Amidst all of the acrimony and complaining about the state of professional bass fishing, I’d like to inject my once-a-decade ray of sunshine. We have the path forward, a model for what things could be, and I was there. 

In 2008, at Lake Fork, the anglers gathered for the second Toyota Texas Bass Classic. It was a team tournament, with four-man teams alternating pairs on the water. During intermissions, they worked on strategy. Meanwhile, writers like me gorged on barbecue and cobbler. There were concerts at night, featuring the likes of Trace Adkins. The whole thing was aimed at selling more Toyota trucks.

None of those specifics need to be rehashed. You could have a different tournament format, a different venue, and different nightly performers (please keep the dessert the same). What needs to be repeated, however, is the attitude of the anglers. Even those who were struggling in the tournament, and perhaps in their careers, were happy to be there. They were smiling. They were all pulling the rope in the same direction.

It's not like it was the world’s greatest time to be an angler. We were still technically in a bubble, but Lehman Brothers would fall just a few months later. The economics may have been vastly different a year later, but even more crippling was the fact that the Professional Anglers Association had started to splinter. The smiles were gone. The rope that they’d been pulling in the same direction was frayed. 

While I still believe that there are too many tours to make professional fishing a consistently viable profession for more than a few anglers, the bigger problem is that the anglers have never joined together like that again. They’ve never used their collective power to move the sport – and themselves – forward. Instead, we have 300 individual entities only able to focus on short-term interests. I sincerely hope that there will be some person, some organization, or some event (like the TTBC) that provides the impetus to move forward as a whole. Those who were there at the TTBC should recall how good it felt, and do what it takes to make that happen again – and then keep it going.