COLUMN
FOR THE RECORD
COLIN
MOORE
T
14
The Greatest Night Tournament
Of Them All
he history of tournament fishing
is waypointed with exceptional
characters – some who are
famous and many more who are not.
Yet on one level or another they all
supplied building blocks in the forma-
tive years of the sport.
Bill Anderson of Cullman, Ala., was
one such promoter who helped
entrench tournament fishing in his
home state, where it’s now second only
to college football in the pecking order
of the citizenry’s obsessions.
Though there are some huge day-
light bass events these days, nobody
would dispute that Anderson’s boat
dealership put on the biggest night-
time tournament ever. In fact, for sev-
eral years the Guinness Book of Records
regarded the Anderson Boats Bass
Classic on Lewis Smith Lake as the
grandest of them all – day or night.
Anderson, who passed away in
2001 at age 71, saw his tournament as
a way to plug his dealership and sup-
port bass fishing in general. What is
not so clear is why Anderson, who was
something of a tobacco-chewing icon-
oclast to begin with, decided to hold
his event at night: from 6 p.m. until 6
a.m. For whatever reason, his tourna-
ment was always in July or August and
coincided with the full moon for that
month. The inaugural event took place
on July 18, 1981, and drew 206 boats.
Another tournament pioneer, Robert
Melvin of Birmingham, served as
weighmaster, his equipment being a
Toledo scale set on a card table with
two chairs behind it.
That first year, when the entry fee
was $50 per boat, Lacy Robinson and
Cotton McClain of Jasper, Ala., took
home the championship purse of
$2,000. Anderson, a professional boat
racer in the ’60s who once set a world
record in Unlimited IV class at the
unheard of speed of 73.6 mph, never
did anything in half measures, but even
he was surprised by the reception his
tournament received. It was the start of
a summer snowball that rolled along
and grew into something much larger.
In time the event attracted weekend
anglers from throughout the South and
Midwest, among them promising new-
comers with the talent and ambition to
progress to the professional level.
Within five years the tournament
had swollen to 742 boats – three
flights of 200 with 142 boats in the
fourth flight – and it took 52 minutes
for all of them to clear the staging area.
Depending on how good the fishing
was, the weigh-in might progress for
hours. From dusk to dawn, the lights of
the boats looked like so many fireflies
flitting around the lake as they raced
from fishing hole to fishing hole,
though such movement diminished as
the long night progressed and partici-
pants began to snooze in place.
In 1987, when the tournament
caught the attention of Guinness’
record keepers, 795 boats were
involved. By that time, the Anderson
Boats Bass Classic had attained
national stature, and the sheer act of
winning it or finishing high had
become as important to most anglers
as any prize money.
There were a number of reasons for
the event’s success. The timing was
right, and the format was unique. It did-
n’t hurt that Ranger Boats – with whom
Anderson had signed on as a dealer in
1968 – was one of many sponsors that
provided prizes. Ranger even anted up
a boat that was given away in a drawing
to a lucky participant.
The most important ingredient to
success was Anderson, whose love for
the sport provided him with the perse-
verance to make his namesake tourna-
ment something that fishermen want-
ed to be part of. The biggest night tour-
nament of them all faded from history
within a few years after his death as his
family got out of the boat business,
though not before Anderson was able
to see his creation become an event
for the record books.
A Ranger Boats dealer in the 1970s and 1980s,
Bill Anderson devised a large-scale night tourna-
ment as a means of promoting his dealership in
Alabama, and the event evolved into the largest
bass tournament of all time.
FLWFISHING.COM I JANUARY 2017