You don’t need to have ever strapped on the pads yourself – in fact, all you need is to have watched a few episodes of HBO’s Hard Knocks – to know the call that every borderline NFL player fears. “You need to report to the coach’s office,” some coordinator or administrative staffer says in a flat tone. “And bring your playbook.”
What goes unsaid, at least until the aspirant arrives in the office, is that he’s been cut. He may later get signed to the practice squad or picked up by another team, but for now he is a man without a country. Despite the fact that he is still better than 99.9 percent of the football-playing public, there’s a very real chance that this marks the end of the road.
For somewhere between five and fifteen 2016 Elite Series pros, the “bring your playbook” moment occurred sometime during this week’s tournament in La Crosse. At some point each of them, whether they knew it or just knew that it was a possibility, made their last casts on this tour, at least until they succeed at the arduous process of requalifying. While this no doubt may qualify as a catastrophe or at least a major setback for those individuals, it’s one of the best things that could happen to the sport going forward. No longer is this a league where you can more or less stay as long as you want as long as you can afford the entry fees.
Let’s be clear: I am sympathetic to the guys who will not be invited back. I’m friends with some of them. Most of them represent the sport quite well. They’re all excellent fishermen. But this is a competitive sport, and one that’s getting more competitive every year. If you want to hold your tour and your anglers out as capital-E-Elite, it’s imperative that there be something to lose – because that makes staying out there all the more valuable.
And yes, staying there has gotten harder. Over the past couple of years, long-term pros who consistently finished in the 90s at year’s end have been weeded out and replaced not just with rookies, but with top-tier competitors like Jordan Lee, Justin Lucas, Drew Benton and Brent Ehrler. That marks a major paradigm shift for the sport’s “middle class” – take away X number of anglers who rarely get checks and shuffle in an equal number who almost always seem to finish in the money and you’ve tipped the scales.
While the competition has gotten more demanding, B.A.S.S. has been very accommodating in keeping people around. No one is sent away because of a lone bad event or even a single bad season. In fact, with the “Legend” designation, it’s possible to have multiple bad seasons in a row and still hang on.
Despite all of these second and third chances, eventually some stalwarts of the sport are going to be sent away. Again, I’m not going to dance on the grave of anyone’s career. I’m sure some of those who won’t requalify – whether it’s this year or down the road – have given their lives to the sport, and are great advocates for it. Should that be enough to keep your job in all instances? I think not. Just because Alex in accounting is a great guy, if he’s not doing the job he’ll likely get axed (unless, of course, he’s the son of the boss or a ringer on the company softball team). Every dream profession has culling methods. If Sam grew up wanting to be a brain surgeon, he can lose that chance if he doesn’t get into medical school. Or he might get into medical school and then not pass the boards at some future date. Or he could practice medicine successfully for 40 years, but then get a hand tremor that jeopardizes his skills. If he doesn’t step aside voluntarily at that point his insurance company will likely force him to do so. The NFL, mentioned above, has opportunities at every turn to deny someone their dream career. You could be cut in training camp before you get meaningful reps, late in the season to give a promising rookie a slot, or at various times for salary cap based reasons. It’s far crueler than anything bass fishing has ever seen.
Few people are clamoring for Alex in Accounting or Sam the Surgeon to keep their jobs when evidence indicates that they’re not up to the task at the present time. And neither of those jobs is competitive in the way that a sport might be. If Nick the NFLer allows three sacks on Sunday or throws two picks Monday night, you can bet that within minutes every message board and thousands of fans’ Twitter streams will be lit up with explicit language recommending not just that they be cut, but that they be drawn and quartered first.
Of course bass fishing is different than the NFL. There’s no guaranteed money at all, and the financial stakes are lower. But isn’t that the point? There’s generally a correlation between the amount of money at stake and the amount of public interest and emotional investment in the minutiae of any sport.
Again, I shudder to think of someone who has been a good representative for the sport being cast adrift. Some of them might go to other tours or fish locally, and some of them may sink into a deep hole of “what could beens,” but for the sake of the game, which is bigger than any one individual, this is a good thing. For a long time this has been a league with a handful of hammers, a huge middle class of very good anglers, and a distinct underclass of guys who aren’t competitive. Now we’re at the point where you can look at the field and regardless of local advantage or past performance you can reasonably expect the majority of anglers to have a shot at winning any given event. We’ll have reached our potential when you can say that for 80 or 90 percent of the crew. It won’t be parity for parity’s sake, but rather a sport that has reached peak professionalism.
I don’t know what the proper number of Elite anglers should be, but I suspect it should be less than 100. Nor do I have a bulletproof plan for how qualifying and requalifying should occur. In a perfect world, there’d be something similar to the NBA’s D-League where legit pros on the way up or on the way down could look for a meaningful chance, something above the current Opens with a legit shot to earn some ducats and prove or reprove your mettle.
With every hard knock taken and every playbook turned in, the cut eventually reseals and our game gets better. It hurts so much because it means so much.