This month marks the anniversary of one of the most remarkable records in sport. In June of 1932, in the most rural nook of Georgia, a poor farmer named George Washington Perry went out in a rainstorm and returned with a 22-pound, 4-ounce bass – still the biggest largemouth ever recorded.

I've been thinking about Perry a lot lately. Since my book, Sowbelly: The Obsessive Quest for the World Record Largemouth Bass, came out this spring, TV and radio hosts, newspaper reporters, bass fishermen and non-anglers alike have all asked me the same question: Why is Perry's record so important?

It's a good and fair question, and it's the underlying premise behind Sowbelly. Unbeknownst to the humble Perry, who died in a plane wreck in 1974, his fish has had a strange effect on a handful of modern anglers across this country and the world. It's turned them into record-chasers, men and women who have distilled their lives down to one single act: breaking the world record for largemouth bass.

In Sowbelly, I chronicled the lives of various bass anglers who had given up their time, money and families in pursuit of Perry's record. The urge to catch the biggest bass in the lake is present in all of us whenever we fish – it's human nature. But these guys have taken this desire to new heights.

The LAPD motorcycle cop, Bob Crupi, fished for the record for nearly 15 years. When his biggest bass – the one he was sure would be the record-topper – came up 4 ounces short, he basically quit, embittered by the fact that he had worked so hard for so long and came so close, but ultimately could do no better.

Mike Long and Jed Dickerson have turned the pursuit of the world's largest bass in San Diego into a turf war. Like two great tennis players, they volley back and forth, one-upping each other's best shots in a match that seems long from over.

And Porter Hall, the Alabaman, has perhaps lost the most in his quest. Like an alcoholic, he's unable to shake his desire to break the world record, even though it has ultimately cost him the family he so clearly loves and misses. Now he's hunkered down in Mississippi, patiently waiting for the well-fed bass in his pond to grow to world-record size – bass fishing's Don Quixote.

All of the characters I profiled in Sowbelly are haunted by Perry's fish, united in a subculture that seems uniquely American, with its blend of myth, ambition, optimism, technology and competition. A subculture that has, at times, the languid feel of baseball, the spontaneity of jazz, the ruthlessness of the high halls of capitalism and even a dash of corruption that seems to seep into anything that really matters to anyone.

Which brings me back to the question of why this record has become so important.

On the first leg of my book tour, in the town of Augusta, Georgia, a woman named Melissa Calvert handed me a copy of Sowbelly to sign and said: "I'm buying this for my dad for Father's Day because he always wanted to know if Perry actually caught that fish." Melissa's question is another that I've been asked countless times. It's a fair one to ask, to be sure. After Perry caught his fish, he had it weighed and measured in a country store, then he did what most anglers in 1932 would have done.

He took it home and ate it.

There are no surviving eyewitnesses to his catch, no photo of the fish and no mount. For that reason, many people doubt that it ever existed.

I think this is one of the things that makes Perry's record something to be celebrated. In this day and age, where facts can be found in seconds at the brush of a keystroke, Perry's fish remains a mystery. Its existence relies on something that every fisherman has in abundance: Faith. I like that.

Perry's fish also represents something else that's important to us, now as much as it ever was: A democratic ideal. His story – a poor farmer fishing for food at the depth of the Great Depression with no intent of catching the world-record bass – tells us that things like this can happen to anyone.

While you or I will never break baseball's single-season homerun record, we could catch the world-record bass. For that matter, an 8-year-old boy or girl on his or her first fishing trip could accomplish the feat. (This is the fact that drives the record-chasers I profiled in Sowbelly crazy. All that time, all that effort, gone to waste.)

The longevity of the record is also pretty special. Despite our advances in technology – graphite rods, Spiderwire line, fish finders – it holds on, though its demise has been predicted for almost 7 decades.

During the research for my book, I ran across Black Bass Lore, a tome published 5 years after Perry's catch in 1937 by a bass fishing nut named Wallace Gallaher. In the preface of his book, Gallaher wrote: "The world record for bass will most likely fall this year."

I didn't make that prediction in the preface of Sowbelly. But the truth is that we should celebrate Perry's 73 year-old record because you never know, the record might fall this year.

Or it might not.

(Editor's note: To order Sowbelly: The Obsessive Quest for the World Record Largemouth Bass, click here to visit the BassFan Store.)