Competitive fishing’s popularity is at an all time high thanks to changes brought on by the Wal-Mart FLW Tour
Organized bass tournament fishing became popular in the late 1960s when Ray Scott put together a unique concept – blending recreational fishing with a high level of competition.
Scott’s initial success with bass fishing contests prompted him to create a “professional” tournament trail. But he soon learned he could not maintain the tournament trail without strong financial sponsorship.
Forrest L. Wood, owner of Ranger Boat Company, joined Scott as both an angler and tournament sponsor. Wood’s boats soon became the benchmark that all other bass boat companies would try to match. Within a few years, non-tournament anglers began to take notice of the professional anglers touring the country. Heroes like Jimmy Houston, Denny Brauer and Orlando Wilson, became common household names. And anglers everywhere admired these professional fishermen.
But success sometimes breeds complacency, and the professional tournament trail became somewhat routine. Professional anglers arrived at the tournament sites, they fished, and the winner walked away with about $50,000 in prizes and cash. Except for avid bass anglers, the general public paid little attention to the tournaments.
That scenario changed about five years ago when Irwin Jacobs, CEO of Genmar Holdings Corp., took an active role in the sport.
“I saw there was a great desire among anglers to compete. And they always seemed to be competing with enthusiasm,” Jacobs said. “All it needed was television and money to take the sport to a new level.”
Jacobs managed to provide both when he purchased Operation Bass and launched the Wal-Mart FLW Tour bass fishing series. Beginning with the first FLW Tour event, the sport made an amazing transformation – an evolution that is still developing. Professional bass tournament fishing jumped to an all-time high in terms of national awareness.
Sponsors make all professional sports successful. Without strong financial backing, no sport – golf, auto racing or football – would survive. Many sports have tried and failed. For most of the 40-year history of organized tournament bass fishing, the sponsors came from within the fishing industry. Ranger was one of the charter and most loyal sponsors. The company still places its logo on all the professional level tournament trails.
Industry sponsors supported the tournament trails hoping to gain customers and achieve greater exposure to the fishing marketplace. Their sponsorships generally met the expectation of increased sales in the highly competitive market of bass fishermen. But surrounding the bass fishing fraternity is a support group of spouses, friends, neighbors and children who took notice of the sport but didn’t necessarily participate. The tournaments and their sponsors had little impact on these non-anglers.
Operation Bass, the Wal-Mart FLW Tour organizers, recognized that this support group needed to get involved. Tournaments had to hold their interest as well as the interest of participating anglers. And the tour needed sponsors to fill the void.
“The real hero in all this is Wal-Mart,” Jacobs said. “They aren’t successful by luck. They know their customers. And the customers of fishing and Wal-Mart are really the same.”
Jacobs met Lee Scott, then vice president of Wal-Mart (now CEO), and formed a partnership that took the sport from the launch ramp to 90 million Wal-Mart customers. It was the start of an exciting time in professional tournament fishing.
Along with Wal-Mart, the tour gained a fine troupe of worthy sponsors like Black & Decker, Chevrolet, CITGO, Coca-Cola, Coleman, Eagle Electronics, Energizer Flashlights, EverStart Batteries, Evinrude Outboards, Fujifilm, BF Goodrich Tires, Kellogg’s, Land O’Lakes, Mitchell, Poulan, Ranger Boats, Shop-Vac, Spiderline, Timex, U.S. Bank, VISA USA, Weed Eater and Wrangler.
While many of these sponsors directly support fishing, over half of them appeal to a broader market. Their products are useful to anglers, families, friends and non-anglers alike. This kind of non-industry sponsorship is what helped transform professional bass fishing into an enjoyable spectator sport.
As sponsors showcased their products to an untapped consumer market, professional anglers tapped into a showcase of high-stakes prize money. Never before have tournament prize purses been as high as they are right now. The typical first place award on the FLW Tour is $100,000. Several special FLW tournaments, like the Forrest Wood Open, boasts first place cash of $200,000 or more.
One angler, Darrel Robertson of Jay, Okla., managed to take home over $850,000 last year in just two Operation Bass tournaments. Robertson earned $250,000 last October by winning the Wal-Mart FLW Tour Championship on Fort Gibson Lake in Wagoner, Okla. He followed that win by taking $600,000 in the Ranger M1 Millennium Tournament at Cypress Gardens, Fla., in November.
Many other anglers, Randall Hudson of Washburn, Mo., Davey Hite of Prosperity, S.C., Peter Thliveros of Jacksonville, Fla., Jim Moynagh of Carver, Minn., Dion Hibdon of Stover, Mo., Rick Clunn of Ava, Mo., and Clark Wendlandt of Cedar Park, Tx., scored big too. These anglers each earned $200,000 or more by winning FLW Tour events. It’s tournament winnings of this caliber that elevated the sport out of the shadows. Today, professional bass fishing rivals other professional sports on the pay scales.
But money isn’t everything, as the old cliche goes. Tournament winners had other goals to achieve. Two years ago, General Mills printed a photograph of the Wal-Mart FLW Tour, Land O’Lakes Angler of the Year on the Wheaties cereal box. Professional bass fishing finally achieved its just ranking among professional sports.
Denny Brauer’s photo was proudly displayed as the first angler to ever appear on the Wheaties box in 1998. In addition to winning over $1 million during his professional angling career, Brauer brought fishing to America’s breakfast table right next to Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan. Last year, David Walker received the same honor. And this year, Walker and Clark Wendlandt are pictured on a series of Kellogg’s cereal boxes.
Television has been a part of fishing since 1963. Many older anglers may recall Gadabout Gaddis, of “The Flying Fisherman” fame. During the 1970s, the “American Sportsman” with Curt Gowdy was a very popular television show for outdoorsmen.
Fishing reached new television viewing levels in the 1980s when ESPN began airing specialty sportsmen shows, and Jimmy Houston replaced Gadabout Gaddis as television’s most popular angler. Fishing became a spectator sport every Saturday morning on the sports network as millions of anglers watched hour after hour of fishing programs.
Pre-FLW professional tournament organizers used the television media to show the results of tournaments. The early television shows brought the audience to the weigh-in podium as anglers checked their fish. While the show announcers tried to build excitement as the anglers crossed the stage with bags of fish, the tournament broadcasts sounded like newscasts rather than colorful sports coverage.
Enter FLW Tour organizers and Little Rock, Ark.-based J.M. Associates who were looking at ways to improve on the spectator value of the post-tournament television show. They came up with a totally unique format. Instead of 150 anglers weighing their catch on the final day of the tournament, the FLW Tour reduced the field through an elimination format similar to professional golf.
In a Wal-Mart FLW Tour event, the entire field competes for two days. After the second day, the top 10 anglers advance to a semi-final round. These anglers start the second day on equal footing as their scale weights are reset to zero. After the third day, the best five pro anglers advance to the final round. And again, the scales are reset.
Camera crews follow these five anglers around the lake or river. Every fish catch is caught on film. Additionally, the final five anglers wear remote microphones so they can talk to the camera crews, tournament announcers, spectators and television viewers. With this novel format, the viewer gets transported from the couch to the backseat of one of the NASCAR-styled Ranger sponsor boats used by each finalist.
A new weigh-in format also made the television coverage more exciting. On stage, each angler brings his fish to the scale one at a time. Excitement builds as the lead changes with every fish. Unlike most professional tournaments, it is never clear who the winner is until the last fish touches the scale.
Complacency is not in the vocabulary of the Wal-Mart FLW Tour organizers. While the television format appears successful, Jacobs took television programming to the next level last November with a live telecast of the Ranger M1 Millennium tournament on FOX Sports.
“The M1 tournament was quite risky,” Jacobs recalls. “But live television coverage of tournament fishing is here and we want to show it to the world.”
The Wal-Mart FLW Tour has revolutionized the professional bass fishing world, but Operation Bass is not one to rest on its laurels. There is still much more work to be done. Jacobs said Operation Bass has many other projects on the drafting board. One of these programs will involve children.
“There is a great need to start at a younger age,” Jacobs said. “We’re going to bring them into the sport with a program that will be national in scope.”
Jacobs was not able to share details of the program other than to say it would be a group effort between Operation Bass and its sponsors. He assures anglers, however, that children will want to participate in the new program.
Professional bass fishing has changed dramatically over the last five years. The sport rose from relative obscurity to the front pages of USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and network television. “We’ve done it in a classy fashion, and we have legitimized the sport,” Jacobs said. “But we’ve only just begun.”