Notable FLW Tour hot streaks
On fire. Rolling. In the zone. Whatever you want to call it, sometimes tournament anglers find themselves enjoying a momentum swing where they can do no wrong. Right now, that angler is Dan Morehead of Paducah, Ky., who just keeps extending his lead in the pro standings with every passing FLW tournament. With the tour heading to his home waters of Kentucky Lake next, nobody – especially Morehead himself – expects him to slow down anytime soon.
But all good things must come to an end eventually. Even Michael Jordan had to retire someday (although it took him three tries). And while Morehead is no MJ of the bass-fishing world yet, the FLW has seen its fair share of hot streaks over the years. Each of them has its own unique characteristics – some pros are masters of certain lakes or techniques, some just find the zone in a series of tournaments – and a closer look at some of the more prominent hot streaks might indicate what lays in store for Morehead over the next few months.
2000: Clunn nearly wins three in a row
It started at the Wal-Mart Open on Beaver Lake in May, where Rick Clunn won the tough-bite tournament with his crankbait. The next month on the wind-whipped Mississippi River at Memphis, Clunn weighed in one of the week’s few 20-pounds-plus stringers in the final round, but took second place after Gary Klein weighed in the heaviest stringer of the tournament, which was over 21 pounds. Then in June, Clunn came back again with his deadly crankbait and won his second $200,000 check of the year at the Forrest Wood Open at Pickwick Lake.
Clunn then wrapped up the year with an eighth-place finish at the FLW Championship on the Red River in Shreveport, La.
A legendarily cerebral fisherman, Clunn said this about his streak: “I really try to win every tournament I enter, and you’ve got to do more than just talk about it. One of my greatest goals is to maximize the human potential, and I think the human potential is infinite. What you’ve seen Tiger Woods do in golf is ultimately possible in this sport. It’s just a matter of fulfilling potential.”
However, even the mighty Clunn fell short of fully reaching his potential when Clark Wendlandt went on to win the Angler of the Year title. Clunn’s good-but-not-great finishes the first three tournaments of that season ultimately dropped him to second place in the standings despite the streak.
1997: Fritts wins three in the same year
David Fritts leads all FLW pros with four career victories, and three of those came in the same year. In 1997, the tour’s sophomore season, he won at Lake Eufaula, Kentucky Lake and the FLW Championship at Lake Ferguson.
While that season sets Fritts apart as the only pro ever to win three in a year, he surprisingly didn’t win the AOY title. In fact, while he added a sixth-place finish to his three wins, he didn’t even really contend for AOY. Between his wins at Eufaula and Kentucky, Fritts finished 139th at Kerr Lake. Then after Kentucky he finished 124th at the Forrest Wood Open on Lake Minnetonka. Not only that, Fritts opened the season with a 126th-place finish at Lake Okeechobee.
It’s a seven-tournament-long season, and even three victories in the same year guarantee nothing in the yearly standings. He finished the year ranked 11th.
1999-2002: Wendlandt is the Beaver Lake master
It’s harder to judge FLW streaks on individual lakes since the tournament venues change every year, but there have been two constants over the years: Lake Okeechobee in January and Beaver Lake in April. While a variety of anglers have won at the Big O, every year competitors go to Beaver Lake with one particular pro lined up in their crosshairs: Clark Wendlandt.
That’s because, from 1999 to 2002, Wendlandt never missed a cut at the Wal-Mart Open and ended up winning it twice, 1999 and 2001. In 2000, he finished 10th and, in 2002, fourth.
“Beaver Lake is just a great place to fish,” Wendlandt said in 2002. “I feel really comfortable here. Anytime you can come to a lake and not have to second-guess yourself, it feels good.”
Incidentally, in no small part to his success at Beaver, Wendlandt is also the only angler to win the FLW AOY title twice. A perennial standings threat due to his dogged consistency, he won the points race in 1997 and 2000.
However, Wendlandt’s top-10 streak at Beaver Lake came to halt this season with his 58th-place finish.
2001-2002: VanDam nearly wins back-to-back AOY titles
While Wendlandt is the only pro to win two standings races, Kevin VanDam became the first viable threat to win back-to-back AOY titles when he went on a tear throughout the 2001 and 2002 FLW seasons.
The VanDaminator won the title in 2001 after notching an unbroken string of solid performances. That year, he finished second twice and never worse than 29th place all year. The guy could do no wrong, no matter what the lake or the conditions. From Okeechobee to St. Clair and the Red River to Lake Martin, VanDam became the man to beat at all the stops along the way. He ended up setting an FLW standings record with 1,105 points for the year.
In 2002, it looked like we would see a repeat performance when VanDam cruised to two top-10s, a second- and third-place, and again never finished out of the top 40 over the first six tournaments. In first place heading into the championship, he was poised to make history as the first pro to win it back-to-back, but Jay Yelas snuck in at the last minute and took the AOY title when VanDam landed the worst finish of his career to date, 44th, at the fish-fest that was Lake Champlain.
“I left the door open,” a deflated VanDam said in 2002, realizing that his place in FLW history had been upstaged.
While he was obviously miffed about his failure to repeat as AOY, one particular aspect about VanDam’s hot streak might have been even more exasperating for him. In those two years – years where people were calling him the “Tiger Woods of bass fishing” – VanDam never actually won an FLW tournament. Instead, he finished second four times from 1999 through 2002.
1996-2003: Other notable hot streaks
– Gary Klein became the first pro to successfully defend an FLW title on the same lake when he won at the Mississippi River tournament in Memphis two years running, 1999 and 2000.
– Jeff Coble became the first angler to win back-to-back BFL All-Americans when he did it in 2000 and 2001, both times at Lake Hamilton.
– In an extremely lucrative streak, Darrel Robertson collected $260,000 for winning the 1999 FLW Championship and then cashed $600,000 by winning his next tournament, the inaugural Ranger M1. It was an $860,000 swing in just two months of fishing for Robertson.
– In 2002, Tony Christian of Hull, Ga., won five BFL tournaments, including three of five in the Savannah River Division and one in the only event he fished in the Bulldog Division. Then he went on to win the Lake Gaston Regional. Christian has dominated the Savannah River Division’s standings since it was introduced in 2002, and he has continued that streak into 2003 by winning the latest tourney. Plus, he leads the 2003 EverStart Series Eastern Division in points and took home his first EverStart victory at Lake Martin.
2003: Morehead’s old Kentucky home
Of course, all this talk of momentum and hot streaks would be incomplete without mention of Dan Morehead’s other streak: his success on his home lake. Of his 18 career FLW Outdoors top-10 finishes, seven of those were victories. Of those seven victories, five of them came at Kentucky/Barkley lakes. Morehead has already won three BFLs, one EverStart and one FLW tournament there.
And that begs the question: Can Dan Morehead do it again? Can he become the first angler ever to win back-to-back FLW titles?
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