Voters like local to win FLW Tour Championship
Birmingham, Alabama’s Todd Ary carries Virtual Championship 2004
FLWOutdoors.com visitors must be a little like realtors: They understand the value of location. Despite Todd Ary of Birmingham, Ala., having squeaked into the 2004 Wal-Mart FLW Tour Championship as the 47th seed – the tour’s top 48 pros qualified – the local pro was the resounding favorite among hundreds of voters to predict a potential winner in the Virtual Championship 2004.
Ary’s consistency on the Wal-Mart FLW Tour in 2004 landed the Tyson pro a slot in the season-ending championship, being held Aug. 11-14 on Logan Martin Lake in Birmingham. Though he is still searching for his first FLW Tour win and didn’t manage a top-10 finish during the regular season, bass-fishing fans are banking on Ary’s ability to pull lunkers out of his home lake. They’re not the only ones; Ary grabbed two votes from FLWOutdoors.com’s pundits who recently put their prognostication skills to work trying to determine who will fill the top five slots when the championship dust settles.
Ary knows what championship competition is like – he fished in the FLW Tour’s big show last year – and he’s come close to a tour-level victory before – a seventh-place finish on Kentucky Lake in 2003. He’s also built up some momentum that he’ll ride into championship competition Wednesday, having registered his best two finishes of the year at the last two FLW Tour stops. Now Ary has another ace up his sleeve; he’s the people’s choice as the pro expected to emerge victorious from the 2004 championship.
But in order to prove Virtual Championship 2004 voters right, Ary will have to outfish one of the hottest pros fishing this year – Greg Hackney of Gonzales, La. – in his opening-round, head-to-head matchup. Check back at FLWOutdoors.com Thursday to find out if Ary will advance. Editor’s Note: See related stories about Ary and Hackney.
Only time will tell whether the FLW Outdoors electorate correctly predicted the winner of the 2004 Wal-Mart FLW Tour Championship, but the ballots have been cast, almost a third of which were for Ary among the dozen finalists in the virtual championship bracket. Ary has earned $70,330 in FLW Outdoors events throughout his career, and he’ll add a cool half-million dollars in cash to that if he can see voters’ predictions through to fruition.
With votes cast in the final 24 hours of Virtual Championship 2004 creeping up on the 2,000 mark, Ary garnered 511 of them, 84 more than his closest competition – pro Aaron Martens of Castaic, Calif., the No. 24 championship seed. During the six weeks of Virtual Championship 2004 matchup polling, 13,589 ballots were cast.
Breakdown of the 12 virtual championship finalists
These polls have been for entertainment only and have no bearing on the actual FLW Tour Championship competition. Click here to view the Virtual Championship 2004 bracket.
1. Todd Ary
2. Aaron Martens
3. Matt Herren
4. Chris McCall
5. Dean Rojas
6. Carl Svebek III
7. Mike Surman
8. Dave Lefebre
9. Alton Jones
10. Dan Morehead (Morehead, last year’s inaugural virtual championship winner, tied with Alton Jones, but was relegated to 10th place this year due to a lower seeding)
11. Andy Morgan
12. Tracy Adams