Last night, while talking to erstwhile Bass Fishing Archives founder Terry Battisti, he asked me a question that stopped me in my tracks: What happened to the Mike Long scandal?
Battisti, who for many years was heavily wired into the west coast scene, and was one of the first to write about topics like swimbaits and dropshotting, had occasionally worked with Long, but life’s vagaries had forced him to away from the front lines. Kellen Ellis had published his expose of Long’s “tactics” on June 24th, and for a while it was the talk of the bass world. Among other places, the story was recounted in Bassmaster magazine. I’m only-half surprised that it wasn’t featured on “60 Minutes.”
As with many other things, the hubbub died down. A quick Google search that Bassmaster published “America’s big bass guru exposed” on December 7th, but that was merely a reprint of the article that had been in the magazine a few months earlier.
No new reporting from anywhere, as far as Battisti (or I) could tell.
We’d picked over the carcass like jackals and moved on to the next controversy or hot topic.
Seven months after he was first exposed, Long appeared to be in the witness protection program with a media blackout on what had happened. The case was effectively closed. Like Tony Christian, Nate Wellman and other purported ne’er-do-wells who were once above the fold on page one, now they were just footnotes. That, I suppose, is partially the result of our short news cycle, and partially the result of our short memories.
What I can’t decide is whether allowing those scandals to fade away is a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand, the world at large likely thinks of us all as cheaters and fibbers anyway, so why enhance that belief? On the other hand, I have a sneaking suspicion that allowing the real cheats to rapidly slink away enables the next scandal to arise more quickly.
Mike Long is still out there. He lives in a small community and he has a distinctive appearance. I can’t see how he really would’ve gone into our version of the witness protection program. If you wanted to find him, you could. To be sure, I am NOT encouraging vigilante justice, I just think we need to find the right way to remember.
