(Editor's note: This piece doesn't necessarily reflect the opinions of all bass anglers nationwide or even of the Southeast region. It's instead meant to raise questions. We'd like to know your opinions. You can give them to us by using the FeedBack form (click here), but you might want to wait until you've read both parts. This is part 1. Part 2 will run on Monday, Nov. 24.)

BassFan contributor Jonathan Manteuffel gave this explanation for writing this piece. "While driving to a bass club night tournament on Lake Guntersville, my partner asked if I knew which pros another club member had fished with in the Bassmaster Southern Open on Wheeler Lake. I didn't, but I mentioned that it was too bad another club member who fished it didn't make the cut. My partner said he hadn't even realized there was a cut format in the Opens now. Then he went on to say that he didn't really follow the pro tournaments much anymore because he got tired of all the changes. That got me wondering if the same sort of burnout was happening to other BassFans. I decided to check around, and since I'm in the Tennessee River valley in north Alabama -- with lakes Guntersville, Wheeler, Wilson and Pickwick strung across the state -- there's no shortage of bass clubs and BassFans in the area. After talking with several members of a few clubs in the Huntsville area, it became clear that even some of the most ardent fans have suffered some degree of frustration with the frequent changes - - and even reversals -- of rules, formats, schedules, field sizes and everything else that has happened in bass fishing lately. What follows was inspired by these fan interviews.
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There's an old saw that comes to mind when considering professional bass fishing these days: "The only constant is change." The last few years, if you didn't make it your business to know, you couldn't keep up with all the changes BASS and FLW Outdoors were making.

Avid fans still track all the details, from points and formats to weights and rule changes, but the more casual fans seem to be getting a little tired of trying to keep up.

Other pro sports are well-established and predictable for the most part. But bass fishing as a professional sport is still trying to find its stride. It's still experiencing growing pains. And one of those pains is, unfortunately, the burnout some fans have experienced.

"I like the way it used to be, when you knew every year what the format was, how to qualify for the Classic, and you could see everybody fish every day" of a tournament, said Ron Glover, a BassFan from Athens, Ala. "Now, when the weigh- ins are local, you have to take off work on a Thursday to be sure you get to see your favorite angler.

"I don't like the cut format at all," he added. "I don't really follow the trails very closely anymore. I don't want to have to look up how (the anglers) have to qualify this year, as compared to last year, to know how they're doing."

Glover's frustration is echoed by other fans who have been befuddled by the barrage of changes each season for the last few years. While most agree that the addition of a second pro-level trail (the FLW Tour) and the infusion of new sponsors has increased the opportunities for the pros to make a living fishing, some find the dizzying pace to be overwhelming. Some fans have found that they have to narrow their focus to one trail or the other, or risk diluting their attention too much to enjoy following the anglers' progress through the season.

"I don't have the time to follow (the details) like I used to," said David Harrison of Harvest, Ala. "I wish they'd be more consistent year to year. I have a hard time keeping up with the qualifying methods and numbers, the formats – even the names of the events keep changing. It's frustrating."

Harrison won the amateur division of a BASS Megabucks event in 1997, and has fished 10 BASS events as a non-boater. A long-time fan, he joined the Christian Bassmen Bass Club in Alabama in 1977, when he was 16, and remembers the first bass tournament he won, fishing a buddy-style tournament with former BASS tournament director Dewey Kendrick.

"I still follow BASS events since I get Bassmaster (Magazine) and BASS Times, and have ESPN2 on cable," he said. "I don't get the channel that FLW is on. I know some guys who fish FLW, but if it weren't for BassFan.com, I wouldn't read about FLW at all," a comment that echoes what several other fans have said.

Harrison reminisced about the "days gone by" when the only national-level pro tournaments were BASS Invitationals: not Tour, not Top 150 or Top 100, or even Open.

Building a Foundation

To understand the rapidity of the changes, a little history lesson is in order.

Back before FLW and ESPN, before the western and Canadian trails, before Operation Bass and even before most local bass clubs, there was just B.A.S.S. Ray Scott founded the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society in 1967 and held that organization's first tournament the same year.

Changes were gradual as the concept of professional bass tournament fishing was developed. It was 4 years before the first Classic was held in 1971, when membership in B.A.S.S. had grown to over 90,000. The Bassmasters TV show was created in 1985, aired on TNN and made tournament fishing more mainstream.

Helen Sevier and her investors purchased the organization from Scott in 1986. That same year the first Megabucks tournament was held, using a new links-style format and a higher payout.

Then in 1987, BASS created a new opportunity for the fans to watch the pros from as up-close as you could get: the Top 100 SuperBASS Pro-Am. A once-a-year event, its novelty was that for the first time an amateur was paired with a pro partner. Two years later the entire non-Invitationals series of BASS events went to the pro-am format. Everybody, pros and amateurs, fished all three days of the Top 100s.

Entry fees and payouts slowly rose over the years, but not significantly. And a few rule changes were implemented along the way, such as disallowing dip nets for landing fish and raising horsepower limits. But for the most part, the adjustments to the tournaments were made in relatively slow and deliberate steps. Fans had no trouble keeping pace, and followed their favorites on The Bassmasters TV show and in the pages of Bassmaster Magazine.

FLW Tour Appears

In 1996, a new opportunity for professional bass fishermen and their fans appeared, in the form of the FLW Tour. It was the brainchild of wealthy financier Irwin Jacobs, who owned one of the world's largest boat companies (now the largest), Genmar Holdings Inc. In 1996, as it does now, Genmar owned Ranger Boats, which at that time was a BASS sponsor.

Just before launching the FLW Tour, Jacobs purchased Operation Bass which was known for its successful Red Man-sponsored amateur fishing circuit. In 2001 Wal- Mart took over this sponsorship and renamed the amateur circuit the Wal-Mart Bass Fishing League. Between the Wal-Mart BFL amateur and FLW Tour professional circuits is the EverStart Series, sponsored by EverStart batteries.

In 1996, the FLW Tour had six regular-season events and a championship which featured a $100,000 1st-place prize, then the largest ever for the sport. FLW Tour events originally fielded 150 boats for two days, then cut to the Top 10 pros and co-anglers for the third day, and to just the Top 5 pros for the last day. That was a made-for-TV approach created in conjunction with JM Associates out of Little Rock, Ark., which is no longer involved with FLW Outdoors but does produce the Bassmasters TV show for ESPN.

The purpose of the cut formats was to use elimination rounds and weight-zeroing to generate excitement and enable viewers to focus on just a few top contenders. Camera crews were paired with each finalist and hosts communicated with anglers via cell phone.

The second year of the FLW Tour found Wal-Mart as the title sponsor of the Tour. This revolutionary involvement of a large, non-endemic sponsorship kicked off the race to increase payouts, and enabled the first $1 million purse for a bass tournament: the 1997 Forrest Wood Open, which had a $200,000 1st-place prize. The first five events of 1997 featured $100,000 top prizes for each event, with a total $3.1 million purse for the entire FLW Tour.

That kind of cash got people's attention. Fields for the FLW Tour the next year filled within 1 hour the morning of registration. USA Today published a front- page story. Other large sponsors from outside the fishing industry jumped on board, names like Coca-Cola, Land O'Lakes, Citgo and Fujifilm.

In 1998, Denny Brauer was featured on the Wheaties box for winning FLW Angler of the Year. It was the first time in the 75-year history of "the Breakfast of Champions" that a professional bass fisherman made the box. Brauer also later appeared twice on Late Night with David Letterman. The Wal-Mart FLW Tour was rapidly making a name for itself, and new fans were being drawn to the sport.

BASS Quickens the Pace

Because of the competition from Operation Bass (now FLW Outdoors), BASS started making changes in the late 1990s.

In 1998-99 it expanded its field from 100 to 150 pros in the renamed Top 150 events.

A Western Invitational (now Open) route to the Classic was added in 1998, starting the on-and-off effort to reach over the Great Divide to unite bass fishermen nationally.

A new format, the World Championship Fishing series, was tried in 1999 and 2000 in an attempt to blend boat handling (some say racing) and fishing.

And purses also were raised to match FLW's.

ESPN Interest

By this time many prognosticators within and outside the fishing industry were referring to bass fishing as "the next NASCAR." The FLW Tour led the charge in giving this impression, with its larger purses and boats "wrapped" NASCAR-like in sponsor logos, but BASS was quickly catching up.

In late 2000 rumors started swirling that ESPN, arguably the pinnacle of sports media, was interested in purchasing BASS. The Bassmasters TV show moved to ESPN2, and sure enough, in April 2001 ESPN announced its purchase of BASS.

ESPN set to work to try to regain the TV audience BASS once had, and also immediately set about putting its stamp on the sport. The Top 150s became the Bassmaster Tour, with the boat count rising to 175 in 2003. Megabucks was discontinued in 2002, but the similar Showdown format was introduced for some events. FLW-like cut formats were instituted, off-limits periods were changed, the Opens went to a pro-am format, a new Open Championship was added, and so on. The Federation was "dissed," embraced, dissed again and is now again being embraced.

With all the changes, life members of BASS began to wonder what was happening to the Society they had joined years earlier.

At the same time, FLW Outdoors continued to tweak their formats, add major sponsors and raise the payouts.

One-Stop Shopping

The head-spinning flood of new faces, sponsors, venues, formats, schedules and so on was difficult for some fans (and anglers) to keep up with, let alone figure out what it all meant. Trying to keep up with everything was made more difficult in that very few sources reported on both leagues in any detail, and none with any frequency. The big players were the league's own media, and looking at either rarely gave any clue that the other one existed.

That shortfall was eliminated in 2001 with the appearance of BassFan.com. The establishment of an independent, fan-oriented source for professional tournament bass fishing information succeeded in bringing fans into a balanced world, where the highs and lows of both leagues could be seen.

"I read BassFan.com every day," said Steve Colvin of Huntsville, Ala. "I can read about what (pattern) won the day after the tournament (whether FLW or BASS). I don't like the FLW magazine or TV show, and the opposite is true for the BASS media, but I don't want to wait a month to get the (information)."

And how do fans best compare their favorite anglers fishing separate tours? Problem solved: The State Farm-BassFan World Rankings provided the only statistical, multi-year ranking system for professional bass fishing that used results from both tours. Even the Professional Anglers Association (PAA) has endorsed these rankings as the official standard for the sport.

The next logical step, of course, would be a "Best of the Best" tournament (or series) that would draw the highest-ranking anglers in the world, regardless of which Tour they fished. That gap is to be filled in 2004, with BassFan's Top Gun Championship tournament, featuring the Top 40 of the BassFan.com World Rankings as of the last tour event in 2004.

As with the new BASS Elite 50 series (yet another new series with a new format), there will be no entry fee for pros fishing Top Gun. So finally, after 37 years of fishing essentially for their own money, in 2004 some pros will fish for cash entirely provided by someone else. And after 8 years of watching some pros fish only FLW or only BASS, fans will be able to see them fish side by side.

"I'm looking forward to it," said David Harrison, of Harvest, Ala. "I'm cautiously optimistic" about the success of such a tournament, he added. "I think it's a good deal to pull from the BassFan.com World Rankings to fill the field. I don't think the competition is as tough in the FLW, but if an FLW-only guy makes (the Top 40) in the BassFan.com rankings, then he is at least consistently at the top," he noted. "It should be a good tournament."

- End of part 1 (of 2) -