what?” said Gerry, a teller in black pants and a white dress shirt.

“It’s a major bass fishing tournament being held in two weeks.”

“Nah,” he said. “We don’t do fishing.”

“Does anyone?”

He shook his head. “Maybe someone, but I couldn’t tell you where to go.”

Evidently, there is also little or no informal betting on the Bassmaster Classic or other major bass tournaments, including calcuttas. At least, not that I learned about.

Calcuttas are auction-like pooled wagering systems that run outside a tournament’s awards and payback structure — sometimes using computer software to calculate odds. Individuals, including and especially competitors, bet on who will win. The money collected goes into one pot, and most of it goes to the winning bettors.

Calcuttas are common in golf tournaments and big-game saltwater fishing tournaments. In the latter, teams of well-heeled anglers fish out of million-dollar-plus sportfishing boats. Calcutta pools there often exceed the total tournament purse and reach into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. One of the richest such saltwater events is the Mid-Atlantic $500,000, held annually in Cape May, New Jersey. In the August 2005 Mid-Atlantic, with teams on 169 boats participating, the total calcutta payout was nearly $1.2 million — more than twice the total purse.

There is no mention of calcuttas, gambling, wagering, or prohibitions thereof in the 2006 BASS rules. It seems like an opportunity for someone, probably bassfan.com — if not to run a calcutta, then at least to set odds on the pros and generate some buzz.

Bassfan.com sort of has that in its proprietary world rankings of bass pros, which do not discriminate based on whose tour a pro fishes. Its calculations just do not incorporate odds-making on upcoming events.

LOCATION, LOCATION

Oddly, only one of the thirty-six Bassmaster Classics has been held in Texas. Actually, half in Texas.

Bass fishing is popular across the United States, and recent Classic winners have come from all over. But tournament participation — in number of events and number of participants — is still strongest in the South.

Texas in particular likely has more bass tournaments, BASS-sanctioned or not, than most other states put together. In 1993, the Inland Fisheries Division of Texas Parks and Wildlife estimated fifty-five hundred black bass tournaments in that state.

No one has updated that number since. There is no permitting or regulation process for tournaments in Texas; tournament anglers opposed and defeated a bill several years ago for a no-fee permit that fisheries managers requested.

It is no coincidence that many of the players and events that shaped professional bass fishing trace to Texas, Alabama, Missouri, and Arkansas. In those states, bass fishing is well rooted socially and culturally.

Consider anglers per capita. The swath of the United States from Virginia to Florida, and west to Texas and Oklahoma, holds more avid bass anglers and tournament participants than anywhere else. In other words, the constituency is very much still Southern. Many current pro stars may not be good ole boys, but a lot of bassheads are. There’s a striking similarity in this respect to NASCAR racers and their fans.

BASS has held regular-season tournaments in many places, including Texas. But the same states and sites repeat again and again, for both regular-season and Classic events. With the Classic, that is mostly due to which localities had deep pockets — less out of a need to be where the core membership is or was.

The Classic has been held nine times in Alabama, the former home of BASS and the state where Ray Scott was the chairman of George H. W. Bush’s presidential campaign in 1980. In the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service survey of 2001, Alabama ranked nineteenth in total number of anglers.

North Carolina (ranked eighth in anglers) has hosted five times. Virginia and Louisiana (thirteenth and fourteenth) have each hosted three times — always at the same location in those states.

The Bassmaster Classic has never been held in California, which ranks second in number of anglers. BASS has held very few regular-season events in California or elsewhere “out West” in nearly forty years, and the region has been underrepresented in major tournament sites and stars.

A number of top California bass anglers — Klein, Martens, Rojas, and Yelas, to name some notables — moved eastward to be closer to the major tournament action, and money.

Texas ranks third in total anglers, just a short count behind California. Only in 1979 did BASS hold the Classic there — or half there. The venue was Lake Texoma, which straddles the Texas–Oklahoma border. It is a notable striped bass factory but an unremarkable black bass fishery. None of the twenty-five anglers in that event registered a single limit of black bass.

Through 2005, the Bassmaster Classic was held only once in Florida. That state ranks first in the country in total anglers and first in boat registrations, and the largemouth bass is hands-down its king of freshwater species. The 2006 Classic will be the second one held in Florida — ironically, at the same venue as in 1977.

And Florida could not have laid out the welcome mat more.

Only a year earlier, a consortium of economic development interests in the Sunshine State had provided incentives for BASS to move its headquarters and personnel from Montgomery to Buena Vista in Osceola County. That put BASS smack in the middle of the fantasy world of its corporate parent, Disney.

One of the agencies responsible for bringing BASS to central Florida was the Metro Orlando Economic Development Commission. Its chairman, Al Weiss, was at the same time president of Walt Disney World Resort.

That company operates four of the top five most visited theme parks in North America; the other one is Disneyland in California. Another player was Florida governor Jeb Bush, an occasional fisherman. His brother, the president, fishes for bass on his Texas ranch. His father, a former president, once told the national press corps that Bassmaster was his favorite magazine.

The relocation was accomplished in April 2005. It came as little surprise two months later when BASS announced live on BassCenter that it was bringing the Classic “home” and holding it on Lake Tohopekaliga.

Said general manager Don Rucks, “It just makes sense for us to take advantage of our new location this time and bring bass fishing’s biggest event to an area that offers some of the very best bass fishing in the world.”

To bring the Classic to Lake Toho, the Kissimmee Convention & Visitors Bureau (CVB) and the Central Florida Sports Commission paid about one-third of what Pittsburgh did. That amount doesn’t count the assistance offered in BASS’s relocation — with the evidently implicit understanding that the Classic would be held locally in the near future.

John Saboor, executive director of the Central Florida Sports Commission, a nonprofit sports-related economic development agency, said the 2006 Classic would bring a direct $20 million benefit locally. That is significant in itself. Several hundred thousand dollars of it will likely be collected by Osceola County in resort taxes, offsetting some or all of its contribution to host the Classic. The county takes in $40 million in such taxes annually.

But securing central Florida’s position as a leading sports destination was also a primary motivator for welcoming BASS, the Classic, and whatever other events the company conducts in the area.

Saboor points to the attractions at Disney’s Wide World of Sports complex, where ESPN routinely broadcasts. He adds NASCAR’s signature Daytona 500 race nearby, the Orlando Magic, professional baseball’s annual spring training — and now BASS planting a firm foot in the ground. The region, he says, has diversified itself as a sports-destination brand.

“In many respects, television coverage is as, if not more, important, than economic development,” says Saboor, noting how valuable it is to be able to communicate to a national audience in February, especially to people who are sitting at home in subzero temperatures.

“The branding exposure that isn’t generated through commercial spots,” says Saboor, “that is actually generated in the body of the program in the form of vignettes and interstitials and billboards in and out — what a wonderful bully pulpit.”

Saboor also notes that the “experience around the experience issue” is very strong in Osceola County and Orlando. They expect to draw incrementally more people during the Classic because of what the area offers besides fishing.

The biggest thing the area offers, of course, is Walt Disney World. Tim Hemphill, the executive director of the Kissimmee Convention & Visitors Bureau, says the Kissimmee brand has been so aligned with Disney over the years that overcoming it is a challenge.

Evidently, they are overcoming. Or simply coming. I had been to the area in the past, but not for some time.

I was surprised to see how strip mall–developed the major highway, Route 192, had become — virtually from I-4 all the way to Kissimmee. Out on the water, especially on the west side of Lake Toho, you could not go anywhere on a weekday afternoon without hearing heavy machinery at work. The area is booming, and real estate has virtually doubled in a few years.

“Osceola County is big,” says Hemphill, “yet only about a third of it is developed. The demographers’ prediction about this entire area is that it will be a super city in twenty-five years. We can’t stop it. But having this event here allows us a platform to remind everybody how important the protection of our resources is. So, as growth occurs around the lake, our leadership is more and more reticent to approve those developments without any thought. And that has happened.”

Kissimmee, in fact, would seem an ideal place to host all aspects of the Classic. Instead, people go from the lake all the way to the outdoor show and the weigh-in at the Orlando Convention Center. That is a forty-five-minute drive for those mortals who do not have a sheriff’s escort and are held up by the incessant traffic on Route 192 and I-4.

But Kissimmee lacks a 250,000-square-foot facility for the weigh-in and the outdoor show, and its arena will hold “only” eight thousand people.

“We’d like to have the whole thing in our county sometime,” says Hemphill. “Maybe in 2009.”

That is when he and Saboor expect the Classic to return to their area. Indeed, Saboor has negotiated the right to host the event that year — if not in 2008, should the Convention Center dates, usually booked many years in advance, be worked out.

“I think it makes sense for BASS to plan ahead,” says Saboor. “Look at what that does for sponsorships and marketing. If you can approach that in three- or four-year increments, look what that would do for sponsors, BASS, and us.”

BASS also changed the Classic’s timing. The event ran in the fall from 1971 through 1982 and in the summer from 1983 through 2005; now it moves to late winter for the first time. That meant BASS had to shorten one season. It brought many anglers into two Classics on the strength of one season and the previous Classic. And it drastically reduced the number of venues that could host the event.

The new target is the last week of February or early March. The amount of money a locality offers will be only part of the consideration, with infrastructure and good fishing being the others.

“It has to be before college basketball and after Daytona,” says Don Rucks, alluding to television’s dead sports zone. He would like to partner with three or four locations for rotational visits. He’s keen on holding future Classics in Texas, especially San Antonio, Houston, or Dallas; New Orleans, when the infrastructure is reestablished; California, “which only leaves the Delta outside Sacramento”; Nevada, where “Lake Mead would be good”; and Florida, including Kissimmee and Jacksonville.

Says Rucks, “I made it a priority for 2006 to hold the Classic in Florida so that we could set a standard for a big catch. The anglers like to catch fish, and nothing’s more important than that the anglers are jazzed.”

There are ample pre-event predictions that Bassmaster Classic records will fall — heaviest winning weight, largest single-day weight, and biggest bass. As the Classic gets underway in late February, the buzz in central Florida is distinctly different than it was last summer in Pittsburgh.