Preface

The Optimists

In the spring of 2003, I approached my editor at Forbes magazine with a story idea about the chase for the world-record largemouth bass. It wasn’t immediately an easy sell. I wasn’t going to uncover some seedy corporate scandal or analyze some brilliant new marketing scheme. And the somewhat obscure endeavor of a few obsessive fishermen surely wouldn't move any markets. But the chase had all of the elements of a good story, so I gave it a shot anyway. I pitched it like this: A collection of very dedicated people—entrepreneurs, really—are actively pursuing a lofty goal, using their wits and an incredible amount of hard work. At stake was the possibility of great triumph, as well as the risk of utter failure. The plot thickened with the colorful, mysterious, and daunting history that had to be overcome. It helped, too, that at the time an $8 million bounty lay on the head of the world-record bass—money put up by a Tampa, Florida, outfit run by a used-car salesman and a real-estate developer.

I’ll admit that I had more than a little self-interest in this story. I have been a fisherman all my life. I grew up in the American South, in North Carolina and Alabama, where fishing for largemouth bass is both a predominant pastime and an industry like, say, skiing in Austria or window shopping in New York City, where I live now. In North Carolina my family lived on a farm. Behind the house, down a gentle slope of horse pasture, lay a blackwater pond full of plucky bass. After my father, Donald, patiently taught me how to fish, I spent an inordinate amount of time tossing lures into its dark water, sometimes even hooking into a wriggling, green-sided largemouth bass. One summer I used a miniature remote-control boat—outrigged with a 6-inch rod tip, 4 feet of monofilament line, and a spinning lure—to troll the pond. I hooked and fought bass from a lawn chair on the shore.

When my father died of cancer in 1989, we moved to Alabama to be closer to my mother's family. I was seventeen years old, an awkward and self-conscious teenager, devastated by my father' death. Fishing was one of the few things that I believed I did well—largely thanks to my father—so I did it often. Luckily for me, my grandfather, whom we called Toots, had a bass lake in Alabama that was just a twenty-minute drive from our new house in Birmingham. He named the lake Tadpole. I fished that lake nearly every day during my last summer before college, and it became a bridge that connected my past with my future.

And I haven't stopped since. Fishing—especially for largemouth bass—was just something you did in our family, a stubborn stain on our genetic code that, like freckles, hasn't been scrubbed out through subsequent generations, though it missed a few of us. Neither my mother nor my youngest brother cares much for the sport. But for me, as it had been for my father and grandfather, fishing was a necessity, though why I love it and continue to pursue it with such passion is as mysterious and beguiling as the black water in that North Carolina farm pond.

So I thought that maybe by hanging out with these world-record-bass chasers—even though they obviously had taken what was for me merely a passion to the much higher level of obsession—I could shed some light on this mystery of mine. My inquiry, I believed, was perhaps similar to the way a pathologist studies the brain of a madman to determine the roots of lesser mental illnesses.

I didn't tell my editor any of this. But I did say that all fishermen, every time they cast a lure, dreamt of catching the biggest fish. And the world-record bass was, for reasons both mythical and absolute, the most sought-after prize of them all. I thought, however quirky, that this was a story the readers of the magazine would enjoy. My editor leaned back in his chair in an office that overlooked Fifth Avenue and thoughtfully rubbed his goateed chin as the idea dangled in front of him. Then he bit.

The article was published in Forbes in the summer of 2003, my contribution to the canon of fish tales. But something happened during the research and writing of that piece: I found myself falling in love with the stories of this small group of individuals who have distilled what they want out of life to the single act of catching the world-record bass. The result of that love is this book. The stories within, I believe, are more than just tales of catching fish. They are about what we humans will do, what we will gain, and what we are willing to sacrifice, in attempting to reach a goal. They are stories about life.

And one story gave birth to all the others included here.

On the rainy morning of June 2, 1932, a poor twenty-year-old farmer from Telfair County, Georgia, decided it was too wet to plow his fields, so he went fishing. A few hours later on Montgomery Lake, an oxbow of the Ocmulgee River, George Washington Perry caught and kept a 22-pound, 4-ounce largemouth bass—the largest ever landed in recorded history. We know very little about George Perry and his fish. None of the eyewitnesses to his catch are alive today, and only a few stories published about his fish actually use Perry as a primary source. As such, plenty of people doubt that the event ever really took place. Yet the International Game Fish Association (IGFA), the keeper of all fishing records, still recognizes Perry's bass as the world record to this day, and it is notable as much for its staying power as for the mysterious circumstances under which it occurred.

Perry's story is also the element that bonds together the rest of the characters in this book, all of whom I spent a year traveling the United States and beyond tracking down. Their stories make up the strange and lively tale of the chase for the new world-record largemouth bass, that mythical, as-yet-uncaught fish that some of its more fervent pursuers have affectionately dubbed “Sowbelly,” for the swinelike girth it will most certainly possess. I started in California, wended my way through Texas to rural southern outposts in Mississippi and Georgia, and even traveled to the forbidden island of Cuba. I interviewed historians, biologists, con artists, detectives, and fed-up spouses. I fished with some of the best big-bass anglers alive. Along the way, I met a taciturn LAPD motorcycle cop named Bob Crupi who came within a hairbreadth of besting George Perry's record and finally exorcising the demons that lie buried deep within his soul. I hung out with Mike Long and Jed Dickerson, the de facto heads of two competing fishing posses, whose increasingly tense turf battles take place in suburban San Diego on a tiny lake that harbors enormous bass. I visited Bill Baab, the world's leading authority on the story of George Perry's fish, and the story's most tenacious guardian.

In Texas, I met biologist Allen Forshage, the head architect of that big-thinking state's complex and very expensive plan to grow the next world-record bass in a laboratory. I spent a week in a shack with Porter Hall, an Alabaman who has lost his marriage and daughter in his thus-far futile pursuit of the world record, but who believes he's finally found the magic bullet: to grow the damn thing himself in his private pond in Mississippi. I contacted fame-seeking con artists who were caught with lead weight stuffed into the bellies of their bass. And in Cuba, I spent time with the thoughtful Samuel Yera, for whom the chase lives most vividly in his curious mind.

Each of these characters had one thing in common: They were all chasing the ghost of George Washington Perry.

George Perry lived in a more innocent time, before our age of technology and stringent rules and media consciousness made records the objects of ravenous desire. His fish remains an anomaly in our modern era, which is remarkable for its unsentimental attack on records of all kinds. Whether it's from improved fitness, advanced technology, illegal supplements—or some potent combination of the three—the significant feats of the past continue to fall. Roger Bannister's 3:59-minute-mile mark has been lowered by 16 seconds since 1954. Bob Beamon's historic long jump stood for twenty-three years until Mike Powell bettered it by two inches in 1991. In baseball, Lou Gehrig's consecutive game streak set in 1939 was broken fifty-six years later by Cal Ripken, Jr., and Roger Maris's 1961 single-season home-run record has been twice topped, first by Mark McGwire in 1998, then again three years later by Barry Bonds. Even important fishing records, like those for brown trout (1992) and Pacific Blue Marlin (1993), to name just two species, have fallen. Part of the hubris of our age is the belief that we can always do things better than we once did. But Perry's record, almost three-quarters of a century later, remains unbroken.

In order to qualify for an all-tackle (using up to a 130-pound test line) world-record catch today, fishermen must go through a some-what tedious process. The IGFA requires the following: that the fish is weighed on an IGFA-certified scale in front of witnesses who must be shown the actual tackle used to catch the fish; that the fish is 2 ounces heavier than the previous record; and that the angler mail in a photograph showing the fish, the tackle, the scale, and the angler with the fish. For the more important records, like the largemouth bass, the IGFA reserves the right to administer a polygraph exam. The certification process is not fail-safe, which has compelled more than a few to try to cheat it. But in general, it weeds out the imposters. In January 2004, a controversial pending world-record bass caught by a woman named Leaha Trew (whom you'll meet later in the book) was thrown out for not meeting the standards.

The irony, of course, is that Perry's fish would have never qualified today. Neither a photograph nor a mount of his fish exists. No one knows for sure the make of the rod and reel he used to catch it. And no one ever subjected him to a polygraph test. Perry did nothing more than weigh the fish on a postal scale in front of a few witnesses and send the measurements in to a Field & Stream magazine fishing contest.

Then he took the bass home and ate it.

His nonchalance was completely understandable: In 1932, the record was no big deal. His bass wasn't officially recognized as the world record until two years later, and only became the IGFA's standard when Field & Stream's records were transferred to that organization in the 1940s. The conspiracy theorists have always debated the authenticity of Perry's catch, a din that only grew louder when he died in a plane crash in 1974, taking all of the secrets of the world's most hallowed fishing record with him to the grave.

But since 1932, the importance of the record has grown immensely, corresponding with the incredible rise in popularity in the United States of the largemouth bass, which has unequivocally become America's fish. How and where to catch the next world record has been a perennial favorite story of the nation's outdoor periodicals like Field & Stream, Bassmaster, Outdoor Life, and Sports Afield since the 1970s. And the heightening fixation on the record has had a strange effect on a handful of bass fishermen: It has turned them into record chasers, individuals who play out their passion in relative obscurity, known primarily only to others who are in pursuit of the same scaly grail, on the lunatic fringe of the $12-billion bass industry.

The true record chasers have no rabid fans cheering them on, no million-dollar national tournament tours to compete in, no television shows to host, no lucrative sponsorship deals to sign. And as four notable modern anglers—Bob Crupi, Mike Long, Jed Dickerson, and Porter Hall—know all too well, unless you break the 22-pound, 4-ounce mark, you earn no riches. And even that money exists more in the theoretical realm than the actual one. The outdoor press often repeats that the angler who breaks the record will reap at least $1 million in endorsement money, but not if that angler happens to be using the wrong rod or reel, or the tackle companies deem him not marketable. Every so often, a magazine will put up prize money, but it's usually closer to $10,000 than $1 million. The Big Bass Record Club was offering $8 million to any member of its organization who caught the biggest bass in the world, but it folded in 2003 due to a lack of new members and the untenable burden of heavy insurance premiums.

That's not to say that fame and money can't be made in bass fishing. Denny Brauer, a tournament angler from Missouri, appeared on a Wheaties box in 1998 and has made almost $2 million in career tour earnings and another $1 million in endorsements. Together the CITGO Bassmaster and the Wal-Mart FLW tours have minted a dozen millionaires, and enabled another five hundred or so anglers to make bass fishing a full-time career. And then there are television personalities like Roland Martin, who can be found five days a week on the Outdoor Life Network kissing bass before he drops them back into the water, his hair bleached blond from the hours in the sun and his shirt festooned with as many sponsorship patches as a NASCAR driver's Nomex suit. Even a hybrid of the two types of bass celebrity has been created. In 2004, a bass tournament angler was featured on the reality show, The Bachelor. Plenty of individuals have become famous and made very comfortable livelihoods from simply catching bass. But no one has ever made a living from pursuing the world record (though some, as you'll see, have spent a fortune in doing so). And what's ironic to record chasers is this: Most of the fish these famous bassers catch are . . . well . . . small.

There's a reason for that. Truly huge bass are extremely rare. Lets say, for argument's sake, that the 11 million frequent bass anglers in the United States each catch five bass a year (a gross undercalculation that doesn't take into account bass anglers in other nations or the tens of millions of bass caught by the 33 million other freshwater anglers in the United States). Most of these bass will weigh between 2 and 3 pounds. In 2003, there was one bass caught in the world that was officially 20 pounds or more, one of only twelve such fish on record since 1923. That means, at the very best, your annual chance of catching a 20-pounder in the United States alone is 1 in 55 million. That's what statisticians call an outlier. You are far more likely to be struck by lightning or become a U.S. Senator than catch a 20-pound bass. There just aren't that many around.

But fishermen in general rely on an almost theological faith—“Faith that the water that you are fishing has got fish in it, and that you are going to catch one of them,” as the novelist and noted fishing bum William Humphrey once wrote. Fishing is the sport of optimists. Every cast into the unknown water world is merely an expression of that optimism, and thus no guarantee of some connection with another living being. The world-record chasers have taken this faith a step even further. They are perhaps the fishing world's biggest optimists in pursuit of a bass that, statistically speaking, may not even exist. Each of these anglers believes somewhere deep down that catching the world's biggest largemouth bass will get him or her something—personally, financially ... each has his or her own reason.

And to get there, they've each turned this pursuit into an obsession. Susan Orlean wrote in The Orchid Thief that once people become adults, they view obsessions about seemingly inconsequential things—like flowers or big bass—as a bit naïve. But very rarely in this world does someone achieve the absolute pinnacle of his or her profession without some sort of obsession. For these record chasers, that fixation has manifested itself in various ways. Some things have been irretrievably lost: Edenic innocence and purity and even the enjoyment of a sport that most fell in love with as children. But others have been gained: notoriety among peers, a profound faith in the unknowable and, perhaps most significantly, a sense of purpose in an otherwise chaotic world.

But here's one thing that gnaws at the gut of each and every one of these record chasers: Anyone could break it. Whereas you or I will never top the single-season home-run record in baseball, we could land the next world-record bass. An eight-year-old on his or her first fishing trip is just as likely to pull off the feat as someone who has spent a lifetime on the chase.

And yet this dedicated collection of individuals persists— casting, retrieving, and hoping for that one fish.

The question is, Why?

Reprinted from Sowbelly by Monte Burke by permission of Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright © 2005 by Monte Burke. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission.