I have spent a ridiculous amount of my life worrying about bass. Where they went. Why they wouldn’t bite (this segment of the pie chart is the biggest of all). Whether I should have thrown a different lure. Why the guy 30 yards down the bank is catching them when I am not (second-biggest slice of the pie).
Then there are tournament anglers who take this particular affliction to an entirely different level. Their livelihoods depend on five fish cooperating. A bad tournament can wreck a season, derail a career and, for a few miserable days, feel like the end of the world.
Miles Burghoff, a Bassmaster Opens pro, used to understand that feeling.
Then his 10-month-old daughter, Rylee, got cancer.
Miles was practicing for the 2024 Bassmaster Open season-opener at Lake Okeechobee in January when he received the news. Doctors had discovered a tumor in Rylee’s abdomen. Suddenly, the tournament he had spent months preparing for didn’t matter.
Neither did the season. Neither did bass.
Miles left Florida and returned home to his wife, Katie, and their daughter. Soon, the Burghoffs temporarily moved from their home in Dayton, Tenn., to Memphis, where Rylee became a patient at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
The diagnosis was neuroblastoma, a cancer that develops from immature nerve cells and occurs primarily in young children. Rylee’s tumor was the size of a baseball, and the cancer had metastasized in her bones, bone marrow and other areas of her little body. She spent the next eight months undergoing eight different chemotherapy treatments and surgeries at St. Jude.
Miles later described those months as living with an almost inescapable anxiety. The treatment was working, but there were no guarantees.
Then, on Aug. 21, 2024, the Burghoffs received the news they had been praying for. Rylee was cancer free. Eight months to a miracle.
Eventually, Miles went fishing again. He returned to Bassmaster Opens competition at Sam Rayburn Reservoir in early 2025. By tournament-fishing standards, it was not a particularly memorable return. He finished 143rd.
The old Miles might have been devastated. This Miles was fine.
The experience had given him something he never went looking for: perspective.
And that’s why I wanted to revisit Miles’ story in the September/October issue of Bassmaster Magazine. Click here to meet another person whose life intersects with St. Jude and bass fishing. Different family. Different journey. But behind every St. Jude patient is a story that began with somebody hearing words no parent ever wants to hear.
What happens after those words is why St. Jude matters. Families treated there never receive a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel, housing or food. That allows parents to concentrate on one thing: Heal my child.
Perspective is a funny thing. We talk about it like it’s wisdom we acquire gradually with age, which is oftentimes the case. But sometimes it arrives all at once, uninvited. Miles’ arrived in the form of a baseball-sized tumor inside his 10-month-old daughter.
Nobody should have to gain perspective that way. But perhaps the rest of us can borrow a little from Miles.
We all have things that keep us up at night. Work. Money. Deadlines. Family. And then there are, of course, our fishing woes — bass that won’t bite and the jackleg 30 yards up the bank who cracked the code that we missed. They all get a slice of our pie chart of concern.
Perspective is simply knowing how big to cut the pieces.