My friends and I like to have "spirited" discussions about music. We talk about the stuff we all like, the stuff that some of us like and others of us think stinks, and invariably end up at the same point: current music is bad.

Not all current music, of course, but we're rock fans and I challenge anyone out there to point out a current equivalent of The Beatles, the Stones, Led Zep, The Who, Hendrix, Skynyrd, Bad Company, KISS (yeah!), AC/DC, Van Halen or even Metallica, Nirvana or Rage Against the Machine, to name a few path-breaking bands that cover the last 4 decades or so.

(What does this have to do with bass fishing? There's a connection down below.)

Obviously, this 40-year-old guy with a 20-year-old brain is dating himself, and I'm cool with that. As an old guit-box player, I can nail any riff on the radio now in 30 seconds or less. A Van Halen riff or Jimi noise can still take a week even though I've been listening to those same riffs and noises for about 25 years.

So what happened to music? You know the answer: big business.

In the beginning it was all about talent. All of the musicians in those '60s and early '70s bands were great. They had to be, or no deal. And the fans usually had a say in whether these bands succeeded because bands weren't signed sight unseen (or "created" for marketing) like they are now. They were signed after people liked them already.

Now it's all about copying what the other company is doing, and saturating the airwaves with interchangeable limited- or no-talent singers and players who have the right "look," or whatever.

You get where I'm going. So I'll leave the music scene there and head to...

Kids Sports

(How's that for a segue?)

My kids are still real young, so they haven't been exposed to the ultra-organized world of hyper-competitive kids' sports yet. Anyone with kids out there knows what I'm talking about.

When we were kids, we showed up in whatever we had, to play whatever game was in season. Even in "leagues," it was lucky if we had uniforms that matched. Not that they didn't give them to us (shirts, anyway). We just trashed them during the week, and some moms couldn't bear to see their kids play again in such dirty stuff.



And who cared? No one. It was about the game and having fun.

This weekend I was listening to a buddy talk about his 9-year-old son, who happens to be a good soccer player. He plays on a state-level team for his age, has tons of practices and games, and it's not cheap. I think it was like $500 or $800 a season, and that's just to be on the team. After that you can add in travel costs, food and all that.

These leagues also have rules that apply to the players' parents, some of whom apparently can't resist cursing out 14-year-old referees with four-letter words. If that ever happened when I was a kid, that parent would've been taken to task by his (or her) kid, and would've been thought of as a lunatic by the other parents.

Our parents wanted to be dignified, and just wanted their kids to have fun. Of course they wanted us to win and – here's the counter-intuitive part – they would tell us firmly when they thought we collectively or individually had a bad game. A minute or two of that was all we needed to get the message.

But now, for all the parental yelling and screaming, the kid is either badgered like heck by his (or her) results-obsessed parents, or the parents make excuses for him.

Hey, for what it's worth: shut up and let the kids play.

I digress.

I started to wonder, especially after seeing our World Cup team get their butts handed to them in Germany this summer: Are all our best players in the system? I mean, alumni from my high school could literally have played better than the U.S. team did.

And on the 9-year-old level, no disrespect to the kids' ability, but are those really the best 9-year-olds? Or are those just the best 9-year-olds whose parents want to spend the money and take the trouble to send their kids all over the place to play soccer?

Which brings me to...

Bass Fishing

Does any of that remind you of the current state of pro-level bass fishing?

When I think of the Beatles and Led Zep in bass fishing, I think of guys with names that ring in your brain, like Clunn, Brauer, Nixon (Bee Branch, Arkansas!), Cochran and even guys who have retired, like Murray, Martin, Green and others. That's not a complete list, but you get my drift.

When I think of kids soccer, I wonder what Clunns, Nixons and Brauers our sport is missing because poor country kids who can catch fish out of a bathtub can't pony up $4,000 and $5,000 entry fees.

I've said here before that high entry fees in this sport have created an environment where it's not necessarily how good you are, but how much you can afford. For our sport, which will ALWAYS be about its roots, that's sad.

Now, I want to qualify that with this statement: There's no way I personally could ever hold a candle fishing-wise to any of the guys fishing now, so I don't mean to insult them at all. Certainly most of them have the ability, and a few will be the new Clunns, etc. of our sport.

But I often wonder: Who are we missing? Who's not fishing the top level right now purely because of the cost involved, but who might be someone who becomes a household name in bass fishing?

To switch that around, if guys like Larry Nixon (fishing guide), Denny Brauer (bricklayer) and George Cochran (railroad worker) were coming into it now, would they be able to afford it? (Rick Clunn was a computer/systems guy, so he might have made enough since computers are big now.)

And to take it in a little bit different direction, if what's driving the higher entry fees (and presumably higher costs to sponsors) – in other words, the current big-business approach to bass fishing – is all the flash (huge weigh-ins, fancy TV, etc.), do we really need it?

Is that "flash" cool? Yeah, some of it. Does it make it more fun to be a BassFan? Same answer: some of it.

But I don't care what anyone says, even with TV personalities like Ray Scott, Bob Cobb, Tommy Sanders and Mark Zona (I hate to lump Ray in there because he's our godfather, but you get what I mean); even with helicopters with cameras in them; even with fishermen and their boats plastered with logos like billboards; this still is all about the fishermen.

The fishermen are the "content" that makes the rest possible. So now, while planning is going on for next season, I hope the powers that be (BASS and FLW) make it easier for these folks to participate – not tougher, as has been the case in the last 5 years or so.

Maybe I'm alone in feeling that way, but you can't convince me otherwise.