I just celebrated my three year anniversary working for B.A.S.S. I came into this job, sport, and life pretty much cold– I knew some guy named KVD was good, and that’s about it. My education has been through what they call immersion therapy where I had to learn everything and try not to make too many mistakes. One way of doing that is to watch every single Elite Series event. We have them all here, if you’re wondering how you can do that. That, and the day-to-day managing of bassmaster.com has been the main sources of my education.
The one thing I learned early on was that Kevin VanDam was a terror before I got here in 2012. You can see it when you watch the shows, when you look up old tournaments. But since I’ve been here, he hasn’t taken over an event. And perhaps, even after today, he won’t this week.
But today Shaye Baker and I watched him catch his limit in 30 minutes. It was breathtaking. I’ve now covered about 30 tournaments for B.A.S.S., and I’ve certainly never seen anything like it. A friend came up to me at the weigh-in and asked me about it.
“I’ve seen it on TV. I hope you know how lucky you are to see it in person.”
I do. I really can’t describe accurately to you how quick and deadly KVD was out there this morning. It was dizzying, and if you go back you can see me frantically trying to blog about it. Fortunately, Shaye shot a great gallery of it and I edited the GoPro footage Kevin let us grab off his boat before we left him. As we pulled up, he cracked the smile you see above. In my admittedly limited time covering him, I think that’s the first time I’ve seen him smile on the water. His iron focus broke for a moment and he asked us if we enjoyed watching that.
We said we did. We definitely did.
