"CREATING A BASS-FISHING CAREER"

HOW TO BECOME A TOURNAMENT FISHERMAN

EDITOR'S NOTE: Mark Davis, 38, of Mount Ida, Arkansas, who won the BASS Masters Classic in 1995 and the Angler-of-the-Year title in 1995, 1998 and 2001, never has had a career outside the fishing industry. "My dad said I've never had a real job," says Davis, who is known today as one of the top bass fishermen in the nation and ranked 3rd in the world for bass-fishing expertise, according to www.BassFan.com, which rates anglers according to events won in the past two years with bonus points given to winning the BASS Masters Classic or comparable events.

Question: If you had a young person come up to you and say, "Mr. Davis, I want to grow up and be a tournament bass fisherman just like you," what would you tell that person?
Answer: I believe that anything you plan to do in life requires a plan. I also think you need to have a back-up plan to fall back on if the first scenario doesn't work. First, I advise a young person to go to college and get a really good education. While in college, he needs to take some public speaking, marketing and business courses because the real money in tournament bass fishing is not only in your skill of catching bass but also in your ability to sell products for sponsors. If you become a tournament fishermen worthy of sponsorship, you have to remember the manufacturers are sponsoring you to be their spokesman. So, learning to speak before a crowd is critically important. While you're preparing yourself scholastically, you've also got to prepare yourself as a fisherman. There are no shortcuts. You need to put in thousands and thousands of hours of fishing time. Achieving both a college education and a fishing education can be really difficult at a young age. The real key for me was being a guide. Guiding was my only avenue to becoming a professional bass fishermen. In the beginning of tournament bass fishermen, all the serious pros were guides. But today, the second generations of professional fishermen aren't guides. They're usually individuals with good educations and often have family money that supports them while they're learning to become a tournament fisherman. You have to have quite a bit of financial backing to make it as a tournament fisherman. If you have a limited budget, you're at a real disadvantage in a tournament when you're fishing against competitors with an unlimited budgets.

Professional bass fishing is not unlike many other professional sports. Thousands of people want to be professional bass fishermen. But only a very few make it to that level. The college education will be an extremely big benefit if anyone to make a living as a pro angler. If someone doesn't get their dream of professionally fishing for bass, a college education offers a great fallback plan.