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.
“There’s a lot of talk about how we’ll overlap,” said Kessel, who then divulged the dream of BASS tournaments on Lake Lloyd (the artificial reservoir within the Daytona 500’s 2.5-mile track), bass weigh-ins before car races, anglers and drivers posed together with twin logos for Yamaha and Busch. “That’s the kind of stuff we’re talking about,” said Kessel.
His attention turned back to the TV. A camera mounted inside one of the vehicles showed a helmeted driver.
“I see a guy in a car,” I said. “What do you see?”
Kessel stuck his finger on the screen. There, beneath his pointer, on the lower left of the racing helmet, had been printed a single word: Reese’s. As in peanut butter cup. The sponsor.
Then I, too, began to see. There was UPS and FedEx and Lowe’s and ...
“I see opportunity,” said Kessel. “A lot of these drivers love to fish and—”
He stopped to watch the last three laps of the race and, when it was over, expounded on the challenges of filming fishing tournaments, which have no last out, no last inning, and no last lap. “You can only see half of the playing field,” he observed. “But I’m thinking about new technology.”
Like what?
He paused.
“Put a camera in a lure,” he whispered. “How cool would that be?”
At lunchtime I met Don Rucks, vice president and general manager of BASS. We convened at the Celebration Town Tavern, where Rucks sat on the patio, sucked a Nicaraguan dollar cigar, and gazed at the perfectly rectangular, man-made Celebration Lake. “You can catch a ten-pound bass right there,” he told me, at which point I felt a craving for some Florida largemouth James Beard–style, the whole fish stuffed with onions, bread crumbs, tarragon, and Tabasco. So I suggested we order some bass.
“No, no, no,” said Rucks. “Can’t do that.”
The Ojibwa water monster and the Cherokee father of all fish were propitiated in the context of a profound spirituality. But today’s bass are the opposite of spirit: They are pounds of living asset. Once lifted out of the water and captured on videotape, they go on life support within aerated livewells, to which the anglers may add doses of a fishy feel-good additive called Aquahol. At the end of the day, after elaborately staged weigh-ins (total weight of live bass caught decides the tournament winner), the fish are returned to the reservoir to fatten and await the next hook. Without a secure stock of bass there could be no BASS tournaments, no BassCenter on television, no Bassmaster website, no Bass Times newsletter, and no Bassmaster magazine. Which would mean no paycheck for Don Rucks.
Instead of bass, we ordered scrod.
“We can legitimately become the next big-league sport,” Rucks said. “There’s only one Bassmaster Elite Series with this media machine behind it.”
Then he explained the next step: “We’re trying to get anglers to build a personal brand.”
A personal brand?
“Everyone has a personal brand, but they don’t know what it is.”
And how does one discover his or her personal brand?
“You have to know, ‘Who am I?’ ”
And how does one discover who they are?
“You do that by checking with your friends, with your wife,” said Rucks.
And what would be the Don Rucks brand?
“Oh, man,” he groaned. “I don’t know. Innovative. Challenging. Direct. Colorful. Animated. Know who you are,” Rucks declared, “then find your matching brands.”
What brand would match Don Rucks?
“Red Bull. Johnnie Walker. Cohiba.”
But isn’t there someone out there whose identity lies beyond a brand?
“No,” said Don Rucks. “I believe everybody has a brand.”
Peter Thliveros hauled up his second largemouth of the day from a mess of submerged trees. By noon he had reeled in two more lunkers, then trolled into some bad luck. The mercury hit 100 degrees and there were no clouds and no breeze, and after a few hours of watching someone not catch any fish, I acquired newfound respect for the challenges facing Don Rucks: Here was a spectator sport sublime in its monotony.
Finally, Thliveros zipped his life jacket, settled behind the wheel of his Ranger, and floored it across the lake. The driver of my boat gunned his 225 hp in pursuit, and as we hurtled through gas fumes and space, the slightest ripple slammed us out of our seats, the rushing air forcing tears from my eyes. Thirty-eight seconds of terror later, we pulled up behind Peter T. at the 9,000-foot-long Benbrook Dam, where among the logs and tumbleweeds he fished for another hour—with no success.
The morning’s crowd of photographers and spectator boats had gradually drifted off: no more old men in khaki shorts and Jack Daniel’s T-shirts; no more sunburned dads with crewcut kids; no more young men in wraparound shades and basketball shorts. No more helicopter. Thliveros could see none of his competitors, had no idea what anybody else had pulled out of the reservoir. Still, he never showed a sign of worry or exasperation. The day before, his bass had come off riprap with that same rattling jig he was using now, and he would stick to his analysis, to the pattern he had discovered in the wind and the waves, the water temperature and the stain, the depth, the current, the time of day, and the season of year.
But Peter T. could catch no more. By late afternoon he had been left with no one but Wes Miller, his onboard television cameraman. (As it turned out, Miller was a big Thliveros fan: At a party a few years back, the chef had smoked an entire wild hog and made a point of inviting Miller to the feast.)
The final weigh-in at the Will Rogers Coliseum attracted a small crowd, reporters from the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and a phalanx of BASS publicists and ESPN still and video cameramen who carefully panned the audience so as not to reveal the acres of empty seats.
I had never seen anyone win a quarter of a million dollars, and so I didn’t know what to expect. The day before, at the women’s weigh-in, the top prize was a fully rigged boat worth an estimated $50,000. Yes, the women have their own professional tour, many of them competing in bright-yellow and pastel-pink FisherGirl jerseys packed with emblems for sunglasses and bait. One of the competitors, Becky McKinney, had been seven months pregnant. Another—Violette Sesco, from Citrus Springs, Florida—was 80 years old.
But now it was time for the main event. The rock and roll blasted, the strobes flashed, and behind their police escort, the airbrushed SUVs rumbled into the arena, each hauling a bass boat. The trailers stopped next to the stage and the anglers hopped up, their fish squirming and dripping cool water through black mesh bags. Some of the finalists held their beady-eyed, humpbacked, potbellied bounty high in the air so the photographers could get the shot. The bass jumped and flailed, but placed into a Plexiglas box and weighed beneath the lights, they finally lay prone. And after the poundage flashed on the big screen, the gasping assets were rushed offstage and back to the reservoir. Peter T. had not had a great day on the lake: four fish for a total of ten pounds five ounces. But as the last of the anglers lay down their creel, it became clear that no one had done any better.
Indoor fireworks sprayed as Peter T. stepped onto the pedestal in his shining suit of sponsorship. He grasped the grail, held it high above his head, and made sure to thank Mercury Motors and Ranger Boats. Then he called his wife on his cellphone. How would he break the news that he had been crowned the prince of BASS—and suddenly become a quarter of a millionaire? Would he scream or sob, cackle or be struck dumb?
As it turned out, none of the above. “Honey,” the chef said, his low voice booming through the arena, “remember that new range we’ve been talking about?”