Bassmaster.com has asked our team of writers and staff to reflect on their favorite moment of 2016. Don Barone writes about the people, emotions, and events that shape the sport of bass fishing.
In sports there are but two quintessential moments:
The Thrill of Victory.
The Agony of Defeat.
For these moments games are played, for these moments athletes take to the field, for these moments spectators fill the stands.
The Thrill of Victory.
The Agony of Defeat.
It presents us life between the white lines, life with a game clock, life with a scoreboard.
To capture the exact moment of victory, the exact moment of defeat is why we take the lens cap off, why we bring notebooks and pens.
My moment of this year, 2016, and my top 5 moment of the past 30 years I’ve spent covering sports is this one of the family of Britt Myers the moment his first Elite tournament win became known.
This is not some staged PR shot, this is not a scripted faked news thing, this is the exact second his wife, Missy, and his two boys Britt Jr. and Carson knew dad…won.
Britt and his family are some of my best friends out on the road, I knew how much a win would be for not only Britt up on stage but his family down in the crowd.
I stood down on the pavement right next to the stage, above me the weighing was being done, I heard the fish splashing, I heard Trip Weldon lift the bag with the fish up onto the scale, I heard BASS emcee, Dave Mercer breathe in and out as he watched the computer screen for the digital numbers that measure the Thrill or the Agony.
And my camera only focused on my friends in the crowd, right elbow resting on the stage, left hand holding the big lens.
Between us the reason this photo is a little blurry is because it was snapped the moment the stage underneath my right arm, the arm that steadies the camera, the moment the stage began to heave up and down with the thrill.
I took 18,636 photos in this BASS 2016 season.
Some good, some great, some awful.
Only one was etched permanently in my brain.
Only this one.
Only this moment.
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