Winter 2024
of success the competitors are still left with a highly- imperfect collection of information. While practicing for a tough Bassmaster Open on Tennessee’s Watts Barr, he commented that “We’re getting bites but catching keepers is tough, and there’s no reason why a 15-incher eats our buzzbait instead of a 14-incher.”
Davis, a lifelong tournament angler but the least experienced of the three at the pro ranks, said that the best advice he can give is, “Don’t let your highs get too high and your lows get too low.” Through a total of 13 Bassmaster events he’s seen both extremes, from winning on his home waters of Lay Lake to finishing 94th at St. Clair just two events later.
“You just have to fish your way out of it,” he said.
Perhaps surprisingly, the time when he felt the most pressure was during the course of his winning campaign at Lay. He had the hometown pressure, the wealth of knowledge and the opportunity for the stars to line up. He said that “at certain times of the day I felt like there was a thousand-pound weight on me.” When he won, he couldn’t dwell on that, either.
“You just appreciate it and move on to the next one.”
THE WRITER’S TAKE
I’ve been writing about professional fishing for two decades and I’ve spent hundreds of hours in the boat, on the phone and in deep conversation with all levels of competitive anglers. With some of them, I feel like
I know their strengths
and weaknesses better than they know themselves. Sometimes what they think is one is actually another.
The first piece of advice I can give to any angler, at any level, is to know thyself. I mean it – take a meaningful assessment of yourself. Enlist the people who know you best to give a brutally honest analysis if you can handle it. This is the best way to get a grip on how you respond to pressure and what you can improve. It leads to an assessment of your personality, and what will work best for you. You can even enlist a coach or sports psychologist, as numerous anglers have, to provide that perspective.
Think of it this way: Steve Kennedy, Mike Iaconelli and Rick Clunn have all had great professional careers, yet all of them have taken very different emotional paths. Even within those examples, sometimes the same characteristic can have different aspects. Iaconelli is at his best when he channels his passion and emotion into a productive force, but he’s at his absolute worst when he lets it get the best of him. There’s a fine line there, one that’s not always easy to walk.
Had Bill Lowen won at a venue like the Ohio River or the Sabine, no one would have been surprised and tens of thousands of Fantasy Fishing players would have been rewarded. The fact that he won at Pickwick, on the Tennessee River, with 83 pounds, speaks to the fact that maturation as an angler comes when there’s a flattening of the curve. The previously “tough” tournaments provide a great chance for a great finish, and the ones where you’re expected to do well start to function like money in
the bank. •
PhotWo: iBll.AD.aSv.Sis.
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