By Monte Burke
Preface
The Optimists
In the spring of 2003, I approached my editor at Forbes
magazine with a story idea about the chase for the world-record
largemouth bass. It wasn’t immediately an easy sell. I wasn’t going
to uncover some seedy corporate scandal or analyze some brilliant
new marketing scheme. And the somewhat obscure endeavor of a few
obsessive fishermen surely wouldn't move any markets. But the chase
had all of the elements of a good story, so I gave it a shot anyway.
I pitched it like this: A collection of very dedicated
people—entrepreneurs, really—are actively pursuing a lofty goal,
using their wits and an incredible amount of hard work. At stake was
the possibility of great triumph, as well as the risk of utter
failure. The plot thickened with the colorful, mysterious, and
daunting history that had to be overcome. It helped, too, that at
the time an $8 million bounty lay on the head of the world-record
bass—money put up by a Tampa, Florida, outfit run by a used-car
salesman and a real-estate developer.
I’ll admit that I had more than a little self-interest in this
story. I have been a fisherman all my life. I grew up in the
American South, in North Carolina and Alabama, where fishing for
largemouth bass is both a predominant pastime and an industry like,
say, skiing in Austria or window shopping in New York City, where I
live now. In North Carolina my family lived on a farm. Behind the
house, down a gentle slope of horse pasture, lay a blackwater pond
full of plucky bass. After my father, Donald, patiently taught me
how to fish, I spent an inordinate amount of time tossing lures into
its dark water, sometimes even hooking into a wriggling, green-sided
largemouth bass. One summer I used a miniature remote-control boat—outrigged
with a 6-inch rod tip, 4 feet of monofilament line, and a spinning
lure—to troll the pond. I hooked and fought bass from a lawn chair
on the shore.
When my father died of cancer in 1989, we moved to Alabama to be
closer to my mother's family. I was seventeen years old, an awkward
and self-conscious teenager, devastated by my father' death. Fishing
was one of the few things that I believed I did well—largely thanks
to my father—so I did it often. Luckily for me, my grandfather, whom
we called Toots, had a bass lake in Alabama that was just a
twenty-minute drive from our new house in Birmingham. He named the
lake Tadpole. I fished that lake nearly every day during my last
summer before college, and it became a bridge that connected my past
with my future.
And I haven't stopped since. Fishing—especially for largemouth
bass—was just something you did in our family, a stubborn stain on
our genetic code that, like freckles, hasn't been scrubbed out
through subsequent generations, though it missed a few of us.
Neither my mother nor my youngest brother cares much for the sport.
But for me, as it had been for my father and grandfather, fishing
was a necessity, though why I love it and continue to pursue it with
such passion is as mysterious and beguiling as the black water in
that North Carolina farm pond.
So I thought that maybe by hanging out with these world-record-bass
chasers—even though they obviously had taken what was for me merely
a passion to the much higher level of obsession—I could shed some
light on this mystery of mine. My inquiry, I believed, was perhaps
similar to the way a pathologist studies the brain of a madman to
determine the roots of lesser mental illnesses.
I didn't tell my editor any of this. But I did say that all
fishermen, every time they cast a lure, dreamt of catching the
biggest fish. And the world-record bass was, for reasons both
mythical and absolute, the most sought-after prize of them all. I
thought, however quirky, that this was a story the readers of the
magazine would enjoy. My editor leaned back in his chair in an
office that overlooked Fifth Avenue and thoughtfully rubbed his
goateed chin as the idea dangled in front of him. Then he bit.
The article was published in Forbes in the summer of 2003, my
contribution to the canon of fish tales. But something happened
during the research and writing of that piece: I found myself
falling in love with the stories of this small group of individuals
who have distilled what they want out of life to the single act of
catching the world-record bass. The result of that love is this
book. The stories within, I believe, are more than just tales of
catching fish. They are about what we humans will do, what we will
gain, and what we are willing to sacrifice, in attempting to reach a
goal. They are stories about life.
And one story gave birth to all the others included here.
On the rainy morning of June 2, 1932, a poor twenty-year-old farmer
from Telfair County, Georgia, decided it was too wet to plow his
fields, so he went fishing. A few hours later on Montgomery Lake, an
oxbow of the Ocmulgee River, George Washington Perry caught and kept
a 22-pound, 4-ounce largemouth bass—the largest ever landed in
recorded history. We know very little about George Perry and his
fish. None of the eyewitnesses to his catch are alive today, and
only a few stories published about his fish actually use Perry as a
primary source. As such, plenty of people doubt that the event ever
really took place. Yet the International Game Fish Association (IGFA),
the keeper of all fishing records, still recognizes Perry's bass as
the world record to this day, and it is notable as much for its
staying power as for the mysterious circumstances under which it
occurred.
Perry's story is also the element that bonds together the rest of
the characters in this book, all of whom I spent a year traveling
the United States and beyond tracking down. Their stories make up
the strange and lively tale of the chase for the new world-record
largemouth bass, that mythical, as-yet-uncaught fish that some of
its more fervent pursuers have affectionately dubbed “Sowbelly,” for
the swinelike girth it will most certainly possess. I started in
California, wended my way through Texas to rural southern outposts
in Mississippi and Georgia, and even traveled to the forbidden
island of Cuba. I interviewed historians, biologists, con artists,
detectives, and fed-up spouses. I fished with some of the best
big-bass anglers alive. Along the way, I met a taciturn LAPD
motorcycle cop named Bob Crupi who came within a hairbreadth of
besting George Perry's record and finally exorcising the demons that
lie buried deep within his soul. I hung out with Mike Long and Jed
Dickerson, the de facto heads of two competing fishing posses, whose
increasingly tense turf battles take place in suburban San Diego on
a tiny lake that harbors enormous bass. I visited Bill Baab, the
world's leading authority on the story of George Perry's fish, and
the story's most tenacious guardian.
In Texas, I met biologist Allen Forshage, the head architect of that
big-thinking state's complex and very expensive plan to grow the
next world-record bass in a laboratory. I spent a week in a shack
with Porter Hall, an Alabaman who has lost his marriage and daughter
in his thus-far futile pursuit of the world record, but who believes
he's finally found the magic bullet: to grow the damn thing himself
in his private pond in Mississippi. I contacted fame-seeking con
artists who were caught with lead weight stuffed into the bellies of
their bass. And in Cuba, I spent time with the thoughtful Samuel
Yera, for whom the chase lives most vividly in his curious mind.
Each of these characters had one thing in common:
They were all chasing the ghost of George Washington Perry.
George Perry lived in a more innocent time, before our age of
technology and stringent rules and media consciousness made records
the objects of ravenous desire. His fish remains an anomaly in our
modern era, which is remarkable for its unsentimental attack on
records of all kinds. Whether it's from improved fitness, advanced
technology, illegal supplements—or some potent combination of the
three—the significant feats of the past continue to fall. Roger
Bannister's 3:59-minute-mile mark has been lowered by 16 seconds
since 1954. Bob Beamon's historic long jump stood for twenty-three
years until Mike Powell bettered it by two inches in 1991. In
baseball, Lou Gehrig's consecutive game streak set in 1939 was
broken fifty-six years later by Cal Ripken, Jr., and Roger Maris's
1961 single-season home-run record has been twice topped, first by
Mark McGwire in 1998, then again three years later by Barry Bonds.
Even important fishing records, like those for brown trout (1992)
and Pacific Blue Marlin (1993), to name just two species, have
fallen. Part of the hubris of our age is the belief that we can
always do things better than we once did. But Perry's record, almost
three-quarters of a century later, remains unbroken.
In order to qualify for an all-tackle (using up to a 130-pound test
line) world-record catch today, fishermen must go through a
some-what tedious process. The IGFA requires the following: that the
fish is weighed on an IGFA-certified scale in front of witnesses who
must be shown the actual tackle used to catch the fish; that the
fish is 2 ounces heavier than the previous record; and that the
angler mail in a photograph showing the fish, the tackle, the scale,
and the angler with the fish. For the more important records, like
the largemouth bass, the IGFA reserves the right to administer a
polygraph exam. The certification process is not fail-safe, which
has compelled more than a few to try to cheat it. But in general, it
weeds out the imposters. In January 2004, a controversial pending
world-record bass caught by a woman named Leaha Trew (whom you'll
meet later in the book) was thrown out for not meeting the
standards.
The irony, of course, is that Perry's fish would have never
qualified today. Neither a photograph nor a mount of his fish
exists. No one knows for sure the make of the rod and reel he used
to catch it. And no one ever subjected him to a polygraph test.
Perry did nothing more than weigh the fish on a postal scale in
front of a few witnesses and send the measurements in to a Field
& Stream magazine fishing contest.
Then he took the bass home and ate it.
His nonchalance was completely understandable: In 1932, the record
was no big deal. His bass wasn't officially recognized as the world
record until two years later, and only became the IGFA's standard
when Field & Stream's records were transferred to that organization
in the 1940s. The conspiracy theorists have always debated the
authenticity of Perry's catch, a din that only grew louder when he
died in a plane crash in 1974, taking all of the secrets of the
world's most hallowed fishing record with him to the grave.
But since 1932, the importance of the record has grown immensely,
corresponding with the incredible rise in popularity in the United
States of the largemouth bass, which has unequivocally become
America's fish. How and where to catch the next world record has
been a perennial favorite story of the nation's outdoor periodicals
like Field & Stream, Bassmaster, Outdoor Life, and Sports
Afield since the 1970s. And the heightening fixation on the
record has had a strange effect on a handful of bass fishermen: It
has turned them into record chasers, individuals who play out their
passion in relative obscurity, known primarily only to others who
are in pursuit of the same scaly grail, on the lunatic fringe of the
$12-billion bass industry.
The true record chasers have no rabid fans cheering them on, no
million-dollar national tournament tours to compete in, no
television shows to host, no lucrative sponsorship deals to sign.
And as four notable modern anglers—Bob Crupi, Mike Long, Jed
Dickerson, and Porter Hall—know all too well, unless you break the
22-pound, 4-ounce mark, you earn no riches. And even that money
exists more in the theoretical realm than the actual one. The
outdoor press often repeats that the angler who breaks the record
will reap at least $1 million in endorsement money, but not if that
angler happens to be using the wrong rod or reel, or the tackle
companies deem him not marketable. Every so often, a magazine will
put up prize money, but it's usually closer to $10,000 than $1
million. The Big Bass Record Club was offering $8 million to any
member of its organization who caught the biggest bass in the world,
but it folded in 2003 due to a lack of new members and the untenable
burden of heavy insurance premiums.
That's not to say that fame and money can't be made in bass fishing.
Denny Brauer, a tournament angler from Missouri, appeared on a
Wheaties box in 1998 and has made almost $2 million in career tour
earnings and another $1 million in endorsements. Together the CITGO
Bassmaster and the Wal-Mart FLW tours have minted a dozen
millionaires, and enabled another five hundred or so anglers to make
bass fishing a full-time career. And then there are television
personalities like Roland Martin, who can be found five days a week
on the Outdoor Life Network kissing bass before he drops them back
into the water, his hair bleached blond from the hours in the sun
and his shirt festooned with as many sponsorship patches as a NASCAR
driver's Nomex suit. Even a hybrid of the two types of bass
celebrity has been created. In 2004, a bass tournament angler was
featured on the reality show, The Bachelor. Plenty of
individuals have become famous and made very comfortable livelihoods
from simply catching bass. But no one has ever made a living from
pursuing the world record (though some, as you'll see, have spent
a fortune in doing so). And what's ironic to record chasers is this:
Most of the fish these famous bassers catch are . . . well . . .
small.
There's a reason for that. Truly huge bass are extremely rare. Lets
say, for argument's sake, that the 11 million frequent bass anglers
in the United States each catch five bass a year (a gross
undercalculation that doesn't take into account bass anglers in
other nations or the tens of millions of bass caught by the 33
million other freshwater anglers in the United States). Most of
these bass will weigh between 2 and 3 pounds. In 2003, there was one
bass caught in the world that was officially 20 pounds or more, one
of only twelve such fish on record since 1923. That means, at the
very best, your annual chance of catching a 20-pounder in the United
States alone is 1 in 55 million. That's what statisticians call an
outlier. You are far more likely to be struck by lightning or become
a U.S. Senator than catch a 20-pound bass. There just aren't that
many around.
But fishermen in general rely on an almost theological faith—“Faith
that the water that you are fishing has got fish in it, and that you
are going to catch one of them,” as the novelist and noted fishing
bum William Humphrey once wrote. Fishing is the sport of optimists.
Every cast into the unknown water world is merely an expression of
that optimism, and thus no guarantee of some connection with another
living being. The world-record chasers have taken this faith a step
even further. They are perhaps the fishing world's biggest optimists
in pursuit of a bass that, statistically speaking, may not even
exist. Each of these anglers believes somewhere deep down that
catching the world's biggest largemouth bass will get him or her
something—personally, financially ... each has his or her own
reason.
And to get there, they've each turned this pursuit into an
obsession. Susan Orlean wrote in The Orchid Thief that
once people become adults, they view obsessions about seemingly
inconsequential things—like flowers or big bass—as a bit naïve. But
very rarely in this world does someone achieve the absolute pinnacle
of his or her profession without some sort of obsession. For these
record chasers, that fixation has manifested itself in various ways.
Some things have been irretrievably lost: Edenic innocence and
purity and even the enjoyment of a sport that most fell in love with
as children. But others have been gained: notoriety among peers, a
profound faith in the unknowable and, perhaps most significantly, a
sense of purpose in an otherwise chaotic world.
But here's one thing that gnaws at the gut of each and every one of
these record chasers: Anyone could break it. Whereas you or I will
never top the single-season home-run record in baseball, we could
land the next world-record bass. An eight-year-old on his or her
first fishing trip is just as likely to pull off the feat as someone
who has spent a lifetime on the chase.
And yet this dedicated collection of individuals persists— casting,
retrieving, and hoping for that one fish.
The question is, Why?
Reprinted from Sowbelly by
Monte Burke by permission of
Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright © 2005 by
Monte Burke. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts
thereof, may not be reproduced without permission.
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