by Ken Schultz
I actually finished this over a week ago and I'm just getting around to writing about it. Nancy has an amazing knack for finding books that she thinks will appeal to me and this is another example of that. Of course, it's not like she really went out on a limb on this one.
Things changed for us when we moved to suburbia in 2003. A major benefit for me was that owning a fishing boat wasn't so downright impractical like it was when we lived in the city. For Nancy the move meant she now had a 45 minute drive one-way every Saturday to meet a couple of her attorney friends for Saturday morning breakfast and bitchfest. My favorite thing to do on a Saturday is take the boat and fish, but that only happens from March to October when the weather and my schedule permits. When the weather stinks, my favorite thing to do is to cook myself a cholesterol bomb of a breakfast and watch the back-to-back fishing shows on the deuce (ESPN2). I even liked watching these shows when I was a kid and didn't get to fish that often. As for which show is which, I could barely tell you, although I do really like Beat Charlie Moore. Even if you think Charlie Moore is a Red Sox loving giant blowhard, and he is, every episode is just like a fishing trip with your buddies. For Nancy, all she can say is, "I can't believe I married a guy who watches televised fishing."
And that's the basics of what Bass Madness is all about, Televised Fishing. Or more correctly put, Gonzo Televised Fishing. Charlie Moore is part of that problem and so are a number of other TV fishermen like Mike Iaconelli, Gerald Swindle, and Kevin Van Dam. When I was a kid, televised fishing was about instruction more than anything else. Bill Dance or Roland Martin would simply tell you how to catch them. Televised fishing shows today are all about showmanship, which would seem to be the complete opposite of the contemplative nature of fishing. I've been asked a couple of times why I don't want to fish in bass tournaments and I tell them it's because it makes fishing too much like work. I go fishing in order to do a fat lot of nothing. I hate to get skunked, but I'm just as content starting at a bobber that hasn't moved in 20 minutes.
The author, Ken Schultz, is of the same fishing school as I, and he wanted to find out how bass fishing has reached to the place where it is now. He's actually even fished a few tournaments including some sponsored by BASS (Bass Anglers Sportsman Society), the organization that is the centerpiece of this book. In golf you have The Masters. In tennis you have Wimbledon. In American football you have The Super Bowl. For BASS, The Bassmaster Classic is The Super Bowl of Fishing. BASS has held their premier tournament since 1971 and the book starts out at the 2005 event in Pittsburgh, PA. Not exactly what you think of when you think of bass fishing is it? That's because BASS, or more accurately stated, their owner ESPN, has sold the rights to hold the tournament to the highest bidder and this year it is Pittsburgh, PA. In fact, ESPN has sold the rights to a lot of things including the tournament sponsorship to Toyota and CITGO. Schultz pulls no punches in pointing out the hypocrisy that a sport consisting primarily of god fearing Southern white males is being propped up by a Japanese automaker and a very anti-American Venezuelan oil corporation. The fact that Pittsburgh's river system is not a very good bass fishery is just one of the many reasons why sponsorship is a problem. Schultz points out other issues and continues to drive home that televised fishing is now the domain of corporate sponsorship in exactly the same way that NASCAR racing is. With more money coming into the sport, there is more money to win at these tournaments, and subsequently the "sport" becomes much more of a cutthroat proposition for the anglers.
After Kevin Van Dam walks away as the 2005 tournament champion with the record lowest total catch ever in the tournament's history, Schultz, in the second part of his book, covers the beginnings of BASS and its founder Ray Scott to the point where we are today in the "sport". He makes a nice transition from Ray Scott to Ranger Boats (the Cadillac of bass boats), to Ranger Boats founder Forrest L. Wood, to the competing FLW tour which is named after Wood.
The FLW tour figures prominently in Schultz' third part of the book which covers the 2006 Bassmaster Classic from Lake Tohopekaliga on the Kissimmee Chain of lakes in Florida. The Southern end of this chain, Lake Kissimmee, I fished two weeks before the classic. We saw a few of these pros practicing while we were down there. I'm sure they were having the same crappy luck as we did because it was so cold. While Schultz was critical of the 2005 event, it doesn't even come close to touching the scathing critique of the 2006 tournament. In this part of the book he spares no expense on anyone. Some anglers are skewered for sight-fishing, a method where you locate bass while they are vulnerably spawning in shallow water. Sponsors are given the once over treatment for not allowing anglers to use their own boats. This proves devastating for ESPN's media darling Iaconelli who is penalized for letting fish die because he was unfamiliar with the sponsor boat's aeration system. But Schultz saves his biggest contempt for ESPN who has turned this whole thing into a bastardized conglomerate of fishing, wrestling, and stock car racing. ESPN tends to focus on a core group of anglers who are showmen much more than they are fisherman, despite the fact that many of these guys are clearly not as good as others. Iaconelli is a pretty good fisherman and Van Dam may very well be the best competition fisherman ever, but Swindle is mediocre at best. Those who are good fisherman and aren't particularly good showmen are switching to the FLW tour which has larger prize money but seems to be more akin to buddies fishing on a weekend. The FLW tour suffers from the sponsorship issues that BASS/ESPN does so the verdict is out on how long it takes for FOX Sports, the network for the FLW Tour, to make it as out of control as ESPN has made BASS.
Overall I enjoyed the book. I had no idea of the difference between FLW and BASS even though it's talked about every Saturday on ESPN2. It also gave me a behind the scenes look at the wholly dysfunctional world that professional bass fishing is today. And yet, I'll still keep watching watching Saturday morning fishing shows because viewing someone yank a rod and reel and seeing it bow over because of the weight of a lunker on the other end of the line is something I can't seem to get enough of.
No feedback yet
Comment feed for this postLeave a comment
