As I write this, my friend Terry Battisti – who wrote for Yamamoto before I did, and was actually the one who recommended me to the then-powers-in-charge – is waging a tough war on behalf of bass fishing. Through his website The Bass Fishing Archives he’s trying to preserve and promote the sport’s history, with little budget and little support, just a lot of elbow grease and “want to” and a partnership with the Bass Fishing Hall of Fame (as well as writer Brian Waldman, who does a yeoman’s job, too). It’s an uphill climb, because the subjects of his research are gradually going away: Ray Scott’s death this week reminded me of that, but we’ve also lost Lonnie Stanley, Forrest Wood, Aaron Martens and others in the not-too-distant past.

We have short memories in the fishing world. You have to if you’re going to be good out on the water – you need to know why you failed, but quickly get over the fact that you just watched the fish of a lifetime sink away. I’d wager that more fish freaks under 25 know of the accomplishments of Jacob Wheeler and the Googans than are aware of all that Denny Brauer achieved.

Despite the fact that BASS and others make an effort to celebrate the sport’s past, most anglers are more concerned with how they’re going to catch their next fish than how someone else caught them 30 years ago. Accordingly, content gets produced to fill those customer needs, so we can’t really blame even avid young anglers for not being able to recognize names like Robert Hamilton Jr. or Stanley Mitchell or Ron Shuffield (except, in the last case, possibly as Spencer’s dad). It reminds me of the Mitch Hedberg joke: “This one commercial said, ‘Forget everything you know about slipcovers.’ So I did, and it was a load off of my mind. Then the commercial tried to sell slipcovers, but I didn’t know what they were!”

The goal of most fishing media is to educate, but only if it makes a profit. They magazine and website owners have to pay for bandwidth and writers and other overhead. Terry, unless he has some nefarious plan to go viral with a tale of the 1976 Classic, doesn’t have that as his primary goal. No one would blame him if he were to find a way to monetize it, but as of now he’s putting in tons of hours as a labor of love. I know that he loves the process and the information-gathering as much as I do, but with a 3 year-old and a demanding job, he doesn’t need to spend his free time poring through old issues of Fishing Facts if it’s not benefitting him somehow. Go click on the site – www.bass-archives.com – and send him some stories, pen a comment or recommend it to a friend. There’s some great information about Yamamoto there, too. Yes, you can have success with a Senko or a Hula Grub if you don’t know where it came from, but as Mark Twain reputedly said: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”