One Saturday in May, in downtown Fort Worth, Peter Thliveros, a professional angler who also happens to be a professional chef, weighed in more than 15 pounds of live bass, a catch that landed him in first place going into the final day of the inaugural Bassmaster Memorial. Thliveros has been touring the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society (BASS) pro circuit for 21 years, during which time he has fished from Detroit to New Orleans, Charlotte to Las Vegas, and taken home more than $900,000 in prize money. (Despite his longevity, success, and general popularity, nobody on the tour can pronounce his last name, so Thliveros’s custom-wrapped boat has been airbrushed “Peter T.”) But the Bassmaster Memorial was something else entirely: a tournament in which the world’s top 55 fishermen were competing for a grand prize of $250,000. By Sunday, the last day of the competition, only six anglers had made the final cut.
At seven o’clock that morning, a helicopter swooped over the water, descended with an earsplitting roar, and presented a terrifying vision: The daredevil in the passenger seat had cantilevered himself halfway out the door to point his video camera at Peter Thliveros. The only 325-pound man on a boat in the reservoir, the pro bass angler was an easy spot.
Everyone at the Benbrook Marina stared at the spectacle in the sky, but the big man did not seem to notice the helicopter, the video camera, or the lunatic aerialist. Ditto for the media boats laden with throngs of zoom-endowed still photographers. Peter T. ignored them, just as he had completely disregarded the spectator boats of binocular-wielding bass-fishing fans. He did not even register the video operator who stood next to him on board and held a camera eight inches from his wide, suntanned face.
Peter T. kept his eyes on the water. He yo-yoed his jig and scrutinized the tangle of grass and roots as though it were rife with submerged meaning. With a quarter of a million dollars on the line, the fisherman discerned nothing but backwater and riffle, weedline and eddy.
Ever since he could walk, Peter Thliveros has fished. Instead of building sand castles, he surfcast, and from the start his parents supported the habit. When Thliveros graduated from high school, his mother bought him his first bass boat. At his first BASS tournament he came in fifth and took home $2,500. “It’s not about the money,” he told me. “I never did it to get rich.”
Thliveros comes from a family of restaurateurs in Jacksonville, Florida, and he’s spent much of his working life in the kitchen. “Fishing has been a passion,” he said, “and cooking is what has supported it.” It has also, apparently, given him a subtle edge on the competition. “When I come home from the restaurant I reek of garlic,” he said. “The scent has gotten into my hands, and after all these years, the garlic has infused my lures.”
BASS rules state that anglers can only fish with artificial bait: No crickets, no cherries, no blood-dipped bees, no black snails with slit bellies, and absolutely no night crawlers. (Using artificial lures, so the thinking goes, provides a greater challenge. Not to mention that if a bass were to swallow live bait too deeply, the removal of the hook might damage the merchandise.) “The scent of garlic is alluring,” said Thliveros. “When I smell it, it makes me hungry.” He considered things for a moment, then reached a conclusion: “Garlic is the essence of all good cooking. Garlic and celery, carrots, and onions. And olive oil.”
At 7:22, Thliveros flipped his jig over his cameraman’s head into the turbid water off a concrete boat ramp. He had been studying that ramp and had become convinced that a largemouth lurked in the shallows. For the previous 20 minutes he had been coaxing the monster out with a rattling crankbait, and now he felt the tug. As he waited for his garlic--infused lure to snuggle itself into a bass gullet, he did not move—then suddenly he jerked his line, which bowed into a tensed semicircle. The helicopter dropped even lower, the cameramen ran tape, the still photographers snapped shot after shot, and the spectators rose to their feet and stared.
Peter T. had caught a fish.
A seminal fishing column that ran in the September 1953 issue of GOURMET described the quiet ecstasies of a midnight rowing expedition to ensnare boatloads of smelts, some of which were devoured beneath the stars. “The boys eat like Indians,” wrote Robert P. Tristram Coffin, “using both hands, blowing out backbones and ribs, eating the fish flame-hot, swallowing guts and heads and fins.”
A half century later, when I went in search of the iconic American fishing experience, I found it in my living room, on television. The professional bass-fishing tournaments broadcast on Saturday mornings on cable are a marvel of monstrous largemouth popping out of the water every ten seconds or so, like some Disney delusion on steroids. So it came as no surprise to discover that Walt Disney was, in fact, behind the whole thing. In 2001, ESPN, Disney’s sports media conglomerate, bought BASS and found itself confronted with the challenge of pumping the acquisition any way it could—from BASS sweepstakes to BASS Visa cards.
The 21st-century incarnation of such an ancient human practice merited investigation, so I caught a plane to Celebration, Florida, the faux-town that Disney called forth from the swamp in 1994. At BASS headquarters I met Dean Kessel, then vice president of BASS operations (he has since left the company), who sat in his corner office and stared at a -wide-screen television, studying cars as they circled the track. I figured he was wasting time, watching TV when he should have been working, until he revealed that next year ESPN hoped to add NASCAR to its broadcast menu.
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