Bass fishing has its own Tiger Woods

<p>Two weekends ago on the Red River near Shreveport, Louisiana, over a three-day period, Skeet Reese made $500,000 fishing for bass.</p><p>Kinda gives you a new respect for worms, doesn’t it? As fish stories go, this one is a whopper. It’s much better than spreading your hands apart and saying, “I once caught a fish this big!” Reese, who grew up in Sonoma County, once caught a check that big at a thing called the Bassmasters Classic, the Super Bowl for competitive fishermen. And the nut of it, that $500,000 check doesn’t put Reese on Easy Street. He’s already there.</p><p>“On the Bassmasters website,” I said, “you’ve won $1,930,541.60 as a professional fisherman. That’s a lot of money for catching fish.” “Well,” said Reese, “that’s not all of it. That’s what I have made since I joined Bassmasters. But I was a pro 10 years before that and made another million.”</p><p>That’s $3 million catching fish. Holy Crazy Leg Chugger Crawler! (That’s actually a name of a lure.) “I pinch myself all the time,” said Reese, 39, who lived in Sonoma County until he moved to the Gold Rush town of Auburn eight years ago. When Reese was a kid living in Rohnert Park, he’d fish the ponds at Sonoma State. He’d fish rivers, bays, inlets, lakes and probably the bathtub if it had something swimming in it.</p><p>“I’m drawn to water,” Reese said. “If I’m flipping through the TV channels and I see water, I stop.” I could see his neighbors tormenting the poor little guy by leaving on the garden hose next to his bedroom window.</p><p>When Reese was growing up, he would fish Mountain Shadows Golf Course (now Foxtail Golf Club). Yes, he would fish a golf course. Standing water. Little rivulets.</p><p>“But since they don’t like you fishing a golf course,” said Reese with a deadpan, “I’d fish there at night. I’d also find golf balls, too, and then throw ‘em at the golfers the next day.” Ah, and who says life in tract-home suburbia is dull. “CAUTION: TEENAGE FISHERMAN” is not a sign you see on every golf course.</p><p>Then again, not every golf course is within pole-distance of someone who will grow up to be one of the best fishermen America has ever produced.</p><p>“Skeet is one of the most versatile fisherman I have seen,” said Andrew Sayles, president of the California chapter of the Bass National Federation. “He can catch fish in six inches of water and he can catch fish in 80 feet of water. He can catch fish with any kind of lure. He is like Tiger Woods right now in our sport.” Reese stayed in Rohnert Park until he was 14, went to Rancho Cotate High School, lived in Santa Rosa for nine years, Cotati for another five, all the while wedded to pole, water and fish.</p><p>“The last time I ever worked for somebody,” he said, “was Ken Elie in 1997.” Elie owns the Outdoor Pro Shop in Rohnert Park.</p><p>While the very act of fishing may appear sedentary, isolated and filled with a lot of dead space, the way Reese describes it, it almost feels like he’s at a rodeo.</p><p>“When you get a bite,” Reese said, “for the next one-to-two seconds your adrenalin ignites. It’s the unknown that’s triggered.</p><p>You don’t know if it’s going to be a big fish or a small fish. You don’t know if it’s going to put up a fight or not. You don’t even know if you can bring him into the boat.”</p><p>The image — and Reese admits it’s out there all right — is sitting on a shoreline, chillin’, seemingly half-interested in fishing, as preoccupied with catching a nap as a fish.</p><p>“The average person has no idea of what we do,” said Reese, who fishes 15-17 tournaments a year. “Each tournament is a seven-day affair. We get up at 3:30 a.m., get back to the hotel by 9 p.m. I have fished in every weather imaginable — snow, sleet, hail, oppressive heat, wind cold. I fished on Lake Erie in 10-foot waves. You get banged around for eight hours on a boat, you feel it. Tournaments have been cancelled but only by extreme weather, like tornadoes.</p><p>“We’re not sitting on the shore in a lawn chair.”</p><p>Like so many sports that operate on the periphery, fishing is ripe with stereotypes, sometimes even within the community of fishing as well. One of them is that bass fishing is a sport from the South, like NASCAR, that it should stay in the South, and so what the heck is this California dude breaking into our club?</p><p>“I think I have really destroyed that myth,” Reese said. “You know the one, of the Southern bubba hillbilly. Even if they (Southern boys) are agitated or disrespect me for being from somewhere else, they don’t have the stones to say it to my face.</p><p>Winning takes care of a lot of criticism.</p><p>“When people see us (ESPN televised the Classic), they will see we are well-spoken, articulate, that we know what we are doing and that we got all our teeth in our mouth.”</p><p>Oh, and that being Tiger Woods with a fishing rod does not produce the typical big attitude, that all this money and fame has not separated Reese from common sense and the people who do sit on the shore in a lawn chair.</p><p>“Is this real?” Reese says to himself sometimes. “I would never ask for money for an autograph. It really pisses me off that some athletes do that. No, I know I am spoiled (by being so successful). I have no complaints at all.”</p><p>Reese can do something very few people can do. It takes a lot of skill, patience and intelligence. It takes a lot of strategy, hours of preparation and the single-minded focus of a passenger airplane pilot in a thunderstorm. But Reese doesn’t kid himself for one moment that he is a passenger airplane pilot in a thunderstorm.</p><p>“I travel all around the country,” Reese said, “to chase little green fish and make money. I know how fortunate I am.” The bass, it appears, would be the only ones to disagree.</p><p>For more on high school sports go to Bob Padecky’s blog at padecky@pressdemocrat.com. You can reach Staff Columnist Bob Padecky at 521-5490 or bob.padecky@pressdemocrat.com.</p>