You once could see a sunrise and a sunset between Gerald Swindle’s bowed legs. Over the years it became an increasingly wide-angle view. That is true no longer. Swindle had knee replacement surgery twice in the offseason – the first one in November, the second one six weeks later in December.
His recovery is far from complete. He’s not as good as he’s gonna get, but he’s better than he used to be. And the 56-year-old two-time Bassmaster Angler of the Year will be competing on his home lake in the FXR Bassmaster Elite at Lake Guntersville, which begins Thursday.
“I’ve always been a little bit bowlegged, but as I’ve aged, they just kind of kept getting worse,” Swindle said. “It was rubbing bone on bone. Once you get so it’s bone-on-bone they push out, you just start shrinking, you get shorter and shorter. The next thing you know, you’re like, yeah, I’m way bowlegged. What’s weird is like I didn’t ever realize it was that bad, until I saw myself in pictures.”
Swindle estimates he’s an inch to an inch-and-a-half taller now that he was in 2025. What he never could overlook was the amount of pain he was in, which was obvious as far back as the 2016 season when he won his second Bassmaster Angler of the Year title.
“The last five tournaments that year, I would come home, go to the doctor, and they would draw fluid off of my right knee. One tournament they drew 120 ccs off my knee. From 2016 to 2018, it just kept getting worse. I limped so bad, then my left knee got bad. By 2018, 2019, my doctor is like, you’ve got to replace them. He said, they’re just shot. I’ve just kind of been putting it off. You don’t really don’t have an offseason with sponsor obligations.”
Last season the inevitable became obvious. He finished seventh in the season opener at the St. Johns River. The next week he was 100th at Lake Okeechobee. He finished 13th at Lake Tenkiller and 25th at Lake St. Clair but those successes were offset by 101st at Lake Fork and 91st at the Sabine River. He finished 72nd in the final Angler of the Year standings. The only time he placed lower was the previous year when he was 88th.
So Swindle finally bit the bullet.
“They really like you to wait three months between knee replacement surgeries,” Swindle said. “I told myself, I ain’t got three months.”
He had the first knee replaced on Nov. 2 and the second one on Dec. 23. Merry Christmas, not. Doctors recommend eight to 10 weeks of hard therapy after a knee surgery. Swindle was six weeks out from his December surgery when he put his boat in the water Sunday for the first day of practice at Lake Guntersville.
“You try to get yourself as healthy as you can,” Swindle said. “You try not to overdo it. I started feeling the mental anxiety three weeks after the second surgery. My progress wasn’t going well. It was one of those mental challenges that I didn’t enjoy because I’m sitting there watching the clock tick. That first tournament is coming and I’m not getting better like I thought I should. You’re wanting to turn that corner where you see major progress. And it’s just not in the cards.”
Swindle’s recovery regimen now includes two hours on a recumbent bike twice a day, morning and evening. Sunday, the first day of practice, he didn’t go on the lake until 11 a.m. because it was so cold and he stayed until 5 p.m. The second day he went out at 9:00 and stayed until 5:00. The final practice day on Tuesday he went out at 7:00 and stayed until 5:00.
“It’s going to be a grinder, which I like,” Swindle said. “I’ve never seen the water this cold and I’ve lived here a long time. We’re still going to catch them. It’s still going to take 17 (pounds) a day to get check and probably 85 to win.”
Swindle knows his knees are going to feel better and his confidence will grow as the season progresses.
“I think everything you go through, you learn something,” he said. “I learned a lot about myself mentally. I’m going to tell you now, the first 10 days after the second one, it was a rough (expletive deleted). I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t walk. It was tough. But we got through it. And then you just learn a little bit about yourself and say, you can do this. The hardest thing to me was going to therapy and knowing I’m going there with the intention to come out hurting. That’s the hardest part. It’s like why would you keep driving somewhere to intentionally hurt this bad. But that’s what you have to do.
“The silver lining is, the last several years, I was miserable and I was hurting and I knew it wasn’t going to get any better. At least now when I’m out there hurting, I know I’m one step closer to getting better. The whole mental thing is hurt today, it’ll be better tomorrow. Hurt a little more tomorrow to be better the next day.”
