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FHM
May 2005
BASSGASM
The New King of Bass Fishing Blows His Load Deep in the Dirty South
By Andrew Vontz
A smoke machine billows thick white clouds throughout North Carolina's Charlotte Coliseum, while blue spotlights sparkle on the arena floor, which has been decorated to look like a lake. In the center stands an enormous stage that's shaped like a fish, and on it dances a man dressed in a giant, plush bass costume wearing a fishing jersey and angler’s cap.
Behold the CITGO Bassmaster Classic, a three-day event known to the 8.7 million people who will tune into coverage on ESPN2 as the Superbowl of bass fishing. After eight hours of casting on nearby Lake Wylie, the nation’s 50 top anglers show up at the arena and weigh their catch in front this crowd of 5,100 fans. And the reigning champ, Mike Iaconelli, is about to take center stage.
Mike Ike, as he's known to his fans, ushered in a glorious new era in bass history at the 2003 Classic when, after his first weigh-in, he threw a piece of cardboard down on the stage and began break dancing. He is also known for pumping his fist and screaming at his on-boat cameraman whenever he pulls in a big catch. His devotion to bass is such that he even has a large mouth tattooed on his shoulder. He is, without a doubt, the reigning bad boy of fishing. For what that’s worth.
A Rocky-style training montage of the 32-year-old Iaconelli pumping iron in the gym plays on the Jumbotron. The crowd goes nuts banging together noise makers, provided courtesy of Mercury Motors. “Yeah, bring it on!” a man in boot cut jeans shouts as he leaps to his feet, his brushy mustache twitching with excitement beneath the brim of his Bass pro shop trucker cap. Beside him a fine young thing in a crop top shakes a sign that says "Mike Is My Pimp," and a group of cheerleaders in blue outfits bearing the Yamaha logo jerk their pom-poms and chant Mike’s name.
Then a Toyota Tundra slips through the fog onto the arena floor. The truck is towing a bass boat towards the stage. On that boat stands Mike Ike, fist raised in triumph. He grabs a mesh sack of flopping live fish from the boat’s cooler and hooks his finger in the mouth of a 7 pound 4 ounce bass that’s as long as his arm, and holds up the spasming creature for the crowd.
Onstage Ike let’s out a war cry and dumps his fish into a plexiglass box where they are weighed by the event's emcee, a man named--no lie--Fish Fishburne. The Jumbotron lights up with the combined weight of Ike's catches--15 pounds 15 ounces! The cheerleader’s pom-poms bustle furiously. “I love you Mike!” screams the girl with the sign. The entire arena erupts into a powerful bassgasm.
All of this, over fishing.
At 6 a.m. the next morning, hundreds of spectators line the banks of Lake Wylie just to watch the fishermen and their ESPN cameraman hop onto their boats and tear off for the second day of Classic competition. Fishing's the one professional sport that takes place in public areas—this weekend’s field of competition, aka the lake, takes up 27 square miles—and there's nothing to stop spectators from hopping in their own boats and following a favorite angler. In fact, GPS tracking lets fans find locate each fisherman via the internet. As the anglers roar out across the water at 70 mph, a Mad Max-like flotilla of spectator boats follow in their wake. Nursing domestic brews camouflaged in foam cozies and sporting tribal tattoos, flip flops, trucker caps, and t-shirts from their favorite bait manufacturers wrapped over protuberant bellies, these are men who’ll be spending their day sitting in their boat, doing nothing but watching other men fish.
"Just like how NASCAR guys like watching the car go around and around in a circle, if you love fish, you love watching guys fish," says Luke Dunkin, a squat 21-year-old aspiring pro angler in a Ranger Boats jersey festooned with patches that looks a lot like the top of a race car driver’s jumpsuit. Dunkin has made has made the trek from Lawrenceburg, TN to see the classic in person. With 50 million anglers in the US, that’s a massive potential fan base for the sport to draw from.
“You wanna come see the Classic because you kinda imagine yourself in it somehow,” says Bradley Stephens, a 21-year-old fisherman from Universal Springs, KY in jeans and a flannel shirt in spite of the oppressive humidity and heat of this sizzling summer afternoon.
Though they’re both young fans, Dunkin and Stephens take divergent views on the image makeover their sport is currently undergoing, a makeover best personified by Mike Iaconelli. "Mike Ike brings a new intensity to the sport,” says Dunkin. “He puts the gills in your face and screams."
“Iaconelli’s a lunatic,” says Stephens. “It may just be the way I was brought up, but I think there are certain ways you should handle yourself. When you catch a 2-pound fish and you do cartwheels and dance around, I don’t understand that. I’ve caught a 2-pound fish and I just look him over and throw him back in.”
Despite his detractors—and the fact that he’s a full one-and-a-half pounds behind Takamori Omori, a shy Japanese angler who leads the field after day one—Ike has the largest swarm of spectators surrounding him. And today Mike Ike doesn’t disappoint the more than 70 boats full of fans out on the water as he jumps around the prow of his boat working his rod with the mastery of Zamphir tooting on a pan flute. "When I got started, there were no personalities," says Ike, who went pro full time in 1999. "There was also a certain pressure to conform to what everyone else did, said and looked like. But then after I started establishing myself in the sport, I could let loose and be myself. I love to fish and I’m not going to be afraid to get excited."
As luck would have it, ESPN took over coverage of the sport and bought the BASS organization in 2001. Their desire to find a bankable breakout star coincided perfectly with Iaconelli's rise. "When Iaconelli won the Classic in 2003 it was a breakthrough," says Dean Kessel, the BASS organization's marketing mastermind. "You saw him on SportsCenter, Pardon the Interuption, the NBC Nightly News. There are stereotypes about the typical bass angler—the Bubba mentality. But here’s a 30-year-old guy from New Jersey, who has tattoos and breakdances. Some of the people who are part of our core audience didn’t really like Mike. They thought he was a little brash. But I tell you what—we love him. He’s exactly the kind of guy people gravitate to."
Thanks in large part to the attention Ike drew in 2003, ratings for day one of the 2004 Classic saw ratings spike 59 percent among men aged 18 to 34.
“We have groupies now, which is a shock for us,” says Ike. “We never saw it in this sport before. When the girl wants an autograph and she wants you to sign her stomach, not her book, you’re like, ‘wow.’”
And just as the degree of adulation has increased among hard core fans, the degree of scorn from the unitiatied has seen a pleasurable decrease. “Ten years ago, if you said you were a professional bass fisherman, people would fucking laugh you out of the bar,” Iaconelli says. “At least now you can have a conversation with someone and they will say, ‘That’s kinda cool.’”
The crowd of thousands at the weigh-in is more pumped up than a phalanx of Big Foot fans at a monster truck rally. They bang together their noisemakers and stomp their feet as they marvel at the size of their heroes’ loads. “Does anyone in here speak Japanese?” Fish Fishburne pleads with the crowd. Takamori, the shy Japanese angler who had lead the weigh-in after day one, has taken the stage, and, judging by his bulging fish sack, he’s once again kicked ass. A quick check of the scales confirms that he will have the lead going into the third and final day. His spotty English makes it hard to tell exactly how he feels about his accomplishment. Still, he’s so happy he seems about to cry.
When Takamori, who’s known as Tak among the fishermen, moved to America in 1992 to become a pro angler he didn’t speak English, didn’t know a soul, lived out of his car and worked as a dishwasher. Now he’s at the top of the bass game. “I caught my first bass when I was 15, when I was in high school,” says Tak after departing the stage. “I had a dream and saved money any way I can to buy boat and fish in tournament. I save all of my money for two years to go to America to go for dream. I don’t speak no English, no friends, but I just had in my mind that I want to fish Classic. I was living in back of car six months to go to tournaments. I cannot get job because back then I do not have visa to work.” It’s the kind of story ESPN execs salivate over—if only its owner was better able to articulate it.
As for Mike Ike, he finishes day two with only one dinky one pound, six ounce bass, and even that was later disqualified because he had accidentally caught it in an out-of-bounds area. But that doesn’t stop him from working the crowd. “Wassup!” he yells paying homage to the Budweiser commercial greeting that was all the rage in cubicles across America four years ago as he takes the stage, a joke that brings the house down. He has scant bass to offer the crowd, but every angler enjoys a story of hard luck on the high seas—or local lake—and the one that got away.
"Not just myself, but other young anglers have grown up watching ESPN, and we've developed our own personas and ways to celebrate like athletes do in other sports,” Ike had explained earlier. “The bottom line is, ESPN is very smart and they know how to market a sport. Every sport has to be an entertainment sport--people want to be entertained. And I think a lot of guys are starting to realize that."
Iaconelli's no fool, before becoming a full time angler he worked in advertising, so he knows how to market himself. "Early on I knew that being different—being younger and from the Northeast, was going to help me,” he says. “Right off the bat it hit me like a ton of bricks, this is an advantage that I needed to use.”
In many ways the young anglers and ESPN have developed a symbiotic relationship—their popularity feeding off each other. “The goal is to give these guys a platform in which to showcase not only their talent but their personalities as well,” says Kessel. “And that will build the sport in general."
And on the days that you didn’t catch any fish, personality’s all you’ve got. “I feel like shit because I sucked ass fishing today,” he says backstage. But, for the spectators that’s part of the enjoyment of bass fishing—their heroes are human. Every angler has spent a day on the water with nothing to show for it and it unifies the brotherhood of the rod when a world champion doesn’t reel in squat on a bad day. “I sucked ass out there in the water,” says Ike backstage. “I made two thousand seven hundred casts and just didn’t catch any bass.”
When Mike Ike pulls off into Lake Wylie at 6 am the next morning for the last day of tournament fishing, the fact that he has virtually no chance of still winning the Classic barely affects the number of boats tailing him. Nor does it affect the energy with which he attacks the day’s work.
Settling into a heavily wooded area along a remote area of shore near a power plant that dumps warm water into the lake, he tries to work the magic that took him to the top of the podium, and indeed the world of bass fishing, at the 2003 Classic. Temperature, time of day, light conditions, boat activity, water visibility, availability of food, and the spawning patterns of other fish makes catching bass an infinitely variable equation that’s difficult to crack. But Ike’s still one of the most capable men on Earth when it comes to working the rod, and, no matter how they feel about his personality flair ups, fishing enthusiasts are awed when they pull their boats up and watch him work it. Swapping between the half a dozen rods in his quiver, each set up with a different lure and line for a specific geographic feature on the lake—like shoreline, open water, or docks—Ike whips out hundreds of casts per hour with the acuity of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s passive cessium atomic clock. Standing on the bow, Ike looks like Jimmy Hendrix wickedly manipulating a crybaby wah pedal as he rocks the trolling motor control with his foot to ease his bass boat in and out of fallen trees and cattails along the shoreline. If he doesn’t get a nibble he silently glided along the shore to the next spot and the next spot and the next spot. In more than an hour of fishing he doesn’t pull up a single fish, but there is something entrancing and almost balletic about his movements. The crowd knows they are in the presence of a master, and they hang on his every cast. One boat carrying two dough boys hopped up on one Coors Light too many ease their boat within spitting distance of Ike, much to the disgust of the other spectators on the water. As a general rule of thumb, BASS and the anglers ask anglers to keep a respectful distance of 100 yards from the boats. These boobs either don’t know or didn’t care. Ike cocks his elbow back for another cast like a gunslinger about to draw his six-shooter from his holster and one of the guys burps and tosses an empty pack of cigs into the water.
Classy.
“When you have fifty boats in the water that has an impact on the environment but the fans pump me up,” Ike says. By day’s end, Mike has amassed 4 pounds 14 ounces of fish. When his boat is pulled to the dais for the final weigh in he bears a meager mesh sack with a disappointingly light payload. Ever the showman, he’s not about to let his lack of fish submarine his chance to outshine his competitor’s personalities. “Let this be a lesson to all you flippers—that’s fishin’,” he says of his bad luck. Adding to his bad luck, bees swarmed the fallen champ while he was fishing today and now he tears off his shirt like Hulk Hogan to display his battle scars. “I got stung eight times today,” he says as he flexes and wheels around to show off his rippling muscles, tattoos—and stings, of course. There will be no celebratory breakdancing from Ike this time around, but he asks Fish Fishburne to give it a go, and the red bearded emcee hits the floor for some groundwork and an attempted backspin gone bad. It has not been a miraculous display of fishing on Ike’s part at the Classic this go around, but it’s quality entertainment, and that’s what he’s all about.
And with that, it looks like the BASS organization will have to catch and release their dreams of piggybacking on the success of a breakdancing, tattooed, PR savvy champ.
The final weigh in is arranged in such a way that the top six competitors present their fish last. Before they take the stage, though, a country singer who took third place on Star Search—is Star Search even a show anymore?—performs a stirring rendition of the national anthem that includes a heavy dose of yodeling. Now it’s show time and whne the time comes for the final six to present their catches canons of light paint an explosion of aquamarine color across the stage, fog machines billow into the stale arena air, and enough pyro to light up a Def Leppard show explodes around the stage. The Yamaha cheerleaders wiggle and giggle in the stands, and the crowd is on its feet.
Because he entered the day as the leader, Tak is the last to weigh his fish. He needs TK pounds to own the title. A video montage begins to play on the Jumbotron, unwinding the highlights of Tak’s day which had been going slowly until he caught three monster bass—all in the final 45 minutes of compeition. His excitement is evident as he pulls in his final catch, yet his limited English keeps him from yelling anything more than, “Yes! Big Fish!” Onstage, Tak sits smiling politely as the video plays.
The scale lights up with the total weight of his catch: 13 pounds, 8 ounces! Celebratory wads of bass-shaped confetti ejaculate out of the stage and shoot high into the air. “I have been waiting for this for eight years,” Tak tells Fish Fishburne, tears in his eyes. There’s not a piece of cardboard anywhere in sight as he steps into a boat for a victory lap around the stadium.
“After Mike won the championship two years ago, he was so animated. Tak’s personality is more subdued and we have to find opportunities that suit him,” says Kessel. Takahiro is a champion fisherman with a compelling backstory, but his softspoken demeanor and poor English do not a Mike Ike make. But whether you’re fishin’ or trying to blow up a sport, you work with what you’ve got. “You capitalize on what you have.”
SIDEBAR
LOCKIN’N’POPPIN’ WITH THE KING OF BASS
1. Gear is essential: Puma , Adidas windbreaker, silky top, silky bottom, also the cap—you need a bit of smoothness for head spins. We used motorcycle helmets back in the day.
2. Opening is key. Before you get down on the floor, you square off and you need to have a good up-rock style to entice your opponent to come battle you. Sometimes I up-rock bass. It intimidates them.
3. Change styles when you are down on the floor. You can never do one thing over and over again. What makes a breaker really good when he can go into moves from another movie, so if you’re going into 4-rock to windmill to freeze and combine them fluidly, that’s what makes a really good floor routine, the ability to combine moves. Hat touching add a little more flare. I’ll do the windmill and then grab my balls. It feels good to grab my balls.
4. Surface—the poor man’s surface is cardboard, we used to buy pieces of linoleum and have it pre-cut and then we could roll it up and carry it with us and we would duct tape them. “DGC: Devastating Ground Controllers” My name was Ike.
5. You need the right freeze. Everything comes together at the end of the machine. The freeze is the exclamation point. In my day I have done a lot of freezes that have scared the opponent away, because it was such a mean freeze.
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