L E V E L O F H A P P I N E S S |
NOVEMBER 2020
Cox ponders the possibility of fishing three major tours . It seems like a good / bad idea .
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FEBRUARY 2021
Cox takes on $ 115,000 in entry fees , $ 60,000 of it due in February / March . He regrets his accounting .
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MARCH 2021
Cox cashes $ 140,000 in checks in one month and wins the Pro Circuit event at Smith Lake . On schedule for a $ 1.12 million year !
MARCH 2021
Cox finishes 79th at Pickwick , drives 10 hours overnight , finishes 61st at Sam Rayburn . Cox is very tired .
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JUNE 2021
Cox finds the rhythm again , racking up over $ 80,000 in winnings after Neely Henry . Momentum is a good thing !
MAY 2021
Cox finishes 96th at Neely Henry just four days after finishing fifth at Lake Travis . Cox is now tired AND mad .
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f you ’ ve followed the career of MLF pro John Cox , you ’ re well aware that almost nothing he does is “ by the book ”.
From the moment the happy-golucky , self-admitted “ fish bum ” burst onto the national tournament-fishing scene in 2011 with a win on the Red River in Louisiana – a tournament in which he squeezed his 17-foot aluminum boat through a 30-foot drainage pipe to reach his winning fish – Cox has gone about the business of catching bass for a living in truly unconventional ways .
He nearly won the 2015 FLW Tour Angler of the Year award fishing out of a 19-foot aluminum boat that had no depth finder . He claimed the 2017 Forrest Wood Cup after finagling his tin boat into backwater nooks and crannies on Wheeler Lake that had surely never seen another human being previously . He pulled into the parking lot of Day 1 of the 2020 Tackle Warehouse TITLE on Sturgeon Bay after driving all night to get there , backed his boat into a fishery he had never seen before , and promptly finished third in the event .
So in November of 2020 , when Cox announced that he would be fishing
three major professional tournament circuits in 2021 – the MLF Bass Pro Tour , Tackle Warehouse Pro Circuit and Bassmaster Elite Series – very few people in the fishing world batted an eye .
“ Oh , that ’ s just John being John .”
The Best-Laid Plans
Somewhere in the Cox household in DeBary , Florida exists a well-marked calendar and a notepad upon which Cox began to lay out his 2021 tournament plans . On the heels of a 2020 season in which he banked just over $ 288,000 in tournament winnings fishing 16 total events on two major tours – the Pro Circuit and Elite Series – Cox was confident in his ability to find and catch fish ( and cash checks ) on a heavy tournament schedule with truncated practice .
He had already committed to fish the seven-event Bass Pro Tour and six-event Pro Circuit ( with the possibility of making the TITLE and four MLF Cup events to boot ), but as Cox surveyed the three schedules side-byside and started to mentally put the puzzle pieces together , the glimmer of a three-tour schedule began to take shape .
“ I don ’ t know if I thought it was a good idea , honestly , but the more I looked at all the schedules the more I liked them ,” Cox admits . “ Sam Rayburn , Chickamauga , Smith , Harris Chain , St . Johns River , St . Lawrence River … there were just so many good tournaments . When I put it all on a calendar , they kinda followed each other – if I wanted to just go straight from one tournament to another to another without really practicing . The more I looked at it , the more I realized that I really wanted to test it and see if it was possible to pull it off without practice .”
Coxenomic $ 1 : The Cost of Doing Business
Of the things that John Cox does well in life , by his own brutally honest admission , “ Accounting is not one of them .” For starters , one might suspect that Cox and wife Melissa would tally up the entry and participation fees for the three leagues ’ 2021 seasons – a $ 115,000 bill – and get cold feet . But in typical Cox glass-half-full fashion , the entry expense didn ’ t even slow him down when he pitched the idea to his family .
42 MAJORLEAGUEFISHING . COM | AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 2021