More: Bassin’ Athletes, Is It a Sport

To follow up on my post yesterday about whether bassin’ pros are athletes, two more thoughts.

First one is this, which may be a) an argument that pro bassers aren’t athletes and b) the real reason Bill Dance retired from competitive fishing…..

Dude is a walking blooper, never gets old. After watching that, not sure I’d want to trade places with Jerry McKinnis in that BASS Legends tourney….

Sport?

Moving on to the larger question of whether bassin’ is a “sport” in some generally accepted sense, I give you this example:

“Tomorrow, I could have some real problems,” he said. “I know if I can get in there, I can win this. But I’m not going to have a partner tomorrow, and I don’t think I can push-pole the boat myself. Also, I don’t think the (FSN) camera boats can get in there either (a requirement per tournament rules), so I’m probably not going to be able to fish that spot unless the water rises.”

[And if the water doesn’t rise?] “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said. “I’ve been going there every day, so I’m not really sure what’s been going on in the main lake. I could easily zero tomorrow. The water level – that’s clearly going to be key.”

That was Jay Yelas talking before the final day of a 2007 FLW Series tourney at Havasu. He was fishing a backwater, and was in 3rd going into the final day. Don’t know exactly what happened on day 4, but the water dropped, he didn’t get into his backwater spot, ended up 6th.

Now, Jay might’ve lost access to his fish entirely because of the water level or maybe it was that plus the camera boat rule. And I guess you could argue that he knew the rule going in so why fish that area in the first place. But I ask you this:

What other “real” sport would have a rule like that? Easy: none.

In this case, if certain waters might be unreachable for camera boats, then those waters should be off limits during the tourney. Otherwise, imo, it’s BS. Let the guys fish where they want every day, period.

That’s so elementary I can’t even believe I’m writing about it.

There’s a lot more to say about whether bassin’ or many other sports are “real” sports, but happened to run across that one recently….