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Norman,
OK - While a career as a professional angler usually cannot be characterized as successful unless an angler regularly brings quality limits of fish to the scales, the veterans know that it’s a business too, and a competent angler who is not business-savvy may not be around to fish next year.
The constant sponsor pimping can at times get annoying, but it’s reminder that while “love of the game” is important, to quote Skeet Reese, in the end “it’s all about the Benjamins.” With the advent of wrapped boats and later with the beginning of the Elite Series, the sponsor game changed in a multitude of ways – most notably, the stakes were raised and so were the barriers to entry. So as the sport has progressed, the sponsors have taken a more central role.
Here, in no particular order, are the top six sponsorship stories of 2008:
Kota Calls Collect
While Kota Kiriyama may call Alabama home these days, he’s a native of Japan, and several of his key sponsors are endemic to that country – companies like Shimano and Jackall. He has been Jackall’s most visible Elite Series pro for several years (although Jared Lintner could give him a run for that title) and has had a hand in developing many of the company’s most successful products, but sometimes having one of a prototype is not enough. That’s the situation Kota found himself in at Amistad in April. He was catching quality fish on a prototype Jackall swimbait, but his last one was virtually beyond repair.
He called Jackall founder Seiji Kato to discuss options for getting some across the ocean. It was too late to get the package into overnight mail so Kato bought one of his employees a plane ticket and had him embark on a multi-airport journey – needless to say there are no direct flights from Japan to Del Rio.
While Kota did not claim the victory at Amistad, he used another prototype Jackall bait – this time a dropshot minnow – to earn first place at Erie, targeting suspended fish over ultra-deep water.
McClelland Goes Smokeless
Mike McClelland’s tour roommate Jeff Kriet flies the Longhorn Smokeless Tobacco colors, but until midway through this year McClelland did not have a non-endemic title sponsors. But for the Kentucky Lake tournament, he got his boat wrapped by Tahoe Smokeless Tobacco on a one-shot deal. While they have not reached a deal for 2009, the concept was unique – give a potential sponsor a chance to dip a toe in the waters, tailoring that toe-dip to a desirable regional market, and see what happens.
The X-factor that made this possible for the popular Arkansas pro is that he has a spare Champion boat which members of his family tow to the tournament sites as a spare.
Kennedy Rolls Tape
How is it possible that super-angler Steve Kennedy doesn’t have a motor deal when so many lesser lights are covered head-to-toe with outboard insignias? While it may not benefit his bank book directly, Kennedy has declined to take on more than a handful of sponsors.
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Even with Kistler Rods, one of his official sponsors, he bought the rods out of his own pocket for years before accepting a deal. Kinami is another sponsor but the
Kinami-wrapped Ranger was another Kennedy purchase. And after a disastrous deal with another motor company, Kennedy refused to accept what he considered a sub-par deal from either of the other two major players – instead he bought his motor (and another, when the first one croaked) with his own hard-earned cash. But rather than give the manufacturer free-advertising, he chose to make a statement by wrapping the cowling in black electrical tape to obscure any such identifying words. |
Sexy Time
While it’s debatable whether Strike King created the color pattern that it refers to as Sexy Shad, no company has done as much to publicize it, nor has any other benefitted quite as much from its use. It certainly doesn’t hurt that they have the 800-pound gorilla of professional fishing on their pro-staff – it seemed like during each of KVD’s five final day appearances this year he was flinging something in the Sexy Shad pattern.
It’s become such a big phenomenon that other lure manufacturers have adopted the name verbatim, and Strike King has developed multiple riffs on the theme, including a chrome version and a clear version. It has become a standard, like green pumpkin or junebug.
Mann Up
Paul Elias’s relationship with Mann’s Bait Company dates back to his kneel-and-reel days, when he unironically wore the Mann’s emblem high on his head on a foam and mesh trucker’s hat in nearly every photo op. He was the first to give the now-popular One Minus street cred and has had a string of products with his name attached to them (like the Legends
spinnerbait).
But after a number of years without a visit to the winner’s circle, Elias returned in a big way this year when he set the four-day weight record at Falcon. And he brought Mann’s with him. Or maybe the reverse was true – it was Mann’s that got him there.
He used a Mann’s deep-diving crankbait in a discontinued color and an oversized Jelly Worm (how old school can you get?). No swimbaits, no chatterbaits, nothing 21st century except the
paycheck
Reverse Engineering
For decades, tackle companies developed product first, then added an angler’s name to it. Now the process unfolds in the opposite direction. For example, Timmy Horton staged a furious comeback at Kentucky Lake, barely coming up short of KVD. Horton’s special tool? A modified version of the venerable Fat Free Shad, with a lip custom-shaved to dive and run differently. This fall, the lure will become part of Bomber’s commercially-available lineup. Similarly, when Dean Rojas wanted a frog that would pop and spit in addition to just walking the dog, SPRO put their production facilities to the test and got him the lure not only in time for ICAST, but more importantly in time to win at Oneida.
When Scroggins wanted to bring a bit of Florida to Texas, he commissioned Yum to produce a paddletail worm to his specifications – it led to a final-day limit at Falcon that nearly eclipsed Rojas’s record single day bag. If you don’t bring your “A” game and the perfect equipment to the big show, you’re going to get beat in these derbies. There’s no room for a one-size-fits-all, mega-produced product when something better can beat it.
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